‘Ghostwatch’ review

[written by author, NKKingston]

“WE DON’T WANT TO GIVE ANYONE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS. WE DON’T WANT TO CAUSE A PANIC.”

On October 31st 1992, at 9:25, a seminal piece of drama was aired. For the next two decades it would regularly top ‘scariest ever’ polls. Frequently compared to Orson Welles’ ‘War of the Worlds’, it would not be shown by the BBC again, but it’s been aired by other channels around the world.

Legitimate DVD’s are so hard to get hold of these days even the show’s writer suggests you watch it on YouTube, though personally I think you lose something with all the stops and starts. If you can get hold of a DVD (LoveFilm has it, I don’t know about Netflix) watch it without pausing, rewinding, or otherwise taking advantage of the fact it’s a DVD. If you want to really relive the experience, watch it at 21:25, the original time of broadcast. It’s the 18th anniversary tonight.

Have you done so?

Good.

Are you going to sleep tonight?

I didn’t think so.

But why does it work? Well, if you’re British you’ll understand the kind of weight Michael Parkinson brings to the proceedings. If you’re American, imagine it presented by Oprah Winfrey. They’ve both interviewed Tom Cruise, after all.

Add to this the presence of well known presenters Sarah Greene and Mike Smith, married couple, and comedian Craig Charles (in his Red Dwarf heyday). Bear in mind that all those psychic shows you see now, like ‘Most Haunted’ and ‘Paranormal Investigation: Live’, didn’t exist. That very few people had satellite or cable television and thus no ‘info’ button to explain the premise of the show to them. That since it didn’t start on the hour many people missed those all important writers credits in the first few minutes.

It’s not all good casting and serendipity, of course.

“I felt someone all over me.”

In the first clip claiming to offer evidence of the ghost, you’ll note that the banging of the pipes doesn’t start until one of the girls leaves the room. For the first hour of the show the majority of phenomena can be explained as the actions of one girl or the other (usually Suzanne). There’s some false scares and a lot of larking about amongst the crew, as you’d expect from a live broadcast. Parkinson explains that other shows will come on later and Ghostwatch will offer updates between them until midnight. Except… at the hour mark the show is still running.

“Do you think Mr Pipes wants to hurt you?” “I think he wants to hurt everyone. I think he wants to do bad things.”

It’s around this point that Suzanne is caught fabricating phenomena. Parkinson becomes thoroughly convinced of the hoax while Dr Pascoe tries to explain Suzanne’s behaviour away. Dr Sylvestri (had the Americans done something to offend us recently? That’s the only explanation for such a dud performance in an otherwise sterling show), our out-and-out sceptic, has a field day with it. Meanwhile, even the most unobservant audience member has probably seen Pipes at least once. He’s actually appeared four times now.

“We thought you’d leave us. All we were is noises to you.”

The non-plot ghost stories told by audience members and the taped interviews (and even Sarah Greene’s own) are all true. Sadly, we don’t get to see as many as we’d like because Pipes strikes. The ghost is literally in the machine. Callers are getting hysterical, Parkinson has been wrong footed, and Suzanne is in a trance. Parkinson informs the viewers the next show will be late, as too much is happening.

“We have to stay. Pipes says we have to stay.”

There are three more sightings of Pipes between now and the end of the show (four if you’re being picky, but two are so close I count them together). The ‘onion skin’ element of the haunting is revealed through phone calls. The phenomena in the house extend to bangings, breakings, and Pipes speaking through Suzanne. Even the camera man gets a glimpse of him. Parkinson’s scepticism dissolves, Dr Pascoe looks increasingly distraught, Mike interrupts repeatedly as his concern for Sarah reaches desperate levels, and Craig and the outside crew have no clue there’s anything going on. Anarchy reigns.

“What big eyes you have. What big eyes you have.”

And then all is calm. And then it’s not.

“It’s in the Machine.”

And then it gets worse.

What makes Ghostwatch work so well, I believe, are the unacknowledged appearances of Pipes. The “did you see him? did I see him?” element. That’s what gives theatrical ghost stories an edge over the literary (if you want to see a genuinely theatrical ghost story, get yourself to London and see Ghost Stories. Thank me later). By giving the audience glimpses the characters are denied Ghostwatch ramps up the tension without dissolving the suspension of disbelief.

The phenomena reported and seen can all be tied back to real world hauntings such as the Enfield Poltergeist. Circular patches of liquid, banging sounds, crude images and words, scratches, temperature changes, smells, even the tying up of phone lines…Ghostwatch hits all of them. It’s this level of research that makes it all the more believable. Unlike certain horror films, the more a viewer knows about the subject the more frightening the show become.

As well as the straight forward haunting there’s a strong sexual theme running through the show. Poltergeist activity commonly focuses on pubescent girls, making it somewhat inevitable, but this is deliberately added to with the stories of Mother Seddons taking in the babies of unwed girls, of Raymond Tunstall sexually assaulting children, and Pam Early’s experience in the glory hole. “I felt someone all over me,” she says, and you know from her tone that it wasn’t just the physical presence that was intimidating. Glory hole is, of course, a perfectly common phrase all over England used to describe the cupboard under the stairs. However, it can also mean a hole in the wall of a public toilet cubicle, made for purposes you can probably work out for yourself. Is the entendre intentional? Well, probably not, but it does add another layer to the sexual imagery.

Ghostwatch has its faults, of course. The aforementioned Dr Sylvestri is so over the top I want to apologise on his behalf to any Americans watching it. Some of the acting (especially the children’s) is decidedly ropey, though as the story progresses you notice it less and less, and a lot of viewers find the ending a bit too much.

The show has an almost mythic status in British television history. Rumours such as Sarah Greene exhorting her child-viewers to watch in during Going Live (disproved by the Ghost Watch: Behind the Curtain blog ) give the show a touch of the conspiracy theory about it, though BBC never tried to pretend it was real. Even the pre-programme trail refers to it as a ‘film’ and the presenters as ‘stars’. It’s credited as the first television show to give viewers Post Traumatic Stress.

The BBC have never reshown Ghostwatch. Shortly after its original showing, a teenager committed suicide. His parents blamed the show for his death. Though the BBC take no responsibility for his death, out of tack they have opted not to show it again. It’s a shame, but a reasonable decision.

Ghostwatch was the first film to ever really scare me. Not ‘make me jump, not ‘gross me out’, but to genuinely, seriously scare me. When you place ghosts amongst other supernatural entities they have a massive advantage. Even the toughest vampire with stagger back when hit with a chair, but a ghost can be everywhere and anywhere, untouchable but all too able to touch you. Even through your TV screen.

And make you scared of your own curtains.

“Did you believe the story of Mother Seddons? Did you? Fee Fi Fo Fum.”

‘The Orphanage’ review

[written by reviewer and writer, Harry Markov]

The Orphanage (El Orfanato) is a 2007 Spanish horror film, which I overlooked, based on the fact that its choice to scare is an orphanage, which automatically means ghastly children. Personally, I have tired of demonic children. Yes, Samara (The Ring) was delightfully terrifying, but I can’t say the same about other horror movies such as Dark Water and The Antichrist. However, Mark assured me it was well worth my time and gave it a shot.

Now, what The Orphanage accomplishes is to create a truly atmospheric movie. All recent US attempts at tales of haunting pale compared to The Orphanage. The movie works to create a sense of setting, present compelling characters for me to care about and avoid the cheap scares, such as constant barrages of screeching noises, sudden bursts of movement, screaming and gore. No, the scare here creeps in, much like frost. It’s a descent into grief-induced madness and the results of human wickedness.

The plot follows Laura (Belen Rueda), a woman who returns home, to an orphanage with plans to restore it into a home for disabled children. The days of preparation function as an introduction to Laura’s life, her interaction with her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and son Simon (Roger Princep), the concerns she harbors for Simon’s constant use of imaginary friends as a coping mechanism, her dedication as a mother and her altruism. However, it’s not long until a mysterious woman appears and Simon befriends six more children, who, this time, are supposedly real, when things go wrong. On the day of the opening, Simon disappears after a fight with Laura and from here on the movie follows Laura’s desperate search for her son, not to mention unveiling all of the secrets surrounding the orphanage.

What utterly captivated me is how whole The Orphanage is. There is nothing in excess. Every frame, every scene, every item that passes in front of the lens plays a part later on and I’d say that this is a movie for people with a long attention span. The woman with the faked identity, the new game Simon and Laura played, a small brooch and even fallen pipes are of importance as the end nears and all these elements swarm together into an intricate puzzle, which paints a very tragic chain of events.

If I’m to discuss the plot any further, spoilers will be revealed; a big disservice to all potential viewers. Instead, I will move on to the actors’ performances. Rueda’s acting is intense and overpowering. I didn’t just watch a desperate and haunted woman reach the end of her strength, her resources to find her son even after nine months, her sanity. I wanted to help her push through it all. Her acting is all-consuming, raw and believable. Cayo felt stiff and two dimensional, but his role was limited in the first place. Princep is convincing as a sweet and emotional boy, who spends a lot of his time in his own world, which more or less leads him to his death. The surprise for me was Geraldine Chaplin, who plays the medium Aurora. It’s a brief appearance, but the scenes with her séance are some of the more memorable and hair-raising ones.

I’ll conclude with just how unusual this movie is. First, the orphanage itself was never shown as negative, gloomy or foreboding. In fact, to Laura this was home, as shown in the movie’s opening. For Laura, the orphanage is a return to her past as well as a promise for a new beginning. Second, the haunting transcends the characteristic ‘a few days to a few weeks’ time frame. I’m talking about nine months of subtle accumulation of events, which also doubles as the deconstruction of Laura’s psyche. Third, the ending is more than bitter, but sweet in its own way as well.

The Orphanage may not have hostile ghosts erupting into violent acts of bizarre property damage and its ghosts may seem passive, but director Juan Bayona and Fernando Velazquez (the man behind the soundtrack) know how to keep the viewers on the edge of their seats.

Designed by the Devil & Powered by the Dead: The World of Thir13en Ghosts

[written by author, Louise Morgan]

I’m going to let you in on a secret. I hate titles with numbers in them. Not “normal” numbers–you know, Twelve Angry Men, The Thirty-Nine Steps–but titles which feel the need to try and incorporate numbers within the text. Se7en makes my blood boil. Thir13en Ghosts, as you can imagine, should make me very cross indeed.

13 Ghosts, as we’ll call it for the sake of my sanity, if nothing else, is one of two recent remakes of Castle & White films–the other being The House on Haunted Hill. Today, Robb White is best known for his fiction, including books like Deathwatch, while William Castle, a prolific director and producer of B-movies with a near-visionary eye for a gimmick, became the inspiration for Dark Castle Entertainment–originally intended to remake Castle’s own films.

Castle’s pictures were a nightmare for cinema owners: his ambitious and complex marketing tools included hearses parked outside the theatres and nurses stationed at the doors in case patrons should suffer fright-induced heart attacks (Macabre), buzzers attached to seats (The Tingler), skeletons flying over the audience on wires (The House on Haunted Hill) and “fright breaks” (Homicidal). The original Thirteen Ghosts was supposedly filmed in “Illusion-O” and watched through a special two-tone ghost viewer/remover which allowed the audience to “remove” the tinted ghosts superimposed over the film should they find them too disturbing.

Of course the ghosts weren’t disturbing–not to our jaded and cynical eyes, anyway. After all, it was 1960. Another world.

And that’s probably why, come the millennium, the time was ripe for some of Castle’s movies to be remade. There’s a vein of similarity between the new 13 Ghosts and House on Haunted Hill–unsurprisingly, given the same creative team on the originals, and the same production company remaking them–but 13 Ghosts is the more interesting of the two.

The plot deviates slightly from that of the original: here, widower Arthur is contacted by a lawyer and told that his uncle Cyrus has left him a house. However, this is not any old house, and dear old Uncle Cyrus has more than a few skeletons in his closet.

Cyrus was a collector of ghosts, and the house was built as their prison. Arthur’s new family home comes with sitting tenants: twelve of them.

And here’s the thing about this film. It’s deeply flawed, but this dirty dozen includes some of the most interesting, memorable ghosts I’ve seen. What they lack in scares, they make up for in sheer imagination and design. Known by nicknames including “The Torn Prince”, “The Juggernaut”, “The Torso” and “The Bound Woman” collectively they form the Black Zodiac. They are solid, meaty ghosts with a real physical presence–and yet they can only be seen by the human characters through special glasses (a clever in-film update of Castle’s “Illusion-O”). Nor are they simply “ghosts”–each of them has a complete backstory which, while it does not appear in the film, informs their look and behaviour. Take the Torn Princess: a once-beautiful young woman with low self-esteem who mutilated herself trying to perform plastic surgery on her own face. She killed herself by slashing her body with a butcher’s knife in the bath, and so her ghost, naked and wet, wanders the halls clutching her knife, surrounded by blood.

One of the most visually striking of the ghosts is the Jackal: a former asylum inmate who still wears his straightjacket and a shattered metal cage around his head, his violent nature has only been exacerbated by the horror of his death and imprisonment in Cyrus’s cellar. No wonder he is described by psychic Dennis (Matthew Lillard in scenery-chewing mode) as “the Charlie Manson of ghosts”. And if you’re looking for my personal favourite, that would be the Torn Prince: the 1950s high-school letterman who developed a bad case of road rash and never got to take up that college baseball scholarship.

They may not be the subtlest of ghosts, and the film may not be the cleverest of haunted house movies, but something of the fun B-movie spirit of Castle’s pictures remains. The house which acts as the setting for the story: the ghosts’ prison (and which is still more than it seems) is a piece of art–a mix of shining glass and clever CG; its shifting form occasionally reminiscent of Cube. However, it is not the star of the show: that role is reserved for the dozen lunatics–dead, deranged and downright dangerous–hiding in plain sight within.

And you think you have scary children…

For tonight it is the wonderful French ghost story:

I highly recommend this one – full of atmosphere and very chilling!

An Unusual Ghost Story: ‘The Fountain’

[written by author, Mana Hotton]

I am a very spiritual person by nature. I believe in the power of the human mind. Our every thought, our every feeling, from ‘what do I want for supper tonight?’ to ‘ouch, I just stubbed my toe’ is a series of electrical charges running up and down our nervous system like lightning in a bottle. There are people in life where just being in the same room with them winds you up or brings you down. We normally label it charisma. You can walk into a place and feel at peace or scared. It’s all about the energy. If you have energy that’s strong enough, it can leave an impression, like the negative of a photograph. We can wave it away with science now if you want, but it’s that afterimage that we call “ghosts”.

As a child, I was always seeing ghosts, or having prophetic dreams, or other such things that freaked out my superstitious Grandmother, among my other family members. That said, I don’t believe that spirituality really has anything to do with our human fascination with ghost stories. Ghost stories fascinate so many of us for so many different reasons, but most ghosts stories in media share a common theme, and I believe it’s that theme that inspires our interest. Spirits become for us not only the answer to the question “What comes after this life?,” but more importantly the question of “Will I be remembered?”.

The plotline of almost any ghost story has an aspect of it. Ghost is about a man dying, but staying to protect his lover and avenge his murder. Flatliners is about a group try to study the afterlife and bringing back their personal demons. Sixth Sense is about a boy learning why the ghosts come to him, ultimately to solve their problems so they can rest. The Ring, The Grudge, and so many other films like them, are about getting justice and revenge. The common thread, the common theme, is justice, redemption, setting things right. They aren’t about the dead as much as they are about wish-fulfillment. In that way, that wish fulfillment, highlights the fact that people can be haunted by memories the way their character avatars get haunted by spirits. No movie, I think, plays that as poignantly as The Fountain, with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz.

The Fountain is a movie with three plots set in three different time periods. The oldest plot is about Tomas, a Conquistador searching for the Tree of Life for his Queen Isabel, who is under siege. The “present day” plot is about Dr. Tommy, an oncologist researching desperately searching for a cure to the same type of cancer his wife, Izzy, has. The third shows a biosphere space ship travelling to a nebula with Tom and a tree, whom he talks to, with the ‘ghost’ of Izzy haunting him. Haunting or hunting, one way or another, each version of Tom, is ever searching for the secret of life over death, while Izzy or Isabel seeks simply life.

It’s the search for redemption, to make the wrong things right, be they in war, or against disease, or personal failure, that drives the main male character in each of the plots. The female protagonist in each of the plots doesn’t seek to run from but toward the inevitability of the end. A few arc words in the movie, spoken over and over, “Death is the road to awe,”. It becomes the ultimate message. Death as creation. However, it’s also that the past can haunt us so much that no matter how long we live or how far we go to avoid it, it will make itself known until we put everything right within ourselves.

In the strictest sense, the The Fountain isn’t a traditional ghost story. However, since it shares with traditional ghost stories that theme of the near-eternal search for redemption until all the wrong things are made right, it makes you forget that it’s not. It may not, in essence, but about a haunting, but the effect is that it haunts you far beyond. You may need to watch it twice or three times to catch all the subtly of it, but each time you are brought closer to closure and, perhaps, closer to awe.

‘The Booth’ review

[written by author, editor and reviewer, Robert Hood]

With a running time of just over 70 minutes, The Booth is a small J-Horror gem — though without “dead wet girls” or any of the other post-Ring stereotypes. Set almost entirely inside an old, disused radio broadcast studio, it uses its closed environment and bleak settings to full advantage, focusing attention not on startling (or otherwise) SFX, but on the main character and his struggle with guilt. As a ghost story, it has the occasional scare, but more to the point it is an unsettling supernatural drama that uses its fantasy elements to focus our attention on the emotional realities it explores rather than to overwhelm our imaginations through violence or creepy spectacle. The one time it does seem to draw on the “spectral woman” trope, it ends up undermining our expectations to good, and somehow even more creepy, effect.

Shogo (Ryuta Sato) is a personable but emotionally selfish and arrogant DJ, host of a late-night call-in radio program called “Love Lines”. On this particular night the show has been moved to a disused studio — a studio with a reputation (it turns out) for being haunted. A DJ from decades before had hanged himself in the studio — in an incident that begins the film and sets the groundwork for what is to come — though that is not to say the dead man is responsible for the haunting. Now, in the midst of his broadcast, Shogo finds himself having flashes of memory, memory of culpable behaviour — and being interrupted by odd noises and a female voice saying: “Liar!” As callers ring in to tell him embarrassing or humiliating things that have been said to them by loved ones (the show’s theme for the night), and he dishes out somewhat fatuous advice in response, we become aware that one way or another all the examples of humiliating put-downs or ill-treatment that he hears can be laid at his own door. It all seems to be about him. Worse, lying behind it all is the possibility that he has been responsible for the death of a female co-worker. As his fear and guilt grows, Shogo begins to face the reality that his past may be catching up with him in more ways than one …

The Booth is tightly and elegantly written, with back-story well integrated into on-screen events, and perfectly structured to draw us inexorably through the experience. Ryuto Sato is engaging as Shogo, skirting around the edge of the “arrogant star” stereotype without ever becoming a caricature or making him hopelessly unsympathetic. As we learn more about Shogo’s past behaviour, we find ourselves approving of him less and less, but it is always against a background of personability set up in the initial scenes — so we “stay” with him during his dilemma. Meanwhile, director Nakamura proves expert at deflecting us, of leading us artfully astray. Truth becomes elastic, and Shogo’s interpretation of events more and more subjective, reflecting his basic self-loathing. In the end, reality becomes so internalised that there is really only one path open for the emotionally bankrupt DJ to take …

In a not-insignificant way, the power of the film lies in the fact that we are never quite sure who or what is haunting the studio. In fact, it is as though it is not haunted in the ordinary sense at all, but rather draws to the surface the ghosts that those entering it bring with them.

‘Session 9′ review

[written by author, Gary McMahon]

Overactive Curiosity: A Brief Examination of Session 9

It has been said that the essence of good drama can be pared down to the basic elements of two people in a room. In Session 9 we actually have five people in a series of rooms, but the drama this scenario creates is none the less for this slight extension of the rule.

For a long time I have believed that the best ghost stories are those that involve the collision between a haunted person and a haunted place. In Session 9, the haunted place is the near-derelict yet hugely imposing Danvers State Hospital, an old insane asylum that is even mentioned in H P Lovecraft’s Pickman’s Model. The identity of the haunted person is one of the many mysteries presented to viewers of the film.

The real-life location of the Danvers Hospital is as important a character in the film as the human protagonists, and its presence permeates every single frame of footage that was shot there. We are acutely aware of the ghosts that roam these empty rooms, and of the stains of madness that remain on the bricks and mortar.

It is difficult to discuss a film like Session 9 without giving too much away, so please forgive my clumsy attempts to conceal important plot points and character arcs. I will also shy away from revealing the identity of the main character in the ensemble.

The picture opens with a team of men from the Hazmat Elimination Company working to a tight deadline to rid the building of asbestos and other poisonous fibres on behalf of the state.

The team consists of the following people:

Gordon – the boss, who is exhausted from the rigours of being a new father and stressed to the limit by the demands of keeping his small company afloat.

Phil – seemingly level-headed, he is Gordon’s right-hand man. Phil has secrets of his own, and holds a grudge against another member of the team, who stole his girlfriend.

Hank – the man with an “exit plan”. He is desperate to find a windfall to fund his dream of attending “casino school” and becoming a casino croupier. Hank stole Phil’s girlfriend, a fact that leads to constant tension between the two.

Mike – the bookish member of the team, he is fascinated with old medical records he finds in the basement. Mike failed his first year of law school, but has ideas to return and complete his studies.

Jeff- Gordon’s young rock-dude nephew, who is drafted in to help the men achieve their seemingly impossible deadline. Jeff suffers from nychtophobia, a fear of the dark, and is slightly gullible when it comes to the ribbing and bitter jokes played upon him by the others.

It’s worth mentioning here that the performances are uniformly excellent, particularly from the great Peter Mullen (Gordon) and David Caruso (Phil), who expertly sketch angry working class characters who are both layered and sympathetic, even when the final revelations are known.

Aside from the obvious job-related stress, there are other factors at work within the group. Gordon is physically and mentally exhausted, and has had some kind of argument with his wife. Hank and Phil are endlessly bickering, and seem constantly on the verge of violence. Mike slowly becomes obsessed with the recorded psychiatric sessions of a schizophrenic ex-inmate called Mary Hobbs. Jeff is the new kid on the block, and struggling with his own phobia as well as trying to fit in with the long-established team.

And there is a presence in the building; something that stalks the men from a distance, examining their weaknesses. This entity is never fully defined, and may even be a product of the men’s stress and paranoia but it is present in every scene, evidenced by snaking camerawork and subtle sound effects.

Director Brad Anderson (who in 2005 gave us the equally exceptional The Machinist) takes the typical haunted house set-up and turns it on its head, avoiding every cliché possible to produce something genuinely terrifying, a work that ruthlessly plays with an audiences preconceptions regarding such a film.

Scare scenes take place when outside it is broad daylight – it is only inside the Danvers Hospital where perpetual night reigns, constant shadows crawl. The recurrent image of an antique wheelchair is a glorious and haunting piece of misdirection. The most blatant sequence involves nothing more than a succession of lights being turned off as a character runs along a subterranean passageway. When one character relates the horrific facts regarding a case of “satanic abuse syndrome”, the camera casually roams the grounds, offering us glimpses of insect life disassembling and consuming their prey in the lazy sunlight – a visual reference to how the building eventually takes apart and consumes the minds of those who spend time in it.

Although the supernatural elements of the story remain ambiguous throughout, the genuinely unsettling final line leaves no doubt in my mind that the ghosts of Session 9 are very real. It is their meeting with, and impact upon, the ghosts rattling around inside the haunted psyches of the team that prompts the devastation that follows.

As Mike sits in the dark and listens to Mary Hobbs’ tapes, sessions 1 through to 9, the team falls apart and dark secrets are slowly uncovered. The audience is made to work through these tapes with Mike, and the rest of the story unfurls simultaneously, the whole thing peeling away like the layers of an onion.

Things eventually come to a head when Hank goes missing after returning to the site after nightfall to steal valuable belongings of the old inmates left behind in the morgue. This is a very frightening scene, and as we approach the recording of the eponymous “session 9” there is much more to come. From here on in, the intensity is cranked up and the scares come thick and fast, but at no point are we allowed to stop caring for the characters that we have come to know in the more sedately paced earlier scenes.

I tend to view Session 9 as a modern, masculine and very working class reading of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and to this end, I will finish by noting several intertextual parallels that I have drawn between the two works.

A group of psychics is sent to Hill House to rid the place of possibly malevolent, toxic spirits; in Session 9 we have a group of professionals sent in to gut the building of toxic fibres and materials which are a metaphor for the spiritual decay that has occurred in the past. Hill House calls to all and the most damaged character responds; the Danvers State Hospital calls to all, and a single fractured mind responds more than the others. The underlying feminist subtext of Jackson’s book is echoed in the examination of the fragmentation of the male psyche as depicted in the film. Eleanor, the main female protagonist in Jackson’s work, has created a relatively glamorous fantasy life to hide the truth of her existence; in the film, each character has constructed his own reality to hide the truth of his life, and the main character fully inhabits his own fantasy in order to hide his madness even from himself. At the end of the novel, Hill House consumes Eleanor; in the film’s finale, the main protagonist is consumed by the Danvers building– everyone else is just eaten.

The extra features on the Region 1 DVD of Session 9 reveal several interesting experiences the cast had while filming on location in the Danvers Hospital. Peter Mullen relates one particularly disturbing moment when he was sure that he heard a voice whisper his name. This sense of the ghostly, of a place that has seen so much human torment, seeps into the film, helping create a mood that otherwise might have rang hollow. It is this that gives an extra dimension to what is surely a superb piece of modern ghostly cinema.

[Originally posted in: All Hallows: Journal of the Ghost Story Society]

Post Mortem Photography: Sentimental Keepsake or Creepy Reminder?

[written by author, Mary Rajotte]



Memento Mori

How many of us have rifled through shoeboxes and envelopes of dusty old family photos?

Imagine coming across a lavish scene of your ancestors decked out in their Sunday best, only to realize upon scrutiny that in the photo they are, in fact, deceased.

Such a discovery is made in Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others, and it becomes a major plot point that carries the story through to its electrifying ending.

About The Others

In The Others, Grace Stewart lives with her two children who are awaiting word of the whereabouts of patriarch Charles, who is MIA in World War II.

The children, Anne and Nicholas, suffer from a strange affliction – they are allergic to light – so that heavy linens are draped over every window, and when moving about the house, no door must be opened without the previous one being closed first.

Immediately, viewers are immersed in the epitome of the creepy, fog-enshrouded English manor house which becomes even more foreboding when the family is forced to live by candlelight even in the daylight hours.

With the tone of the movie set, the tale begins, taking on an uneasy tone immediately when the help arrives.

Mrs. Mills, played by the always striking Fionnula Flanagan (whom I thoroughly enjoyed in this, as well as her turn as Eloise Hawking in LOST or matriarch Rose Caffee in Brotherhood), Mr. Tuttle and the mute maid Lydia arrive, and there is something decidedly different about them.

When Nicole Kidman discovers a photo album (or Book of the Dead) in the attic, the true nature of the tale is revealed, whether Grace knows it or not.

As Mrs. Mills says matter-of-factly, “Sometimes the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living” – and later on we find out just how right she is.

Memento Mori: Remember Your Mortality

The Victorian Era already had an air of the macabre before the advent of post mortem photography.

But what may seem as a grim practice to us was, back then, one of the only ways families were able to preserve memories of their loved ones, especially babies, for whom this may be the only photo families would have due to high infant mortality rates throughout the early nineteenth century.

Memento Mori, or post mortem photographs, were just that: photos taken of the deceased. Grace’s discovery is a display of three different styles which were used in this arcane practice, and they illustrate how families not only captured when their loved ones died but also a reminder of how they lived.

“The Eternal Sleep” sees the subject of the photo laid out to look as though they are peacefully sleeping.

Other photos show relatives of the deceased posed alongside the deceased themselves, making for particularly solemn photographs especially when young children are sitting (and often holding) their dead siblings.

Photos can also be found of deceased propped up in special frames and sitting up in chairs.

These are not images that capture whispy orbs that may or may not be spirits, depending on one’s believability in such.

There is no question about these photos. They are unflinching, abrupt and bring one face to face with his or her own mortality, and in The Others, they serve an important purpose.

Soul Stealers

Ancient tribes have long held the idea that photographs steal the soul. Maybe that is why Mrs. Mills, Mr. Tuttle and Lydia have a difficult time leaving the house.

A thought posed by Mrs. Mills herself when Grace comments on how she finds the practice of post mortem photography particularly macabre, Mrs. Mills offers, “In the last century, I believe they took photographs of the dead in the hopes that their souls would go on living through the portraits.”

In this case, that very thing happens. Granted, the three are buried on the land and they also died in the house, but perhaps the fact that these post mortem photos exist are like a beacon keeping them tethered to this world instead of passing on.

Otherwise, why would they want to remain in a place where a mother would take a pillow and smother her two children in the middle of the night?

Not Just A Dream

I liked that the big reveal (that Grace and her two kids were ghosts, too) didn’t just seem tacked on the end of the film in an “it was all a dream” kind of way.

When the tables are turned and Nicholas’ “ghost” Victor is revealed as the “real boy” and the Stewart family are, in fact, the true ghosts haunting this house, one feels for them and their desperate attempt to stay together in this place that contains them.

However, why, if the family is dead, were they not depicted in a post mortem photo in the album?

My thought? It is enough that Grace eventually remembers what she did to her children;  when Anne and Nicholas remember that  “Mummy went mad” (even if they do not remember why until the very end of the film).

There were subtle clues before that – the gravestones (first cleverly hidden by piles of leaves before Mr. Tuttle “brings them to light” later). The missing curtains, which force Grace to realize that her children are not photosensitive. But for all of these gestures used to make Grace understand, the catalyst comes when she discovers the photo of her servants, each dressed in black, their eyes sealed shut, and Grace is forced to finally accept (and in her case – remember) that she is no longer of this earth.

So, while post mortem photos may seem like a macabre way to remember one’s relatives long after they are gone, and Mrs. Tuttle’s comments that “Grief over the death of loved ones can cause people to do the strangest things”, the photos can also remind us that, as Lord Byron wrote, we have lived, we have loved, and have done so not in vain. That something within us shall go on after we retire.

In The Others, it is more than just the simple lilting of voices claiming, “This house is ours.” Their souls, with the help of these mementos (which can be considered either creepy or sentimental depending on the individual viewer), do go on living.

NOTES:

Linkage that might pique your interest:

* The Thanatos Archive – Post Mortem Photography

* Post Mortem photo from WikiCommons

* The Others trailers

* The Lord Byron poem I mentioned (in brief) at the end

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

CXXXVII.

But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:

My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,

And my frame perish even in conquering pain,

But there is that within me which shall tire

Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire:

Something unearthly, which they deem not of,

Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre,

Shall on their softened spirits sink, and move

In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.

‘The Devil’s Backbone’ review

[written by author, Orrin Grey]

“What is a ghost?” a voice asks over images of falling bombs and a dying boy at the beginning of The Devil’s Backbone. “A tragedy doomed to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.”

This is the thesis that defines what a ghost is, at least thematically, in The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo del Toro’s breakout Spanish-language film and the follow-up to his first effort Cronos, which I talked about during Vampire Awareness Month. (He made the English-language film Mimic in-between them, but he doesn’t like to talk about it so we won’t either.)

In the commentary track for The Devil’s Backbone, del Toro talks at length about Gothic novels and classic ghost stories. He says that he intended The Devil’s Backbone to be, essentially, a Gothic novel combined with a Spanish Civil War movie. To this end, he runs through a series of basic definitions of what constitutes Gothic for him: the action is linked to a place, a dark secret from the past affects the present but is shrouded in silence, there is romance/passion/carnal desire that is almost always forbidden or secret or repressed, and the protagonist is usually an innocent. He transposes all of these characteristics onto the chassis of a war film by bringing a young boy named Carlos into an orphanage in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. An orphanage with, of course, more than its share of repressed desires and dark secrets.

Of course, there is a literal ghost in The Devil’s Backbone; the ghost of Santi, the murdered boy who we see dying at the very beginning of the film. We’re introduced to him early on, a decision that del Toro says was prompted in order to make us feel sadness toward him, rather than fear. This is in keeping with what del Toro says is the greatest strength of Gothic and horror fiction, which is that it teaches us to understand “the other.”

“You have to love the monster to tell a really interesting horror tale,” del Toro says in his commentary track.

As with the vampire in Cronos, though, the actual, literal ghost in The Devil’s Backbone is only the most obvious of the film’s many ghosts. Almost all of the characters in the movie are suspended in time in one way or another, their tragedies constantly returning to haunt them, constantly being repeated again and again.

Santi’s ghost may be the most literal expression of this motif in The Devil’s Backbone, but he is not, perhaps, the one most central to the film. That would be the unexploded bomb that lies half-buried in the center of the orphanage’s courtyard. A bomb that was dropped on the same night that Santi was killed. It sits at the geographical heart of the orphanage and the thematic heart of the movie, as a constant reminder of guilt and of danger, and that, while the war may be outside the walls, it is inside them as well.

The bomb is a visual nod to The Castle of Otranto, which is widely considered the first Gothic novel and in which a giant helmet falls from the sky near the beginning. It’s a recurring visual reminder not only of the guilt and danger within the film, but a reminder to the audience of del Toro’s stated objective of marrying the Gothic novel and the war movie. Even the film itself, by its end credits, comes back around to where it began with the repetition of its opening monologue, although now it’s being said with an added poignance.

Beware of ‘the others’

For tonight is none other than, ‘The Others’:

Is it me or has it just gone cold?