Dancing with the Dead: Ghosts in “The Graveyard Book”

[written by author, Louise Morgan]

That Neil Gaiman has written a book for children called The Graveyard Book should come as no surprise. His previous offerings for young readers have included a story which sees a young girl visit a parallel world where people have buttons for eyes (Coraline) and a book in which a family are driven from their home by rambunctious wolves (The Wolves In The Walls), so it’s fair to say that Gaiman is becoming a master of the mini-macabre.

The Graveyard Book opens at night, with a sleeping family–and their brutal murder at the hands of an all-too-real assailant. One of the family, however, escapes: the young son, barely even a toddler, who finds his way out of the house and through the dark to the nearby graveyard. And who should he find waiting for him but a cast of ghostly characters who will become his new family; who will protect, guide and teach him about the world–and more importantly, about life. After all, who knows more about living than someone who has already done all of theirs?

Gaiman was greatly influenced by The Jungle Book in writing this (even the title alludes to it) and, like the world Kipling created for Mowgli, little Bod (full name: Nobody Owens) is furnished with a wealth of friends and neighbours in his new home in the graveyard–from the homely and well-meaning ghosts of Mr and Mrs Owens who never had a child of their own and become his surrogate parents, to the tricky Liza Hempstock who only wants a gravestone of her own.

The mastery of The Graveyard Book is not in its plot, which follows Bod’s adventures at key points in his journey from infant to adult, nor in the sheer Gothic joy of the graveyard–but in the ghosts themselves. Gaiman knows full well that no two ghosts are the same, just as the people they once were differed. He infuses them with (ironically) life, and energy; wisdom and stubbornness, pity and pathos. Even from the comfort of the graveyard, the echoes of the world outside, the world of the living, seep inside the gates: on the night of Bod’s arrival, the sedate and settled ghosts of the cemetery contrast with the sudden appearance of the shocked ghost of Bod’s newly-dead mother as she appeals to the others to protect her son–a violent death begetting a violent-seeming apparition.

Bod is a boy between the two worlds, between the living and the dead, able to see (rather like Gaiman himself, perhaps) the things that others miss. And it is when the two worlds converge that The Graveyard Book really soars: with the “Macabray”, for instance, the Danse Macabre between the living and the dead–and at the centre of it all, the Lady on the Grey, sinister and smiling at once; one part Gaiman’s own Death of the Endless to one part Terry Pratchett’s mounted Grim Reaper mixed with something strange and new.

Not that being between the two worlds is easy, of course. Bod outgrows his first playmates, all of whom are stranded as children forever. Nor can it be straightforward trying to make friends in a world that you don’t perhaps fully understand–like school, as Bod discovers. While this could be true of a hundred, a thousand, other books about childhood, by invoking ghosts and spectres with which to people his narrative, Gaiman exaggerates the challenges of childhood and makes the real world, the adult world, the living world which must be negotiated even more alien to our hero.

There is, of course, much more to The Graveyard Book than just its ghosts. There are the humans who tumble in and out of Bod’s life; the deliciously awful ghouls who seek to carry him off; the creepy, whispering menace that lurks in the shadows and waits for its master; and Silas–the lonely figure who protects Bod from the corporeal dangers of the world.

With its graveyard that is all things to Bod: shelter, school, playground and battlefield, the message of the book is clear. Ghosts are not the enemy: the living have little to fear from the dead. The dead are dead, and as Silas tells Bod: “they are, for the most part, done with the world”. It is the living who pose the greatest threat to Bod as he grows: the man who killed his family, the school bullies, policemen, unscrupulous antiques dealers… the list goes on.

The Graveyard Book is, in so many ways, a love song to graveyards and their ghosts, separated from the living but not so different from them after all. Midway through the book, Bod is told: “You’re alive Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything.” and it is not the living who help him realise this, but the dead.

Through the graveyard–the Egyptian Walk and the unhallowed ground, the Owenses, the Lady on the Grey, the formidable Mother Slaughter and even Silas–through the dead, the ghosts, Gaiman asks us to consider what it really means to be alive… and then, simply, quietly, to go out and live.

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.