The Others--Otherwise Awesome

I give a lot of Spoilers out on this page, but for this post, I absolutely refuse to do it. Why? Because watch this movie. I’m serious. There’s nothing quite like this film I’ve ever seen. The ending will leave you stunned.

                STOP. STOP GOOGLING IT. Go to Amazon or Netflix or Blockbuster (just kidding. Blockbuster is dead) and WATCH THIS MOVIE. It’s a Fight Club ending without Brad Pitt and all the explosions.

                The basic summary is this: a woman (Nicole Kidman) lives in a house with her two children who are allergic to light and must always be in the dark. She locks every room behind them and draws every curtain so as to contain all the sunlight.

                One day three servants show up at the door after her own servants have mysteriously disappeared. Her husband has died in the WWII, so she is thankful for the help, even though her advertisement seeking employees has not yet been published in the newspaper. Because strangers showing up at your doorstep with no explanation for how they got there is basically a great indicator they should be left alone with your children.

She was a witch but read an ad in the paper.

            Of course things go wrong, and the audience is never sure what the servants are up to, but we know they’re creepy. This movie keeps you guessing. The house is haunted, but only the little girl can see ghosts. Doors open when they shouldn’t and Nicole Kidman feels like she’s going mad and attacks her children. Their dead father shows up, very much alive, but leaves them again to go back to the battlefield, and, most importantly, somebody stole all the curtains.  Everything is confusing and suspenseful until BAM. It hits you like a truck.

                We’ve talked about “The Wind in the Rose-Bush” and other loving tales where Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman loves both killing children and having two names.  So this is a similar mother-child story. We’re questioned with whether or not Nicole Kidman is a good mother or too strict and demanding. She certainly isn’t negligent like the mothers in Wilkins Freeman stories. But if you finish the movie, you will definitely see she would do anything for her children. Anything.

                Isolation. It’s a big house in the middle of nowhere, which is the beginning of 80% of every scary movie. The protagonists cannot go outside because of the children’s sun allergy and the fog is so thick Nicole Kidman says she feels alone.

                Women. There is a definite female presence here. The gardener is the only man and he spends most of the movie outside with very little dialogue. Both Nicole Kidman and the daughter are the ones most affected by the haunting, the little boy calling his sister a liar when she tries to convince him there are ghosts. In fact, the movie definitely creates a parallel between Nicole Kidman and her daughter. Often they repeat the same lines and have similar strong-willed personalities.

                The trickiest element in the film I now mention in hopes someone who has seen the film can offer more insight: Christianity. Nicole Kidman is a devout Catholic and is seen often encouraging her children to be the same. But her children both, secretly, express their doubts in the Bible and Jesus. In a pivotal scene where the curtains are stolen, Nicole Kidman takes a board with the Lord’s Prayer written on it and turns it into the sun against the window, so the message is no longer facing her children. Maybe it is just coincidence, but we have to ask if this is significant.

                The ending lines of the film, the children ask about the afterlife, reminiscent of a conversation earlier in the film. Their mother, who has been so convicted the entire time of Heaven, Hell, and limbo, replies that she doesn’t know the answer. Her loss of faith has to be echoing a larger Gothic motif, but I just can’t place my finger on its significance.

                This movie is recommended. 

Movie Trailer

The Wind in the Rose-Bush--Not a Rosy Tale

     “The Wind in the Rose-Bush” by Mary Eleanor Wilkins-Freeman is a quick read about a possessed shrubbery (last seen with the Knights-Who-Say-Nii). It begins with a woman, Rebecca, on a train headed to collect her niece who has been in the care of her stepmother following the death of her birth mother (the protagonist’s sister) and father.

Visual Approximation

     When Rebecca arrives, the stepmother greets her and insists the child is away at a friend’s house. Rebecca agrees to wait, but notices the bush outside seems to rustle even when there is no wind. The child does not arrive over the next few days, and the stepmother continues making excuses for her absence. She claims the girl is at a friend’s house. However, when Rebecca goes to visit the family to retrieve her niece, she finds the home empty and assumes they’re out of town with the girl.

Strange things happen at the stepmother’s house where Rebecca is staying. She hears songs play on the piano in the dead of night, sees her niece’s shadow under the window, but the girl never makes it to the door. Strangest of all, Rebecca enters her room one afternoon to see her niece’s white nightgown laid out on her bed, a single rose bloom gripped over its chest by the sleeves like a corpse laid to rest. It’s the same bloom she saw on the rosebush by the front door, but the bloom disappear when Rebecca tries to confirm this (the convenient disappearance in any haunting).

     Rebecca soon gets a letter, claiming her cousin has fallen ill and needs immediate care. Rebecca leaves for home, with the stepmother insisting she will send the niece on a train to Rebecca’s house as soon as she can. But the girl never comes and the stepmother breaks all contact with Rebecca. Finally, Rebecca contacts the local postmaster who informs Rebecca her niece had died a year ago from neglect and the family her stepmother had claimed she had been visiting had died out long ago.

My only feeling over the course of this story is how stupid Rebecca is. Of course her niece is dead. It’s entirely shady that she never sees the girl and her stepmother has some mysterious excuse for her constant absence. So the story is short without many surprises, but nevertheless leaves you chilled as you learn the truth of the dead little girl (unless you’re a sociopath and don’t care about the health of little girls). The story is too short to be boring, but doesn't do a lot in the suspense or surprise department.
     Mary Eleanor Wilkins-Freeman (aside from having a long name) has a reputation for mother-daughter stories. In many of her works, like “The Lost Ghost” there is a child who has died due to neglect. We see that woman theme this genre is so fond of; women belong in the sphere of domesticity and when they fail at this, abnormal things happen.

So in summation, women, don’t have a career—your job is suckling babies and anything less will get you eternally haunted (good to know Casey Anthony has it coming).

This story is recommended. 

Read It Here!

Bring me... a shrubbery. 

What Lies Beneath--Falls Beneath Your Expectations

                Let me start out by saying whatever Michelle Pfeiffer is involved in, I am 100% on board. She’s a classy lady with a lot of talent who occasionally winds up in a not-so-great film.

But I will forever love "Cool Rider"

But overall, she’s a big star and my favorite Cat Woman, so coupled with Harrison Ford, I went into this film optimistically. I should not have gone into this film optimistically. What starts out as an edgy domestic thriller gets cliché and bad very, very quickly. Let’s break it down.

                Michelle Pfeiffer plays a softer character than her usual role as a mom whose daughter is moving off to college. She soon begins to see things, doors opening by themselves and picture frames falling off shelves. She chalks it up to “empty nest syndrome” and her husband (Ford), a notable doctor, encourages her to forget all the nonsense.

                But soon Michelle Pfeiffer (whose name is Claire, but will always be Michelle Pfeiffer in my eyes) suspects the woman next door has been murdered by her husband and is now a ghost seeking justice. When Michelle Pfeiffer and her best friend Jody do a séance with a toy Ouija board, the ghost reveals its initials to be MF (at which I immediately thought the ghost was being vulgar, but actually the neighbor’s name was Mary Fuer).

                Michelle Pfeiffer rushes to her doctor-husband’s lab in a tither, suddenly spotting her neighbor, Mr. F (shame on you if you don't get this joke). She accuses him of killing his wife, at which point his wife appears at his side, very much alive.

                So long story short, Michelle Pfeiffer finds out the ghost is actually a coed named Madison who had an affair with her husband, Harrison Ford. And here is when the movie stops being good.

                Until this point I was invested in a twist ending or a surprise thrill. But cheating husband with cute college student? Kills her because she threatens to go to the dean? That’s every episode of Law and Order: SVU without the cool DUN DUN noise.

                So Harrison Ford, who has been a caring a supporting husband and stepfather the entire film goes crazy and tries to drown Michelle Pfeiffer by sedating her and laying her in a filling bathtub. But Madison’s ghost appears, startling Harrison Ford so he slips backwards, hitting his head on the sink, going unconscious. Michelle Pfeiffer recovers from the drug just in time to escape the bathroom.

                Of course the phone lines have been cut and this movie is old, so there’s no 4G. Michelle Pfeiffer steals their dinosaur cell phone and gets into a car, searching for service (because all of a sudden the neighbors she has been obsessing over don’t have a house phone).

                Surprise! Her husband ambushes her in the car, and a ghost appears on a bridge, causing Michelle Pfeiffer to swerve into the water; the same lake where her husband pushed Madison’s car with Madison inside the night he killed her.

                Their submerged car hits against Madison’s submerged car and her corpse comes alive trapping the doctor, allowing Michelle Pfeiffer to escape. She is seen later placing a single red rose on Madison’s grave, surrounded by white snow. THE END.

                Here is where the movie really doesn’t click with me. It starts out with great potential. Michelle Pfeiffer has amnesia and suffered a major car accident a year ago; later you learn she caught her husband and Madison together and, upset, drove into a tree. But with an amnesiac being haunted by a ghost, the plot had so much more potential than a professor sleeping with a college student. Because that’s just season four of Gilmore Girls. So in the end, the movie fell flat of my expectations and simply felt rushed and boring. Yet nevertheless, sets a great model for the water ghost genre of horror.

                In the common horror film, two people sense ghosts before anyone else: artists and women. The protagonist in this film is both, a famous cellist and a female. Her husband, who reasons that there is nothing supernatural in the house, is a doctor and a man. In one pivitol scene, you see the couple on a double date wherein the two wives both believe wholeheartedly in the haunting while the men discuss business.

                But a more prevalent theme is promiscuity. In Gothic works, the woman is repressed, often sexually (as in most Poe works). And in Friday the 13^th movies, the girls getting it on are the girls not getting out alive. And in this film, there are more sex scenes than in Debbie Does Dallas. Michelle Pfeiffer wears white and beige through the entire film, except in one scene where she is possessed by Madison and is wearing a red dress. She has sex only with her husband and is a kept housewife. Madison has no father and latches to a married man, having a sordid affair. And she ends up dead. I don’t think it’s by accident.

Let me slip into something a little more...creepy.

                Water ghosts. In water ghost stories, the victim dies in water and often seeks revenge; they drown their victims. This story is no different, except Madison’s spirit employs the help of her victim’s wife. But hey, solidarity sister. That’s what keeps Madison from holding Michelle Pfeiffer under in the end.

                The movie was not altogether unwatchable. It has a lot of potential for analysis, but not a lot of potential for wowing an audience. This film is not recommended.

 

"Annabel Lee"--Lee-ves You Chilled

                The facts are these: there are thousands of people in this world who understand more about Edgar Allan Poe than I ever will or hope to. But that isn’t to say I don’t appreciate and—furthermore—enjoy his works. With that in mind, I present to you my review of “Annabel Lee”.

                The poem is the closest Poe could ever get to a Sparks love story, and many speculate whether or not he wrote it about his dead cousin/child-wife whom died two years after their wedding (when she was the ripe old age of fifteen).

That is one damn sexy teenager.

                It is a story of a beautiful woman who is loved by the narrator so strongly that even angels are jealous. She is stolen from him and placed in a sepulcher by the sea. The poem winds down with the narrator longing for his love and eventually joining her in death; he is buried beside her.

                I don’t need to say Poe is the king of all that is creepy and Gothic (the prince is Tim Burton). In this poem the woman is literally placed in a tomb, an enormous motif of the genre; women encased and trapped, the claustrophobic element. She is beautiful and she dies because angels are jealous of her love, which is our sexual repression ingredient. Furthermore, Poe sets the scene by using adjectives to impress cold isolation—“a wind blew out of a cloud, chilling,”—and everyone knows location is half the battle in giving somebody the creeps.

                It ends with the narrator grieving himself to death to be with his love in the ground. So it’s basically a fantastic rom-com (like Schindler's List!). This poem is recommended.

Read It Yourself 

"The Yellow Wallpaper"--Off The Wall Entertaining

                Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an iconic feminist author saddling the 19^th and 20^th centuries with her works featuring female characters. However unlike most feminists (Virginia Woolf), she isn’t boring.

 Bringing Sexy Back

                "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a creepy story. I honestly cannot describe it any other way. It ends with the main character descending into madness and “creeping” all over the room. “But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.” First question: what is a smooch? But let me back up.

                The main character, an unnamed woman, is bedridden after having a child, in a room she assumes to be nursery coated with the distinct titular yellow wallpaper which she despises. But the house is a rental so no one will repaper it; she sits all day staring at the wallpaper until she becomes convinced there is a woman trapped in the wall. So she starts peeling.

                She spends hours, not sleeping, peeling away paper from this wall, trying to free this woman. And the entire time her husband is comforting her and telling her everything will be fine—but it’s not, because soon this woman goes off the deep end and starts “creeping”. The story ends with the narrator making circles around the room over and over, making grooves (probably synonymous with a "smooch"?) in the walls with her shoulder. Just endless creepy repetition.

                I love the entire premise of this story. It’s short but effective, employing plenty of haunted elements. I will list them as concisely as possible.

A.      The Chamber. The Gothic theme of a woman imprisoned or trapped as the protagonist in her yellow room.

B.      Women. More in tune with the supernatural. She sees the woman “creeping” in the walls.

C.      Artists vs. Doctors. The woman’s husband is a doctor and insists he knows best and she must stay in her room. The woman is a writer who is more irrational and therefore affected by the haunting.

D.      Location. Big manor they rent in the country, hinted it might have been an asylum. Clearly a location for a haunting.

E. Repression. The woman's husband doesn't like her getting out of bed or writing. Insists she stay in the room.

               All of these motifs, and yet there are no ghosts! This is a perfectly framed horror story, but there is nothing (probably) supernatural. It's the woman's own mind that haunts her (being a woman is hard, guys. You don't even know).

                So last but not least, feminism. This is what I love about this work—the feminist themes aren’t aggressively shoved down your throat. The woman is suffering postpartum depression, but her husband doesn’t recognize it (when he asked her what was wrong, she replied “nothing” in a voice that clearly implied something). The husband ignores her requests to go outside and patronizes her in a way most similar to Ibsen’s A Doll House (a feminist play written by a man, might I add).

                So in the end, to break free from her domestic role of mother and wife, she loses her mind. Which is deep if you think about it. So women, next time you don’t want to do the dishes, fake psychosis. This story is recommended.

Read the Story

The Shining--Shines The Light On Pretentiousness

     The Shining is a classic horror story gone fantastically wrong (and not just for Jack Torrance, the main character). The book offers a cohesive story line of a boy with an ability known as “the shining” set against his abusive father possessed by an evil hotel. Stanely Kubrick takes this story and makes it as subtle (pretentious) and mysterious (confusing) as possible; the entire audience is left speechless (because they have no idea what happened).

                I won’t waste my time with an in depth summary. If you haven’t seen the movie yet you probably hate America or live in a cave (or both. See Saddam Hussein). But for a refresher, this is the iconic film where Jack Nicholson chops down a door manically calling “Here’s Johnny.” This is the film that makes parents lean across dinner tables and whisper, theatrically, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” (Dad, seriously, this doesn't make sense.  Stop doing this. I’m trying to eat). This is the film which features little Danny pedaling around a hotel seeing ghost girls and muttering “Red Rum!” with no supervision. 

They should really get him tested for dyslexia

                At this point you've probably seen the film (if you haven’t seen it yet, I’m begging you--read the book. Sure, Stephen King was strung out on coke when he wrote it, but means to an end, right?).

                The entire film is just full of gaping holes. I present to you a condensed collection of my thoughts: Why isn’t Danny’s Shining more useful? Why is Jack Nicholson in a bar in the 1920s when Prohibition was in effect? Why is he in a picture on the hotel wall in the ending? Who did Shelley Duvall sleep with to get this role? And where there are questions unanswered, there are conspiracy theorists. Thus, Room 237 was born. 

More About Room 237

Room 237 is a brilliant documentary that breaks down The Shining and all the theories surrounding it—from “the movie is Nazi propaganda” to “the minotaur and labyrinth”. I personally can’t begin to rationalize The Shining in this way, because I simply don’t have time to watch this movie 100 times (seriously, it’s a long film, and I have stuff to do).

                But I have seen it more than once, and I can say it holds to the semblance of many popular haunted methods. It was reminiscent of “Fall of the House of Usher” by Poe; Jack Nicholson and the hotel seem connected and linked somehow, as Usher is to his family’s manor. Also, Usher buried his sister alive and Jack certainly tried to bury his family (but he was going to kill them with an axe first, because he’s not a monster). So it certainly has the elements of classic Gothic, but with a small pinch of 80s slasher.

              I’m not saying I understand this film. It’s been applauded and viewed for decades now and has an active cult following. I’m just wondering if maybe the film actually has no answers, and Kubrick was just trolling us all. But if you want to believe in fairy tales, check out Room 237. Either way, this film is not recommended.

The trailer has less mystery than the two hour movie

Mama--Not A Nurturing Film

The movie feels like it's forever too

                The 2013 movie Mama features one of my new favorite actresses, Jessica Chastain, and the worst plot of the New Year. You probably recognize Chastain from Zero Dark Thirty where she was torturing terrorists. She learned everything about torture, I assume, from the producers of Mama.

                The film begins with a man shooting his wife and fleeing into a snowstorm with his two young daughters, Victoria and Lilly. He wrecks his car and takes shelter in an abandoned, though convenient, cabin. When he tries to kill his daughters, placing a gun against Victoria’s head, a mysterious force snaps his neck and drags his body out into the snow. The girls then live off cherries. Just cherries. Cherries that fall out of the sky like they’re in Pac-Man. Several years pass.

                The girls are eventually discovered and adopted by their uncle and his girlfriend, Jessica Chastain. This Chastain has not been nominated for an Academy Award nor killed Osama Bin Laden yet, she is just a punk rocker who is introduced by peeing on an EPT and celebrating its negative result. So she is thrilled when her boyfriend adopts two feral children who refuse to sleep in a bed and can’t speak English (not). Luckily, Chastain’s boyfriend, Victoria and Lilly’s uncle, is injured mysteriously and put into a coma within fifteen minutes of the film (because it’s not his name on the movie poster).

                So Chastain is stuck with these two demon girls who insist there is an invisible being feeding them cherries and living in their closet—Mama. And of course, their psychiatrist doesn’t believe them (because in every horror film EVER there is a doctor who insists there is nothing supernatural happening, and an artist, like musician Chastain, who insists there is, in fact, a “presence”).

                So the audience suffers through the “Look out behind you!” while the characters dumbly insist there is nothing irrational about giant black vortexes appearing in the walls and little girls playing hide and seek with the thing in their closet while barely escaping their own horrible deaths with every scene. This lasts for an hour.

                SPOILER TIME. The movie ends like this: the psychiatrist in denial dies, the girls’ Aunt Jean dies, and Lilly dies. Turns out Mama was an asylum patient who jumped off a cliff with a baby in her arms and is now spending her days of the afterlife searching for her child (which makes her not so bright, because insane or not, if you jump off a cliff with an infant, it’s not going to survive the fall).

                Lilly, the younger child, ends up jumping off the cliff with her imaginary friend Mama and Chastain holds onto Victoria (who was always her favorite anyway) and watches her go. Because in the end, what the audience needs to remember is, Chastain hates kids.

                This movie had a contrived plot and lot of bad acting, but ultimately is not the worst horror film I’ve ever seen. I suppose it even offered some fresh actual Gothic elements instead of cheap gore and startling “jump-out” scenes meant to hook the common modern audience. I appreciated it holding to the female importance of a horror film—the idea that Chastain needed to find her sphere of domesticity. She is seen doing laundry instead of having her own career in her (probably mediocre) rock band. So it’s nice to see the movie teaching us a woman’s role is as mother and housewife like it’s an episode of Mad Men.

                The movie was reminiscent of a Charlotte Perkins Gilman story—you have crazy women, babies, the woman’s role, and women dying; key elements in any one of her pieces. And as she is major influence to haunted literature, I suppose Mama did a few things right (if this were the 20s).

                Ultimately the ending left me feeling unsatisfied, like it could have been better, but they ran out of time and slapped on a conclusion. And in the end, we're still all wondering "What with the frickin' moths?" This film is not recommended.

 Is it wrong I spent most of the movie laughing at the girls crawling all over the floor like feral lizards?