The Little Stranger (2018)

The Little Stranger (2018): adapted by Lucinda Coxon from the novel by Sarah Waters; directed by Lenny Abrahamson; starring Domhnall Gleason (Dr. Faraday), Will Poulter (Roderick Ayres), Ruth Wilson (Caroline Ayres), Charlotte Rampling (Mrs. Ayres), and Liv Hill (Betty): 

In stripping Sarah Waters' very good, long novel of its first-person narration by protagonist Dr. Faraday, the film-makers turn The Little Stranger into a dull, decidedly unscary slog with an inert cipher at the heart of the action in Domhnall Gleason's Faraday. This is not Gleason's fault -- he has almost nothing to work with. It's a ghost story for people who find Perry Como music too exciting. Not recommended.

The Small Hand (2010) by Susan Hill

The Small Hand (2010) by Susan Hill: Hill's much-earlier The Woman in Black is a fine tribute to the ghost stories of the past. This recent novella, not so much. 

Having the protagonist be a jet-setting antiquarian book finder seems like an updated nod to the great ghost-story writer M.R. James, whose collections of early 20th-century ghost stories had 'Antiquary' in the title not once but twice. 

Alas, our protagonist and narrator is boring. Very boring. And the ghostly incidents are separated by what seems like endless pages of landscape description, though The Small Hand is more novella than novel. 

I suppose two other problems with The Small Hand are its somewhat glib and superficial use of mental illness and the fact that underneath it all, this is a tale of ghostly vengeance that would barely support a six-page EC Comics story. It's all quite a disappointment -- read The Woman in Black instead for Hill at her best. Not recommended.

Dark Matter (2010) by Michelle Paver

Dark Matter (2010) by Michelle Paver: It's 1937 and a quintet of Oxfordians has received funding to create a research station above the Arctic Circle on an island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and then winter there. But they need someone trained in the sciences, and so Jack Miller earns that right after an interview. 

As an impoverished clerk forced to give up his studies in physics due to money problems, Jack Miller is of a much different social class than the rest of the group. There will be tensions from this -- Miller is acutely aware of all the quirks of the 'Old Boy' Oxfordians from the moment he walks into that interview. But his job and life are deeply unsatisfying, and while Jack doesn't believe that the expedition will permanently change anything in his life, it will at least be an adventure.

But as the expedition gets whittled down by one before it ever leaves England because of an illness in one member's family, and as another member has to return home after breaking his leg while in transit, the whole thing starts to look just a little cursed. And they haven't even landed yet.

Told primarily in the form of entries from Jack Miller's Arctic journal, Dark Matter is a superb 'old-school' ghost story with a contemporary spin in terms of its musings on class and gender identity. The descriptions of the often alluring, always Sublime Arctic are superb. The characters are engaging, none moreso than our narrator, whose childhood and adult traumas he has brought into the Arctic just as the long night is falling.

Paver builds suspense and terror gradually, just as she did in her later Himalayan ghost story Thin Air. She has a thing for extreme environments, British class issues, and angry ghosts. For a ghost there is, though how much of the expedition's mounting woes are ghost-related and how much simply the result of environment and character remains a question until the climax.

Paver also throws in a lovable sled dog named Isaak for the reader to worry over as tensions mount and problems multiply. Will the dog survive? Will anybody?

My minor quibble is the title itself, which Paver seems to have decided upon before really beginning the novel. It takes a certain amount of shoe-horning to get the concept of 'dark matter' into a novel set in 1937. But I think the title and the metaphoric nature of the concept, discussed in the novel, is the only real 'Flashing Neon Sign of Meaning' the novel has. 

Look, I don't like such Neon Signs, but some people are perfectly happy with them. But you will have a character explain that title some time in the book, and it comes across like those moments in the later Mission: Impossible movies in which a character apparently has to say the word or words in the movie's subtitle.

I don't quibble with Paver's choice to begin the novel with a letter written by one of the characters other than Jack Miller a decade after the events of Dark Matter. The letter doesn't give anything away, exactly. More importantly to Paver's vision, it ensures that all three expedition members have a chance to write 'in their own voice,' as Gus, the third member, has excerpts from his own journal entries interpolated into Miller's narrative. There's a narrative fairness here insofar as Miller's own views of the other two members are, of course, unreliable.

In all, this is a very fine ghost story, told with a generosity of spirit and an admirable economy of pages. Where will Paver's next ghost story of privation and the Sublime be set? Antarctica? Peru? The Moon? Only time will tell. Highly recommended.

The Ghost of Yotsuya (Tôkaidô Yotsuya kaidan) (1959)

The Ghost of Yotsuya (Tôkaidô Yotsuya kaidan) (1959): written by Masayoshi Onuki, Yoshihiro Ishikawa, and Nanboku Tsuruya; directed by Nobuo Nakagawa; starring Shigeru Amachi (Iemon), Noriko Kitazawa (Sode), Katsuko Wakasugi (Iwa), and Shuntaro Emi (Naosuke): Apparently based on a Japanese folk tale, Tôkaidô Yotsuya kaidan starts slowly, almost infuriatingly so, before moving in its second half into an inspired, creepy, occasionally amusing piece of spectral revenge. 

Along the way, you'll ask yourself such important cross-cultural questions as 'Why did he think it was a good idea to nail dead bodies to wooden shutters before throwing them in the river?' and 'Why does the deadly poison also make someone hideously ugly along the way?'. It's a very satisfying, somewhat oddball horror story, strangely affecting as it lingers in the memory. Recommended.

Screwed

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898): One of the great horrors of a lot of first-year university English courses is The Turn of the Screw. It's really not something that should be inflicted on anyone below third-year English. And besides the complicated sentence structures of Henry James, there's a cruel tease in handing students a ghost story that's too attentuated to be viscerally scary.

So it goes. The striking things about the story have nothing to do with horror, and everything to do with a realistically imagined reaction to horror. It's one of the first psychological examinations of the workings of terror on the human mind. For actual scares, James' admirer Edith Wharton was much more forthright and reliable. Her ghosts stories would be fine first-year texts. James, not so much.

The distancing effects of the text play into its very title, which is, as explained in the story, a metaphoric description of the effects of a particular type of narrative, the ghost story itself. In the narrative, the revelation of the events of the story of the governess comes as a result of a bout of fireside ghost-story telling. The typical ghost story elicits certain reactions: to imperil children in such a story represents a further "turn of the screw" to increase the emotional and horrific "pressure" on the audience.

The two schools of thought on The Turn of the Screw roughly divide up into 'There are ghosts' and 'there are no ghosts.' The latter requires narrative duplicity on the level of The Usual Suspects: pretty much everything in the main part of the story that describes the struggle between a young governess and two malign ghosts for the souls of her two young charges must either be confabulation on the part of the governess or, at a further remove, confabulation on the part of the frame character who has ostensibly set down her narrative.

The former requires suspension of disbelief, something the average reader will accept but that many academics are incapable of accepting. There are no ghosts in the real world; hence, the ghosts in James' story must be fiction. If there are ghosts, though, what then? We know they did something to the young girl and young boy when they were still alive. What?

James isn't necessarily going to answer such questions. There's a reticence born of his own sensibilities and the sensibilities of the time. That reticence occurs within the story-world as well: the governess is at all points constrained by what is or is not proper to talk about, by what is or is not mentionable in polite company. Within that story-world in which there are malign ghosts, propriety allows those ghosts much more free rein than they might have in other circumstances.

But the genius of the story lies in the aforementioned psychological examination of the effects of terror on a human mind. The governess' mind must circle, returning again and again to its own reactions to things others cannot see, forced to deal again and again with feelings of horror the source of which only she seems to see. How much do the children see? How many of the children's actions constitute clever play-acting? What do the ghosts want now?

Around and around we go. The chills here are almost entirely of a philosophical or existential nature: how does the mind in isolation react to that which should not be? How can action be taken against incorporeal beings that never really act against one, but instead appear and disappear, trailing clouds of malevolence? How complicit is the governess in what happens? And why does she write exactly like Henry James? Highly recommended.

The Dead Marshes

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1983): If you've seen the recent film adaptation starring Daniel Radcliffe, please note that the novel's plot bears only superficial similarities to that movie, as becomes obvious exactly one sentence into The Woman in Black.

The Woman in Black is a tremendous homage to ghost stories of the classical English type from the 19th and early 20th century. Hill's prose is pitch-perfect: it reads like an English ghost story from that time period, the prose as controlled as the subtly building narrative of horror. This is a novel of subtle, building horror which gives the reader both a haunted house and a haunted landscape and uses both to great effect.

With something of a nod to Great Expectations, it's the story of a callow youth told by his much older, wiser self. This ghost story owes debts to a lot of writers, perhaps M.R. James and Henry James most of all, though at points it seems closer to some of Edith Wharton's ghost-story nightmares. There's a chapter title that tips a hat to one of M.R. James' two most famous ghost stories, and a rumination by the narrator on the limits of natural courage when faced by the supernatural that's almost a direct quotation from an early 20th-century William Hope Hodgson story.

　
The young, early 20th-century English barrister whose older self narrates the novel is a sympathetic figure whose rationality is no match for what awaits him in a small English coastal town. Forever surrounded by salt marshes and the sea, the townspeople do not want to talk about the wealthy, elderly woman whose death has brought the narrator to them to settle the affairs of her estate. To do so, he has to spend time in Eel Marsh House (!), the woman's now-empty mansion, situated on a spur into the sea, cut off from land transportation with every high tide. And then there's the eponymous Woman in Black, whom the narrator first sees at his client's funeral and whom no one will answers questions about.

I won't say any more about the particulars of the story except to note that, like many traditional ghost stories, it's 'told' (by the narrator, that is) at Christmas, that its roots lie in the strictures imposed upon woman in Victorian society, and that the malevolence of the circumstances the narrator finds himself in are masterfully constructed. This is a short gem of a novel by any measure. Highly recommended.

Mama (2013)

Mama: written by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Neil Cross; directed by Andy Muschietti; starring Jessica Chastain (Annabel), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Lucas/Jeffrey), Megan Charpentier (Victoria), Isabelle Nelisse (Lily), Daniel Kash (Dr. Dreyfuss) and Javier Botet (Mama) (2013): Produced by Guillermo del Toro, Mama has some of his tropes scattered throughout, most notably the linkage of insects with the supernatural. It's not the most brilliant of horror movies, as at least two characters do really stupid horror-movie cliche things, and a sub-plot turns out to exist because it makes the main plot run more smoothly towards the end.

On the other hand, the movie looks great. The set design is impressively functional insofar as it's atmospheric while also serving the plot and not being ridiculous. Jessica Chastain is never less than fully invested in her lead character, almost unrecognizable in a black short-cut wig and raccoon eye make-up. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones) has an oddly thankless dual part as twin brothers, both of whom disappear for the middle of the picture so thoroughly that one wonders if he was called away to do reshoots on that HBO series. And the two little girls do about as good a job of playing semi-feral girls abandoned in the woods for five years as one could ask.

The movie really succeeds or fails, though, on how one feels about the eponymous monster. Or ghost. Or ghost-monster. There are a couple of really nice aspects to the visualization of Mama: her hair perpetually seems to float as if she's underwater (and metaphorically speaking, she is). And she occasionally comes at people while almost completely submerged in the floor, with only her ghostly hair marking her approach like some ghastly shark's fin. There's more imaginative CGI in her creation than in all of Peter Jackson's last three films put together.

And there are also several imaginatively shot dream/memory sequences from Mama's standpoint that are seriously disturbing. It would be lovely if as much care had been taken with the story as is taken with the visuals, but at least the movie is neither found-footage nor 'based on a true story.' Recommended.

The Hungry Ghost

The Changeling: written by Russell Hunter, William Gray, and Diana Maddox; directed by Peter Medak; starring George C. Scott (John Russell), Trish VanDevere (Claire Norman), Melvyn Douglas (Senator Joe Carmichael), John Colicos (Captain DeWitt) and Barry Morse (Dr. Pemberton) (1980): One of the good results of Canada's tax-shelter days for movies, The Changeling is a traditional ghost story that plays fair with its audience. It also won pretty much every major Canadian movie award for 1980, demonstrating that a horror movie can do such a thing, but only in Canada. Screw you, Oscar!

George C. Scott plays composer John Russell, who's removed himself to Seattle to teach at a university and try to recuperate from a personal tragedy. But the house he rents turns out to be haunted. But while the ghost there is initially prone mainly to minor fits of glass-breaking and noise-making, its persistence leads Russell to try to figure out who it was and why it's still hanging around. Director Peter Medak and his writers build the suspense gradually, with attention to detail that makes the scares, when they come, quite effective.

Scott stays under control for most of the picture, and has some fine character moments -- one in which he weeps in bed is especially effective. Scott's wife, Trish VanDevere, plays a local woman who helps with the investigation of the ghost's origins and motives. The investigation itself is a time capsule of technology: there's a reel-to-reel recorder and microfilm involved!

One of the sharpest things about The Changeling is its refusal to become sentimental, a decision that's laudable given the subject material. This may be the ghost of a child, but it's had decades for its rage to build. Its apparent allies may be in as much danger from its wrath as those it's seeking revenge upon.

A lot of Canadian stalwarts -- most notably John Colicos and Barry Morse -- make what are basically extended cameos. This is really a two-person show, with some able assistance from the soon-to-be-dead Melvyn Douglas as a U.S. Senator with a connection to the mystery. Recommended.

Silent House (2012)

Silent House: adapted by Laura Lau from the Uruguayan movie of the same name written by Gustavo Hernandez; directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau; starring Elizabeth Olsen (Sarah), Adam Trese (John), Eric Sheffer Stevens (Peter), Julia Taylor Ross (Sophia), Adam Barnett (Stalking Man), and Haley Murphy (Little Girl) (2012): In the tradition of both Hitchcock's Rope and the Uruguayan horror movie it remakes, Silent House was shot in a series of continuous takes that were then edited so as to look as if there were no edits at all.

The seams don't show as much as in Rope, in which Hitchcock had to have the camera dive into a wall or door every eight minutes to hide the edit. That's because of digital effects and the murkiness of much of this movie, most of which takes place inside a house without electrical power.

Twentysomething Sarah, her father John, and her father's brother Peter are working to clean and repair the family cottage/lakeside house, which has been sold to new owners. Commence the escalating horrors! Is it a ghost story? A slasher movie? Could there be a twist ending?

Elizabeth Olsen, the younger and considerably bustier sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley, does a pretty good job here running the emotional gamut from screaming to trying not to scream to running to hiding. She definitely looks at the handheld camera a couple of times, though, which knocks one a bit out of the film world. But this is a tough acting assignment, as the camera is either on her or looking over her shoulder for the entire movie.

Olsen does a good job overall establishing both viewer sympathy and a growing sense of unease at what she's seeing, though given where the plot goes, a higher-cut, darker-coloured top might have been a good idea. Or not. This is a movie in part about voyeurism and objectification, which means that the amount of time the movie spends centered on Olsen's cleavage can ultimately be read as an attempt to increase the discomfort of the viewer at the pronouncedly anti-erotic climax of the film. Recommended.