Hereditary (2018)

Hereditary (2018): written and directed by Ari Aster; starring Alex Wolff (Peter), Gabriel Byrne (Steve), Toni Collette (Annie), and Milly Shapiro (Charlie): As in The Shining or The Exorcist, Hereditary puts a family under malign supernatural pressure and sets the burner to 'Boil.'

Things start slowly but eerily. You get a somewhat weird adolescent daughter (a terrific, odd Milly Shapiro). You get a stressed-out Mom (Toni Collette, superb as usual). You get a well-meaning but somewhat ineffectual Dad (Gabriel Byrne, channeling Donald Sutherland in Ordinary People). And you get a really stressed out teen-aged son (Alex Wolff).

Around the 40-minute mark, something awful happens. Is it just random, horrible luck? Is the supernatural at work here or are we seeing a family whose members -- especially mother and son -- have serious, unresolved psychological issues?

Well, the next 80 minutes or so provide the answer to those and other questions. Hereditary does a nice job of eventually inverting our assumptions about who or what is responsible. It also has more beheadings than A Tale of Two Cities. Along with graveyard robbing, naked cult members leering from the shadows, mysterious lights, impotent authorities, ghostly drawings and writings, people burning alive, and so on, and so forth.

Told in an almost stately, deliberate manner, Hereditary nonetheless traffics in the stuff of Gothic nightmares as it draws to its tense conclusion. It may be too deliberate for some -- I found it exhilarating. I hope to see more from writer-director Ari Aster. He treats both the horror genre and the tropes he used with respect and diligence. Highly recommended.

The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson

The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson: 60 years after its first publication, The Haunting of Hill House remains the finest haunted-house novel in the English language, its nearest competitor a very distant second.

There's not much to say that hasn't been said already. Maybe nothing. Re-reading it again, I noted at how deftly Shirley Jackson balances the entire novel between two possible explanations, with a number of possibilities between them, right to the last words of the novel. And nevertheless leaves Hill House itself a horrifying mystery to linger in the mind long after one has finished the novel. 

The Haunting of Hill House has proven to be almost unadaptable. The great 1960's adaptation dropped a huge amount of relevant material in order to fit into a two-hour window. The solid 2018 miniseries pretty much threw in the towel on any attempt at a straight adaptation and instead constructed an alternate narrative with entirely different character representations and plot beats. And the 1999 film adaptation was an unholy abomination about which we will no longer speak.

Jackson's novel is about as densely packed as one could ask of such an elegant, often sardonic piece of work. Eleanor's story is a tragedy of forced servitude -- as the unmarried sister, she was expected to care for her ailing mother for nearly two decades. She's either the perfect foil for the house, or the perfect time bomb ready to go off. 

Her fellow characters, ostensibly there at the behest of a professor to investigate the famous ghost house that is Hill House, are sharply drawn, though the reader must be aware of how often their personalities are refracted by Eleanor's shifting perspective.

You will have your own answers to the mysteries of Hill House, and your own reactions to the marvelous characters whom Jackson puts in mortal peril at the hands of... What? Hill House is a bit of a paradox in American horror: a Lovecraftian horror rendered in entirely non-Lovecraftian prose and parameters. But in Hill House, as in sunken R'lyeh, all the angles are wrong. Highly recommended.

Christmas at the Overlook Hotel

Room 237 (2012)

Room 237 (2012): written and directed by Rodney Ascher; featuring theories about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) from Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan, and Jay Weidner: To paraphrase a Jack Kirby cover blurb, "Don't ask -- just watch it!" 

Rodney Ascher unpacks and illustrates nine, count them, nine 'fan' theories about the secret meaning of Stanley Kubrick's movie of Stephen King's The Shining. Oh, brother. The loopiest is that The Shining is Kubrick's coded confession that he faked the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The most wide-ranging is that The Shining is about ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY. 

If you want to understand the Ourobouros of the theory, of becoming transfixed by an idea that seems objectively insane... well, this movie is for you. Asture observations occasionally surface, only to be drowned in the red flood of hermetic hermeneutics. Learn the mystery of the Impossible Window! Marvel at carefully detailed, viewer-generated maps of the floor plan of the Overlook Hotel! Realize that somewhere, Stanley Kubrick is busting a gut! An absolutely fascinating work of documentary, non-judgmental about the validity of the theories described herein.

The most astonishing moment probably comes when, prompted by one theorist's statement that The Shining must be viewed backwards and forwards to truly be understood,  a film theatre screens The Shining played backwards and forwards, projected on the same screen at the same time. I've got to guess that a lot of headache medication was taken during and after that adventure. Highly recommended.

The Haunting (1963)

The Haunting (1963): adapted by Nelson Gidding from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House; directed by Robert Wise; starring Julie Harris (Eleanor Lance), Claire Bloom (Theodora), Richard Johnson (Dr. John Markway), and Russ Tamblyn (Luke Sanderson): 

The Haunting isn't as good as the novel it adapts, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. How could it be? The novel rates with me as the greatest haunted-house novel ever written. The movie is very good. And I think the movie benefited from the relatively low budget handed to director Robert Wise. Wise elected to keep the hauntings even more off-screen than they are in the novel, inspiring dread instead with shadows and strange noises and booming knocks at the door. 

The cast is first-rate. Julie Harris' Eleanor Vance is the dark heart of the movie. A shut-in forced to care for her ailing mother for years, she has now been released by her mother's death and her own realization that she herself has never truly lived. A poltergeist incident when she was a girl causes Dr. John Markway to invite her to help him investigate Hill House, the malign structure where doors refuse to stay open and "whatever walks there, walks alone." Along with the apparently psychic Theodora and house-owner Luke, Eleanor will investigate the bizarre properties of Hill House. Is there a rational explanation?

Stephen King's The Shining riffs on The Haunting of Hill House, especially in its combination of a deteriorating personality and a malign environment that encourages that deterioration. The movie and the novel have influenced many other works over the years. The movie on its own (movie qua movie?) remains a gem, a sad and horrifying gem that remains as mysterious about the source of its hauntings at the conclusion as it was at the beginning. Maybe moreso. Is Hill House haunted by ghosts or is it itself some sort of malign and inhuman distortion in reality? Answer this yourself. Highly recommended.

The Shining, Again

The Shining (1980) : adapted from the Stephen King novel by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson; directed by Stanley Kubrick; starring Jack Nicholson (Jack Torrance), Shelley Duvall (Wendy Torrance), Danny Lloyd (Danny Torrance), Scatman Crothers (Halloran), Barry Nelson (Ullman), Philip Stone (Grady), and Joe Turkel (Lloyd): Three times have we watched The Shining in the last seven years, as reviewed here and here. And that's not even mentioning Stephen King's novel. Or Doctor Sleep, King's sequel to The Shining.

One of the noteworthy things about The Shining is how many nutty interpretations (and even conspiracy theories) it has inspired. Many of these come from very literal-minded people who seem to be extraordinarily unfamiliar with the idea of sub-text, much less interpretations that don't rely on suppositions about what the director intentionally put there.

The best one -- that The Shining is Kubrick's subtle confession to the idea that he faked the Apollo 11 moon landing -- is all sorts of crazy. And that's leaving aside the fact that if Kubrick had been hired in 1968 to fake the 1969 moon landing, the 1969 moon landing wouldn't have occurred until at least 1973. Do you know how many retakes those shots would have needed? And do you really think Kubrick would have used the bit in which Neil Armstrong blows his first line on the Moon?

The Shining is, of course, both great and a complete departure from the Stephen King novel it's based on, which is also great (contra Kubrick, who thought the novel was weak). One view that works pretty well is that the whole thing is a satire of horror movies that also works as a horror movie. Well, whatever. The Sublime is conjured up, and even the looming, menacing Overlook Hotel finds itself dwarfed by that Sublime landscape. 

Some view the surprising death of a major character who doesn't die in the novel as one of Kubrick's 'Screw you!' moments addressed to Stephen King and fans of the novel. Is it? Because it looks an awful lot like Kubrick riffing on Hitchcock's use of Janet Leigh and her character in Psycho. To me, at least.

Lots of room for interpretation here. So it goes. Highly recommended.

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (2013)

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (2013): King's 36-years-later sequel to The Shining finds psychically gifted Danny Torrance (call him 'Dan', now, please) all grown up and working at a seniors' hospice in New England. His mother Wendy Torrance died of lung cancer several years ago. And Dan has survived a decades-long battle with alcohol.

Nine years sober when the main narrative of the novel begins, he uses the psychic gifts of the Shining to help calm and comfort people who are about to die, all with the help of a cat, Azreel, who somehow knows when people are going to die. It sounds like the set-up for the weirdest children's book ever.

Meanwhile, roaming around the country in a malign fleet of RVs are the members of the True Knot. Long-lived psychic vampires, they feed on mass death and, when at all possible, the physic residue created when they torture and murder someone with the Shining.

As the power of the Shining tends to peak when a child is 10 or 11, they've spent millennia torturing and murdering children to increase their own lifespans. Their protective colouration (other than their own prodigious range of psychic powers) is that they look like a normal band of mobile-home enthusiasts of all ages. Truly of all ages, as that psychic residue -- which they've dubbed 'steam' -- can age them backwards when imbibed in enough quantity.

Now, through a series of truly unfortunate events, the True Knot has become aware of the most powerful psychic they've ever detected -- a pre-adolescent girl named Abra (no fooling) who lives a dozen miles or so from Dan Torrance. They're going to come and get her and eat her, and while she's more powerful than Dan ever was, she's going to need his help to survive, and to perhaps destroy the True Knot once and for all time.

Billed as King's return to horror, Doctor Sleep really isn't, at least entirely. Much of it is of a piece with his other 'Wild Talent' novels -- Carrie, Firestarter, and The Dead Zone --- which would have been classified as science fiction had they been released in the 1950's. The True Knot's members are horrifying, especially leader Rose the Hat, but King devotes a lot of space to making them understandable by depicting their group dynamic and their genuine concern for one another. They're monsters, but as a knowledgeable ghost tells Dan at one point, "they're sick, and they don't know it."

Moreover, the True Knot's travelling ways and their quasi-carnival slang (normal human beings are "rubes", for instance) put them firmly in the tradition of Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, a dark carnival King has riffed on a number of times in his work, most notably in It and Needful Things.

It's with Dan that the novel must succeed or fail. I think it succeeds. Torrance, plagued by memories of his alcoholic father and the demonic Overlook Hotel, certainly has his reasons to escape into the bottle. But he's also finally forced to find his reasons for getting out again -- and, with Abra, to play the role that the Overlook's benign cook with the Shining, Dick Hallorran, did for Danny. Because beyond the threat of the True Knot, there is the threat posed by Abra herself, poised closer to the edge of becoming Carrie than anyone initially realizes.

Doctor Sleep isn't one of King's scarier novels, though it has its moments. As a character study, though, of Dan Torrance and of the horrible, pitiful members of the True Knot, it succeeds. It's a novel about forgiveness more than anything else. Some ghosts must now go, quietly or not. Recommended.

Carrie by Stephen King (1974)

Carrie by Stephen King (1974): King's first published novel still has zing. Or zip. Or whatever. It's not particularly representative of his work as a whole, though its telekinetic namesake is representative of a lot of King novels from the first ten years of his novels.

Carrie gives us a powerful telekinetic; The Shining gives us a boy and a man who are both telepathic and precognitive; The Dead Zone gives us a precognitive man; Firestarter gives us a pyrokinetic girl. King's interest in psychic abilities seems very much a product of the similarly interested 1970's America. I'm surprised he didn't do a novel involving pyramid power.

Carrie also features atypical King narration, a combination of third-person omniscient and 'clippings' from fictional books, magazines, and letters. It works, though just barely: some suspense is leeched out of the text by our knowledge that something extraordinarily dire is going to happen from pretty much the first page onwards. Of course, the movie strips these documentarian elements away, leaving only the high-school narrative that is Carrie's greatest strength.

King himself noted that in going back to Carrie after Columbine, he found her much less sympathetic than he remembered. Pitiful, perhaps, and warped by persecution and a loopy, homicidal mother, but not sympathetic. Anyone who has been an outcast can feel pangs of horror at Carrie's sad life, but she's ultimately no more sympathetic than John Gardner's Grendel, and much less so than Anthony Burgess's Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

This is still a tight, fascinating read (it may be King's shortest novel). Separated from high school as a student by a few short years and as a teacher not at all, King conjures up a world that's a nightmare for students who are low in the pecking order, where even a good deed can lead to horrible consequences. Recommended.

The Real Monster Homes of Maine

Hell House by Richard Matheson (1970): Matheson's great ghost story pays homage to Shirley Jackson's earlier, great haunted-house novel, The Haunting of Hill House, in many of its attributes. As in Jackson's novel, Hell House gives us a quartet of psychic investigators led by an academic and weighed down by personal issues who've been brought together to stay in an extremely haunted house for several days.

Matheson's novel focuses on the always fuzzy world of "psychic research" far more than Jackson's did. The psychosexual issues are much more overt. And unlike Hill House, where the haunting seemed to be a matter of a Bad Place rather than individual Bad Ghosts, Hell House appears to be the domain of the ghost of Emeric Belasco. Matheson loosely bases Belasco on Aleister Crowley, black magician and self-proclaimed "wickedest man in the world." Belaso is much wickeder: his remote Maine mansion was the site of mass murder, suicide, and worse. But when the authorities finally broke into the mansion in the 1920's, Belasco was nowhere to be found among the dead.

Hell House is set in 1970. Two previous attempts to probe the mysteries of Hell House, the last in 1940, ended in the deaths or institutionalization of all those involved but one. And that one, a then-16-year-old boy judged to be one of the greatest psychics ever, is along for this expedition. Why? Because a dying millionaire is paying him and the others $100,000 each to try to figure out from the evidence of Hell House whether the human soul survives death.

As with his great, rational vampire novel I am Legend, Matheson herein sails the edge between the supernatural and the scientific. The physics professor who leads the expedition believes that ghosts are a product of human minds interacting with a charged psychic environment left behind by traumatic events in a specific location. There is no life after death except as an amorphous energy field subject to the fears and hopes of the living. The academic's wife isn't so sure. And the two psychics know that there's something more than that going on. But what?

Matheson doesn't write 'long.' Hell House is fairly brief and to-the-point, and its structure is as much mystery novel as horror novel. But the horrors are quite potent, and the characters sympathetically drawn even as they wrestle with their fears and their failings. Highly recommended.

Shine On, You Crazy Caretaker

The Shining: written by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson, based on the novel by Stephen King; directed by Stanley Kubrick; starring Jack Nicholson (Jack Torrance), Shelley Duvall (Wendy Torrance), Danny Lloyd (Danny Torrance), Scatman Crothers (Dick Halloran), Joe Turkel (Lloyd the bartender) and Philip Stone (Delbert Grady) (1980): So much has been said and written about Kubrick's version of Stephen King's novel that there's not a lot left to say.

It's fortunate that Kubrick's original ending got cut from subsequent releases, as it rendered the rest of the movie nonsensical in a way that anticipated M. Night Shlamayan's descent into climactic shock for shock's sake. Go look it up. It's also fortunate that Kubrick's addition of a supernatural element absent from King's original (reincarnation) is also muted in the film, though still there. As with a lot of great artists, Kubrick often seems dumber than his work.

If you're watching The Shining for the umpteenth time, note how much heavy lifting sound and music do in the movie. Take away the audio and half the scares evaporate. Also note the astonishing number of symmetrical shots in the film, most but not all of them in the Overlook Hotel (I count a few in Dick Halloran's Miami apartment, but all of those occur while Danny is telepathically contacting him, and once the contact is over, Halloran's apartment becomes scrupulously asymmetrical and dominated by diagonal lines).

The symmetry comes from two elements -- the position of the characters and the mise-en-scene, which is to say the layout of the set and the props in the shot. I'll leave you to theorize what it all means, what all the mirror shots mean ('Redrum' is, of course, the movie's big 'mirror reveal'), what the static shots of Nicholson's face at various points mean, what all the Native American elements mean, and so on, and so forth.

As with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick herein also plays with a sort of metapsychology playing out inside a gigantic metaphor for the human mind. In 2001, it's the brain-and-spinal-cord spaceship Discovery, carrying an emotionless and sterile technohumanity to its ultimate rebirth and rejuvenation. In The Shining, it's the haunted mind of the Overlook Hotel, carrying Jack Torrance metaphorically backwards in time to the early moments of 2001, leaving him without language and howling, running around with a weapon he will ultimately be unable to use (or triumphantly throw into the air).

It's a fascinating film that rewards multiple viewings, if only to admire the bizarre, seemingly meaningful colour choices Kubrick makes with the various rooms in the set. Dig that red-and-white washroom! Highly recommended.

Shine

The Shining, written by Stephen King (1977): I've read this novel four times now, and didn't notice until this time around a somewhat hilarious piece of inexplicable business that I'm going to leave to you to figure out. It has nothing to do with the supernatural and everything to do with the logic of everyday life, and I'm pretty sure King kept the scene as-is because he needed several things to happen plot-wise and couldn't figure out a way to have them happen otherwise. Think of it as an Easter Egg.

The Shining was King's first foray into a ghost story at novel length, and its many strengths epitomize King's own strengths over the years, most especially the sympathetic characterization of his main characters and the verisimiltude of their reactions to supernatural phenomena. The basic set-up -- telepath (or 'sensitive') vs. haunted house -- comes directly from Shirley Jackson's classic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, a novel King has his characters explicitly mention during the course of The Shining. Here, though, the telepathic character -- five-year-old Danny Torrance, gifted with the telepathic gifts similarly gifted hotel cook Dick Halloran calls 'The Shining' -- is able to contest the haunted house, and not be seduced by it as in Jackson's novel.

The Overlook Hotel, way up in the Rockies and apparently next door to Hell, is a great character in its own right, a malign entity with no clear origin for its evil (in the movie, the hotel's malignity is attributed to that old chestnut, the Indian burial ground; here, as in other King works like "The Monkey" and Christine, there is no clear cause for the malice of this particular inanimate object: it just is, a productive evocation of Ramsey Campbell's dictum for good horror, "Explanation is the death of horror."

King conjures up a terrible sympathy for failed writer Jack Torrance, plagued by alcoholism and the memories of his physically abusive father, and eventually tested to destruction by the hotel, eroded into a killing machine aimed at his own wife Wendy and son Danny. Our more recent knowledge of King's struggles with substance abuse until the 1990's lends extra poignance to the novel, even as one also notes that Torrance, with his somewhat unpractical writing aims (he's a playwright and high-end short story writer) and literary pretensions (he dismisses Edgar Allan Poe as "The Great American Hack") is most certainly not a King-surrogate. But this novel is also about Danny's courage, and the growth of his mother Wendy into someone who can oppose both the horribly undone Jack and the hotel itself.

The building of dread is this novel is skilfully accomplished, with some truly startling set-pieces of horror. King goes a bit over the top towards the end, though a lot of what happens can (as in Jackson's novel) be explained as malign hallucination rather than actual physical attack. In any event, this is one of King's novels that, warts and all, rewards multiple readings. Highly recommended.

Rag-and-Bone Shop

The Shining, written and directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd and Scatman Crothers (1980): While watching The Shining over the course of three nights on my PVR, I realized that, for me at least, I'd found the perfect way to watch it. The Shining has always been a movie of dazzling parts held together by a plot that shudders and jolts to a complete stop at points. It may be that Kubrick wanted to make a much longer movie, or it may be that Kubrick never intended the plot to work all that well in the first place. This was not a film-maker that gave a crap about pleasing an audience in a traditional way, after all.

The basic plot is this: failed writer Jack Torrance, wife Wendy and five-year-old son Danny take the job as winter caretakers at a Colorado hotel located in the Rockies. The hotel closes from November 1 to April 30 for the winter, leaving the caretakers the only people for miles. Danny has a psychic talent called "The Shining" which gives him premonitions of the future, causes him to see things, and occasionally results in his body being taken over by the benevolent but creepy "Tony."*

Overlook head cook Halloran also has "The Shining." He cautions Danny about the hotel's ability to show people illusions, and tells Danny to signal him telepathically should anything go wrong over the course of the winter. The Overlook Hotel itself has been the site of a number of murders and atrocities over the years, not least of which was a previous caretaker murdering his wife and twin daughters before killing himself. Over the course of the first five weeks or so of caretaking, hilarity gradually ensues.

Certainly, enjoyment of the film requires one to forget about Stephen King's novel. In the novel, Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson in the movie) is a good man undone by alcoholism and circumstances and, of course, by the hotel. In the movie, Torrance is a physically abusive nutcase barely hiding his unravelling psyche from his wife Wendy (Duvall) and son Danny (Lloyd) even as the movie begins. There's very little sense that Torrance actually loves his family, and his fairly rapid descent into a homicidal fury suggests a sub-text of family violence and monstrous fathers that doesn't exist in the novel. Wendy, a blonde beauty in the novel, becomes the awkward Duvall in the movie, and Torrance-POV shots at key moments in the movie are probably the least flattering shots of Shelley Duvall ever put on screen. Of course, that's the point: Torrance's real view of his wife, allowed to fester by the hotel, is that she's a hideous shrew.

Production design and camera work are key here, as they are in all of Kubrick's films once he had complete creative control. The interior of the snow-bound Overlook Hotel is subtly alien and off-putting both due to size and colour scheme; the rugs alone might drive almost anyone off the deep end. Certain things work really well as horror -- the looming hedge maze is an improvement over the novel's homicidal hedge animals -- while others seem to verge on parody. The red-and-white washroom is really pretty hilarious.

That line between hilarity and horror -- or horror and horror-parody -- is crossed and recrossed throughout the film. One of Kubrick's stated aims -- to make a horror movie in which the lights stay on as much as possible -- is pretty much achieved. Certain scenes and images (especially the blood-torrent-spewing elevator) play more like parody, and the revelation that 'Redrum' is 'murder' spelled backwards lands with a dull thump, as does the 'shocking' photographic revelation that ends the movie. I believe these thuds are intentional: Kubrick seems to be aiming to scare people and make fun of horror tropes at the same time, maybe never moreso than in the fate of Halloran in the movie, much altered from the novel.

Nonetheless, there are enough startling moments -- the revelation of what Jack's been typing for weeks, Jack's pursuit of Danny through the hedge maze -- to allow the horror to outweigh Kubrick's parodic play with the horror. Kubrick's film also serves as a companion piece to his own 2001: A Space Odyssey: rather than watching humanity evolve from killer ape to Star Child, we watch Torrance devolve back into a killer ape chasing his own son through the hedge maze, his urge to do violence ultimately destroying him while Wendy and Danny are saved by Halloran's altruism and Danny's cleverness. Recommended.

* Who, in the novel, is Danny trying to telepathically warn himself from the future, Danny's middle name being 'Anthony.'