Reading Horror, Redux: Experimental Film

Travel for the holidays has meant that I haven't had an opportunity to watch anything for this thing I write (but it has meant I had plenty of time to contemplate the interiors of the Detroit airport), but while I was on various and sundry airplanes going places, I read another really good horror novel, Experimental Film by Gemma Files.

It's the story of Lois Cairns, a Toronto film critic struggling to balance her attempts to actually make a living as a film critic with being a mother to a child with an autism spectrum disorder. She's got a loving, supportive husband (and an equally loving but not especially supportive mother), but she's wracked with self-doubt, and the pickings in Canadian film are slim at best. One night, she attends a program of experimental film at an alternative arts space in hopes of putting together a piece she can freelance out. One of the films - by a tiresome rich kid who cobbles together footage from other sources and calls it "sampling" - contains segments from something that looks very, very old. Like, earliest days of film old. And so Lois, certain that she's onto something that this dilettante missed, begins chasing down the provenance of the old footage. And so Lois begins to learn the sad story of Iris Macalla Whitcomb, a woman of the early 20th century who lost her only child and descended into eccentric seclusion. A woman interested in spiritualism, seances, mediums. A woman trying to contact her son. One day, Iris Whitcomb got on a train, but when the train arrived at its destination, she was nowhere to be found. All that remained in her passenger car was a burned sheet pinned over a window, and the melted remains of what might have very well been an early film projector.

The majority of the book, then, is Lois' descent down a long, dark rabbit hole. The author builds the story carefully, gradually shifting away from the geography of Toronto, the politics of the Canadian film industry, and the daily struggles that come with having a child on the spectrum to older mysteries, the tragic life and mysterious disappearance of Iris Whitcomb, the Germanic folktales with which she was obsessed, a world of lesser gods forgotten by time and hungry for worship, and the way that early filmmaking - reliant on highly volatile silver nitrate stock - resembled nothing so much as alchemy. It's largely paced well, giving the most startling events impact by leaving plenty of room to breathe between them (though it does get a little rushed and exposition-heavy toward the end), and leans into a mythology not often drawn upon by horror to great effect, rendering its monsters vividly and making light as oppressive and threatening as darkness.

Stories about people chasing down cursed or mysterious books and films are some of my favorite types of stories when they're done well, and this is absolutely done well. I could see someone like Ari Aster adapting this quite effectively, given his acute attention to detail at every level of the process. He is excellent at depicting fractious, complicated relationships, and his films are packed with subtle details and powerful images alike. The use of light and pagan traditions in this book often reminded me of Midsommar, and if anyone could find a way to turn a film about film into a metatextual ghost story, it'd sure as shit be him. If you haven't read this, you should definitely do so.

Available from Amazon