Censor: Your Life Is Already Half Video Hallucination

Psychological horror does a good line in blurring the line between reality and delusion, in featuring protagonists who aren’t sure if what they’re experiencing is real or not. And horror films (alongside other forms of popular entertainment) have been singled out as inspiration for real-life violence for decades. The argument is that people cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, and so seek to reenact horror films in real life. For this reason, the argument goes, horror films should be restricted or banned, in order to protect the public. In my (cynical) experience, it’s rarely if ever truly about public safety. Generally it’s a convenient way to gin up outrage or to present someone as a moral exemplar ahead of a political campaign or a fundraising effort. It’s not about horror movies, it’s about something else. Horror movies are just a useful proxy.

Censor is a genuinely unsettling psychological horror film that directly engages with these ideas, and doesn’t insult the audience’s intelligence in the process.

It’s set in Thatcher-era Britain, the early 1980s. It’s a time of extensive civil unrest and increasing suppression. More to the point for this film, it’s the height of the “video nasty” era of film censorship, and we follow Enid Baines, a censor at the British Board of Film Classification. It’s the job of her and her colleagues to screen films, impose a rating, and recommend edits that make the film compliant with obscenity guidelines. She and her colleagues have to watch a lot of what were colloquially termed “video nasties” - exploitation films high on graphic violence and low on production value, intended for distribution directly to video rental places.

Enid is good at her job. She’s thoughtful, careful, determined to make the right decisions. She takes the idea that these films are potentially corrupting and dangerous at its word, and she’s passionate about protecting people. It’s personal for her. Her sister Nina disappeared without a trace when they were both very young. It’s haunted her ever since. And she has a lot of stress in her life - her parents are having Nina declared dead, a recent murder case is tied by the tabloid press back to a film that Enid passed for certification and so now she’s getting nasty phone calls at all hours and the press are camped outside her job. And she just finished screening a film called Don’t Go Into The Church, a film with scenes that looked suspiciously like childhood memories of hers. She would have sworn one of the actresses looked familiar too.

She looks a lot like Nina.

The central conceit, then, is that we have someone who job it is to protect people from confusing fantasy and reality finding that the line between fantasy and reality is blurring. In this sense, it treads some of the same ground as Berberian Sound Studio. Both feature protagonists in hostile environments - in Berberian Sound Studio, it’s being alone in a foreign country, and for Enid it’s being mired in the controversy around a recent classification. Both protagonists are also immersed in violent films - as part of the production in Berberian Sound Studio, and here as a viewer - and it both cases it’s taking a psychological toll. The biggest difference here is that Berberian Sound Studio was a much more restrained, cerebral film. There’s something much more disturbing about what happens to Enid as the film goes on. It’s very much a slow burn - everything starts to go sideways so gradually, beginning with nightmare segments and then the gradual intrusion of repeated motifs, the contrast between Enid’s perspective and others’ becoming more sharp as the film goes on, that you don’t realize just how far gone Enid is until it’s much too late.

Like I said last week, dealing with your nightmares by denying and suppressing them doesn’t end well, and Enid cannot bring herself to face her nightmares, to confront what happened all of those years ago, and the film, to its credit, keeps a lot of things unexplained and unresolved. We get hints, clues, possibilities, but Enid won’t admit to herself what happened, and we experience most of the film from Enid’s perspective, so we never know for sure ourselves. The possibilities, the glimpses, the stuff we get around the edges, they’re disturbing, but it’s also hard to tell how much of that is the reality of what happened and how much is Enid excoriating herself for things out of her control. Again, there are no easy answers to be had, and the interweaving of Enid’s life with both the films she’s investigating and her own internal psychological landscape is intuitive and seamless, making the final act really, really unnerving. 

The production is handled skillfully - as I said above, it reminds me a lot of Berberian Sound Studio, and that’s as much about the aesthetic as narrative similarities. Like that film it’s a period piece dominated by primary-color lighting and drab environments, longer takes that focus on the minutiae of everyday workplace behavior and highlight the ways in which the protagonist is sort of an outsider. Although the censors aren’t portrayed unsympathetically - they’re not strident moralists for the most part, they’re doing a job, and they mostly seem to have a wry distance on the films they’re watching - some of them do seem to see Enid as being a little too strict and serious about it. They’re friendly enough, but there’s a bit of a chummy boys’ club atmosphere to the place, and you get the sense that she doesn’t have too many friends. There are lots of shots of Enid on her own, walking back to her tiny, drab apartment, and even at work she’s generally pictured apart from her colleagues. It underlines an alienation that only gets worse as the film goes on.

It’s also really good at using contrasting cinematic vocabularies to describe what’s happening. Video nasties were low-budget exploitation films, high on graphic violence and low on production value, meant to titillate and shock, and they’re recreated very faithfully throughout - honestly, I’m not sure how much is recreated and how much is archival footage, it’s damn near impossible to tell. So we start with glimpses of the films Enid is screening - grainy, garish, obviously made on the cheap - and as the film goes on, their presence makes itself known in increasingly intrusive ways without being too literal about what’s happening. It’s the blurring of the line between film and reality, and it isn’t even really necessarily that noticeable until the point where you realize how much it’s swallowed up everything

It’s sort of a truism that the most vehemently moralistic have all kinds of skeletons in their own closets, but here it seems less a case of rank hypocrisy and more that this is how Enid is processing her trauma. She can’t bring herself to face what happened to Nina, she’s deeply in denial, so she sublimates it into her work as a censor. She couldn’t protect or save her sister, so she’s going to protect and save everyone else instead. But putting that level of denial in an environment suffused with violence, being constantly exposed to graphic violence as a viewer, well, those aren’t going to mix well, and in Enid’s case it makes for a nightmarish downward spiral from which we get little relief and even less closure. It’s thoughtful, powerful stuff.

IMDB entry
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Doctor Sleep: Acts Of Service

(Just as a heads-up, I’m probably gonna spoil both The Shining and this over the course of this one, so if you have somehow never seen The Shining, go rectify that immediately and then come back to this.)

I am normally not one for sequels. I think horror works best when the audience is left hanging a little, when there are loose ends, when not everything is explained. Sequels tend to overexplain, bleeding off the mystery that gives horror its power. At their worst they create some kind of mythos for the world the story exists in, turning what should be scary into what is basically a gory action film.

So I’m already not on board with sequels, but a sequel to an iconic horror film? Come on. Come on. At that point, you aren’t just making a film, you’re also taking on the original film’s legacy. You’re making a film under a very long shadow. You’re going to have to reckon with the original, otherwise what’s the point? And how do you do that in a way that doesn’t devolve into “hey, remember how cool this movie was?” It needs to be something more than a retread, it needs to not overexplain, but it still has to acknowledge its source material.

This means that Doctor Sleep has…a lot…on its shoulders. And I don’t think it drops the ball, but I think in its attempt to be faithful to the novel from which it was adapted and engage with both the original text of The Shining and the film adaptation, it…well, it ends up being a lot of things, but I’m not sure a horror film is one of them.

It begins as The Shining does, with the same ominous, minor-key synthesizer and a long tracking aerial shot. In my write-up of The Shining, I pointed out how just changing the soundtrack would turn it into a family vacation film, and that’s exactly what we get here. The car driving the long road belongs to a family who stops for a picnic, and their young daughter Violet wanders off to pick flowers. Down by the riverbank, she meets a woman singing a lovely tune and picking flowers of her own. There’s some conversation, and soon enough, Violet has become another face on another missing-child poster.

Elsewhere, Danny Torrance is living in Florida with his mother Wendy. They moved there so they’d never have to see snow again. But Danny - cursed to see the dead around him - hasn’t earned a quiet life yet. The Overlook was condemned following the events of The Shining, and its ghosts grow hungry, drawn to Danny like moths to a candle. As he gets older, he learns ways to deal with them, to lock them in boxes in his mind, where they can’t ever, ever get out.

And then meanwhile, in yet another movie, young Abra Stone celebrates her birthday with her parents and friends. Her mom and dad have hired a magician for her birthday, and Abra - delighted - does some magic tricks of her own, much to her parents’ bemusement. She’s gifted, like Danny is gifted.

This is how the movie opens, and I think you get a sense of one of its biggest problems right off the bat. The first third of the film is almost entirely world-building and table-setting. This is even assuming we’re familiar with the original film - if you’ve never seen The Shining, it’s going to be pretty confusing, and that film had a lot going on as well - “psychic boy moves to a haunted hotel where his abusive, alcoholic father goes insane” is a lot of balls to keep in the air, and this film tacks on even more. This film employs the same title-card device that The Shining did, and it ends up being equally as disorienting, though I don’t think that was the intent - it just highlights how much we’re bouncing around in time and space trying to connect three different stories.

So we have a flash-forward. Danny Torrance is a grown man, and he isn’t doing well. He may have quieted the ghosts of the Overlook, but he continues to see the dead. He is very much his father’s son - he drinks to numb himself and has bouts of violent rage. He loses nights to booze and coke and fistfights. He sleeps on the street. And then he hits bottom in horrifying fashion, bringing together the worlds of the living and the dead. He jumps on a bus and heads for New Hampshire. He gets a room, starts going to meetings. One day at a time. He takes a job at a hospice, sitting with the dying. A big part of recovery is being of service to others.

Meanwhile, Abra has grown into an extremely bright teenage girl who can hear what other people think, who can move objects with her mind, who can reach out across vast distances to other similar minds. Minds like Danny’s.

And then there are the people behind the disappearance of young Violet. They’re a group who call themselves the True Knot. They’re very, very old. Much older than they look. The oldest of them cheered gladiators in the Coliseum. They live a nomadic existence, traveling across the U.S. in a caravan of campers, looking for the food that sustains them. They call it “steam,” and it prolongs their lives. Steam is produced when you take someone with Danny or Abra’s gifts and torture them to death. Pain makes the steam better. Fear makes the steam better. And it’s always better in the very young.

So they travel across the country, leaving a trail of missing-child posters in their wake. But it’s getting harder and harder to feed. The steam isn’t so pure anymore, and there’s less of it out there. As their leader Rose tells their newest member: “Eat well, and live long.” But it’s been a very long time since any of them ate well.

Like I said, just getting all of the pieces onto the board takes the entire first act, and then the second has to start bringing everyone together. Abra learns about the True Knot (in another genuinely horrifying moment), calls out to Danny for help, and Danny has to reckon with all of his old, buried ghosts to help keep Abra alive once the True Knot gets her scent. The chase is on.

Here, I think it’s worth contrasting the original story with the sequel. King has written candidly about his struggles with alcohol and drugs, and it’s hard not to see an element of “write what you know” in The Shining, a story about a writer struggling to support a family and wrestling with an alcohol problem. It’s a surprisingly claustrophobic story given the Overlook’s size - it’s Jack, Wendy and Danny all on their lonesome and Jack is under tremendous pressure. It all happens in one place over the course of a few months. Doctor Sleep, on the other hand, is about someone in recovery, coming out the other side of something, and its scope is vast - it ranges across the country over several years (though the extensive use of date and location cards is one of the many ways it’s tied to the original film), and instead of being a tight, focused story about one family’s experience, it’s part of a much larger dark fantasy tapestry that encompasses something of a shared universe within King’s writings. These are two different stories written by the same man at two very, very different stages of his career. The Shining is the work of a writer trying to establish himself and mining very personal fears. Doctor Sleep is the work of a writer thinking back on those times and playing in the landscape of an imagination that has at this point been producing stories for decades, roaming deep and wide.

What I think this all means is that you don’t have to worry about this film merely recapitulating the original. But I also think that The Shining made for a better film (despite King’s dislike for it, more on that in a bit) because it was such a tight, focused story. Doctor Sleep is so sprawling - geographically, temporally, and in the sheer volume of ideas it presents - that it feels throughout like you aren’t watching a movie so much as you are bingeing a miniseries. It’s two and a half hours as it is (about the same run time as The Shining, come to think of it), but it feels like you could have tacked on another hour and a half and turned it into a four-part miniseries (an approach that has been tried with the even more sprawling King novel The Stand, and it’s still not enough time to do that story justice). The problem with this is that the amount of exposition needed leaves very little room for any kind of atmosphere or tension to develop, and in positioning Abra and Danny against the True Knot, we end up with more of a good versus evil story than a horror story. Not that horror films don’t deal in good and evil, they often do, but it’s usually on much more personal terms, rather than being about some kind of cosmic struggle.

The result of this (and a pretty heavy emphasis on action in the back half) is that what we get is closer to dark fantasy than horror per se. Dark fantasy and horror can certainly coexist (I have high hopes for the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman stories in the works at Netflix in that regard), but once we widen out from Danny Torrance’s personal hell, it really becomes something other than horror. It isn’t bad, but there’s just too much going on across too many places and too many ideas being juggled for it to really bear down and get scary.

Which is too bad, because there’s definitely horror to be mined here. One thing I really appreciated about this film was that it does something lots of sequels don’t do well, if at all - it actually deals with the consequences of surviving a horror movie. Danny’s downward spiral is illustrated vividly - he’s a rage-fueled alcoholic on his way to bottoming out when the movie starts. Putting your nightmares in boxes isn’t confronting them, and I think that under other circumstances, there would be a much tighter, more personal, honest-to-goodness horror movie in the story of Danny’s trauma. We get glimpses of that movie in the beginning, and it’s responsible for one of the most unsettling sequences in the film.

This isn’t to say that the film as it stands is insubstantial - despite its sprawl, there are some clear thematic through-lines here. Letting go is a big theme here - Danny works at a hospice and comforts the dying, helps them to let go, where the True Knot do monstrous things to delay death because they can’t let go of the world. In the end, Danny lets go of the ghosts (literal and figurative) of the Overlook, who’ve been with him for most of his life, because that’s how you find peace. The film is also, in ways textual and otherwise, about service. Service is important to recovery, so Danny engages in service. By contrast, the True Knot are profoundly selfish in how they feed on the lives of others. They serve nobody but themselves.

Which leads to another way of thinking about service. Questions of fanservice attend any adaptation or revisiting of a popular story, and this film has to contend with the legacy of The Shining, both the original novel and the film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick, an adaptation that author Stephen King has always vocally disliked. I understand King’s criticisms, but other than his problem with how Jack starts off the film well on his way to losing his mind (something that really leapt out at me on my recent rewatch), I don’t really share his objections. A lot of them are to do with how impersonal the film is and how much the characters have changed from the novel. They have, but Kubrick isn’t going for fidelity to the text, he’s going for mood and atmosphere and vibe and his version of The Shining has that in spades. The best you can say about the King-approved miniseries adaptation is that it’s more faithful to the text and less cheesy than I feared it would be, but it’s still most notable to me as an example of why strict faithfulness to a text isn’t always a virtue. Bottom line, it’s just not that scary, and King’s distinctive authorial voice doesn’t always work as well coming out of people’s mouths as it does on the page.  

Stuff doesn’t always translate well from page to screen and part of adapting a book into a film is knowing what to keep and what to jettison. So this film reckons with both the text and the more notable of the two adaptations and does so deftly and with intelligence. It’s filled with visual allusions to The Shining throughout - matching shots, recreated flashbacks, some sly locational references where you aren’t expecting them - and that’s before the action arrives, as it must, at the Overlook, long-condemned and abandoned, a ghost of its former self. Here, it all becomes explicit, the location and visuals speaking to the film, and the action and dialogue often speaking to the original text, creating a place where both come together, just as past and present converge at the Overlook. It could be reduced to trivia (and certainly it’s going to be more rewarding to people familiar with both the book and film than to people unfamiliar with them), but I think that misses the point. It’s not just a bunch of references, it’s the way the present recapitulates the past, the way the son threatens to make the same mistakes the father did, the way trauma doesn’t just go away - avoidance and repression aren’t confrontation. The ghosts are both literal and metaphor alike.

That’s a huge legacy to live up to, and a heavy burden for a film to bear, and honestly I think it’s impressive how well it manages to evoke its predecessors, but here’s where one last contrast comes in: My central thesis when I talked about The Shining was how much it worked at the irrational, lizard-brain level for me. It was a film almost entirely about feel, which is why I think it was so effective. This film, rich with textual, subtextual, intertextual and metatextual allusion, works better as a comment on the original than it does as a stand-alone film. For anyone who has seen and read The Shining and appreciated both film and novel, this film is going to be intellectually rewarding. But thinking isn’t feeling, and the impression I was left with was “hmmm…well done,” not “holy shit.” Which, I have to say, is a little disappointing. But I’m not sure what else I could have expected from something that had to serve so many masters on its way to getting made.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

The Shining: Dissonance

So my way to this one was a little roundabout. As I was looking over movies I wanted to check out, I had a couple of people recommend Doctor Sleep to me. I’m a fan of the director, and it’s a sequel to The Shining ,which is…and that’s when it hit me.

I’ve never written about The Shining on this thing.

This isn’t necessarily noteworthy - there are probably far more horror movies I haven't written about than ones I have. But back in the day I did a survey of my top ten horror movies, and I’ve already written about six of them. I’ll get to the rest of them in time. But I can’t even start to talk about Doctor Sleep without having talked about The Shining first. This is a big oversight on my part.

The Shining…that’s number one on the list. It is, for me, the ur-horror film.

It all started when I was nine or ten years old and saw an ad for it on television. This ad, as a matter of fact. I didn’t make it through the whole thing. Six seconds in, Jack Nicholson turning slowly toward the camera just pushed some lizard-brain nightmare button that said “NOPE” and I had to change the channel. Every time it came on TV after that, I’d change the channel as soon as it started. I don’t think I saw the full trailer until I found it on YouTube as an adult and I’m positive that if I’d made it through the whole thing as a little kid it would have scared me shitless. It’s a distillation of the film’s mood and aesthetic, evoking a powerful, inarticulate dread that almost felt overwhelming at the time. It felt less like a movie trailer and more like someone had managed to put one of my nightmares - cryptic, but full of fear - on film.

Fast forward about six years or so, and I’m a teenager who has since developed something of a taste for horror - more in literature than film, but nonetheless. I’d read a lot of Stephen King by this point, probably including the original novel upon which the film is based. So, one evening I saw that The Shining was showing on television. Not cable - network television. For those too young to appreciate the difference, this means a couple of things. First, that all of the most egregious stuff - profanity, nudity, and graphic violence - was going to be excised. Second, that it was going to be interrupted periodically by advertising. Add to that frequent interruptions by the state weather service who was busy tracking tornado activity in the region. It didn’t really make the evening more atmospheric or anything, mostly it just meant more interruptions.

None of that mattered. It scared the crap out of me. Even much older, even though it was a sanitized and frequently interrupted experience, it still scared the crap out of me. Any time anyone asks me what my favorite horror films are, this is the first one out of my mouth. It’s not the most unsettling, it’s not the most provocative, but it captures the feelings of my nightmares better than pretty much any movie out there.

And so here I’m going to try and pull that apart - why and how does it have this effect on me? How is it so good at creating a mood that so many other films struggle to create? And finally, how does it stand up now, after years of writing critically about horror movies?

Upon watching it again, I think in short that the key to this film’s effectiveness is a persistent sense of contrast and discordance - in the narrative, in the cinematography, in the interaction between the film and its score. This is a film that keeps you off-balance, and pulls you in different directions at once.

It starts early, with an ominous, dirgelike minor-key score over a beautiful tracking aerial shot of a car winding its way down a long mountain road. If you change the soundtrack, it’s a family holiday film. We’re presented with something innocuous on the surface, but the music is telling us that something bad is coming.

In the car are Jack and Wendy Torrance, and their son Danny. They’re headed into the mountains of Colorado, where Jack is interviewing for a winter caretaker position at the Overlook Hotel, a resort that operates from April to October, then closes down for five months. You’d think that ski season would be prime for them, but they get so much snow and the roads get so impassable that the cost of keeping everything clear basically eats up any profits they’d see. So they hire a winter caretaker to do minor repairs and upkeep, to make sure the boiler that heats the hotel doesn’t break down, to look after the property when the snowfall means nobody else can get there from town. It’s a tough job - the isolation gets to people. There was an…incident with a previous caretaker.

It’s a big change from what Jack was doing - he was teaching English at a school in Vermont, but…he left that job. He doesn’t want to talk about why. It was just a placeholder anyway. His real work is as a writer, and he’s looking forward to the solitude as an opportunity to start work on a novel. And then there’s Wendy and Danny. Wendy seems a little tired all the time, but she’s pleasant enough, even when she’s talking about the violent episode that got Jack to swear off drinking a few months ago. It’s sedate, conversational, but there’s an undercurrent of unease. Danny seems like a normal kid, mostly. He’s got a really active imagination, though. He has an imaginary friend named “Tony” who talks to him, talks through him. Tony can apparently see things before they happen.

Tony doesn’t like the hotel. Terrible things have happened in this hotel.

The Overlook Hotel, then, has a past, as most big old resort hotels do. It’s been around since the early 1900s and that’s a lot of time, a lot of people passing through its doors, a lot of sordid things happening in a lot of the rooms lining its labyrinthine corridors. And Danny seems to have something of a psychic gift - a “shining” that shows him those things. The past is very alive to Danny. So the hotel is established as a malign influence, and we have this  man and his wife and child about to be locked up there for five months on their lonesome…and then we jump one month ahead.

This is the first way the film creates a feeling of deep unease. It’s punctuated with title cards intended to mark the passage of time, or to separate the film into vignettes. We begin with “The Interview”,  and then “Closing Day”, and then a leap to “A Month Later” with a sudden musical sting. It creates tension and a feeling of dislocation - a sense of time’s inevitable forward motion combined with unpredictable shifts, a feeling that we’re moving toward something inexorably, but we’re jarred out of a steady rhythm as soon as it’s established. The title cards appear throughout, moving from “A Month Later” to “Tuesday,’ repeating some days, moving from days to hours, expanding and contracting our sense of time. It’s deeply dislocating and from a contemporary standpoint, it’s not unlike the way time blurs in pandemic lockdown, how one day starts to look very much like another, how weeks blur together, and it’s either November or it’s Wednesday, or both. The end result feels like they’re sort of adrift in this giant hotel and at the same time moving toward some horrible conclusion. It’s a discordance of simultaneous timelessness and countdown to something.

This sense of being adrift is also reinforced (and subverted) by the cinematography. This isn’t really a film that uses a lot of medium shots. Shots are either of small figures dwarfed and swallowed by the rooms they inhabit, or close-ups and tight shots. There’s very little in between, and the close shots often have people placed exactly in the center of the frame in symmetric composition that draws your eye to the figures at the middle. There’s something really unnerving about extended close-ups on faces, it’s agitating, almost overstimulating, and that’s not even taking into account the fear on those faces. You can’t really look away, and there’s an exaggerated quality to the facial expressions in shots like these that reminds me very much of the intense emotions experienced in a nightmare. The lighting contributes to this as well - Jack is lit from above or below, rarely directly, which makes him look even more sinister, and the lighting palette is a mixture of warmer incandescents, natural lighting from windows, and the flat, harsh panels of fluorescents, reinforcing this feeling of disconnection, of things shifting as they do in dreams.

So everything is either very distant or uncomfortably close. and adding to the unease is a mix of slow dissolves and sudden cuts, of fast, tight zooms and slow zooms than deny you any kind of visual distance on what’s happening. It feels a little glib to talk about a film’s director as controlling what you see in a film, but here the way things are so strongly composed and presented really does feel like you don’t have much say in the matter, like you’re going to look at whatever’s happening whether you want to or not. It’s not chaotic at all, but neither is it fluent or familiar from minute to minute, so it keeps you on edge right from the start, and combined with the score and sound design, it creates tension in scenes out of something that might otherwise be innocuous. There’s nothing by itself scary about two little girls standing in the middle of a rec room, for example, but their sudden appearance, the way they hold the middle of the shot, their dead-eyed stare, it all combines to create a sense of the inexplicable and awful. In my nightmares, I’ll be faced with something similarly innocent on its own, but in the nightmare it carries some hidden, terrible meaning that I just somehow know. There’s a discordance in the visuals, then, where you’ll be presented with something that seems more or less normal, but the way it’s presented, and what you’re hearing on the soundtrack, are telling you it’s anything but.

Just as the visuals and the score change and shift to create a sense of unease, so does the narrative itself. It begins with supernatural elements there, but more in the background, the central story more one of Jack’s psychological disintegration. Just as we moving from the day the hotel closes to one month later, Jack’s descent feels just as abrupt, though it does feel forecasted - the sudden change in jobs, the incident with Danny, the relatively recent sobriety - it’s set up pretty clearly that he really has no business taking this job, so things catch up to him quick. As with the cinematography, it’s all about stark contrast - he’s fine, then he really, really isn’t. Wendy begins the film pleasant if not somewhat timid, but as we learn about what happened three years ago, the excuse-making becomes apparent, the beleaguered vigilance of an alcoholic’s spouse. It’s not an especially sympathetic portrayal - she’s hardly a portrait of courage, but it works to communicate that feelings of helplessness, and as things get worse, her feeble attempts to defend herself vividly describe anyone who has ever found themselves unable to run or speak or fight back in a nightmare. That feeling of being utterly ineffectual is almost primal.

As the movie moves on, it shifts from impending dread to a story of psychological disintegration to one more explicitly supernatural - the hotel is a malevolent place, but at first it seems like only Danny can see the wreckage of its past. But then, as Jack’s grasp on reality slips, the hotel becomes a more actively malicious force - the hotel hasn’t just had evil things happen there, the hotel itself is evil, an organism with its own consciousness, given voice by its ghosts. We get hints of this throughout as Steadicam shots give the impression of something ghostly, gliding along behind Wendy and Danny, something watching them and following them through the halls. Finally, it becomes apparent even to Wendy as the hotel shows its true face to all of them in the final act. We know that something bad is going to happen, then something bad does happen, but then it just keeps getting worse and worse, pushing beyond rational boundaries into the purer images of the subconscious.

It does a lot right, but I think the intervening years that I’ve spent watching lots and lots of horror movies with a critical eye has revealed some flaws. Jack’s rapid descent into madness can be explained by the leap in time, but there are already hints of it under the surface at the beginning - he never really seems like a sympathetic family man at all, and as things get worse it does collapse into scenery-chewing in places. Likewise, the pacing feels very slack to me - the vignette structure means that we get isolated moments that are themselves powerful, but the middle of the film meanders some and loses tension as a result. It can feel every inch of its almost two and half hours, which works for the drifting, rootless feeling of isolation, but it undoes some of the tension as well. We get scenes that work in isolation, but don’t really build on each other.

Stephen King has over the years been openly critical of this adaptation, taking exception to the way Jack and Wendy are depicted and deriding it as a beautiful film without any substance. Certainly, director Stanley Kubrick has been accused of lacking warmth, of making icy, unsympathetic, clinical films, and I don’t necessarily disagree, but I think it works for the film here. It’s not the more tragic story of the original text, of a Jack Torrance who’s trying to be a better person, who’s trying to battle his demons and who fails, or a Wendy Torrance who is strong and resolute when necessary, and does what she must to keep Danny safe. It’s about something bad that you see coming from the very beginning, with that ominous score over the opening tracking shot, but like a nightmare, it just keeps coming and coming and coming and getting worse than you imagined. The generally histrionic pitch of everyone’s behavior is the elevated, operatic pitch of dreams and nightmares.

It’s not the more human-scaled story King wrote - which is a fine piece of horror writing, no doubt about that - but it works very well as its own thing, impeccably styled and relentlessly uneasy. It may not have the visceral punch it did when I was a kid (though specific shots, scenes, and segments, have lost very little power over the years), but I see echoes of this film in every juxtaposition of the pastoral with the hysteric, symmetrical shots interrupted by a lone horrible figure in the center of the frame, the quick cut with musical sting, fast zooms, faces contorted with horror, and these are the sort of devices that never fail to get to me. They are the visual language of my nightmares, and that’s pretty much the highest praise I can give a horror film.

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Saint Maud: The Agony And The Ecstasy

When you stop to think about it, some expressions of religion are extremely lurid, if not downright terrifying. In Christianity, this goes all the way back to Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God, moving up through the hellfire-and-damnation tradition in Protestantism, alongside the horrifying tribulations of Catholic martyrs. I mean, there’s a reason there’s a (very good) horror movie called Martyrs. And a younger, edgier me would have called The Passion Of The Christ the first real “torture porn” film, because it’s sure as shit as bloody as one, and its violence as lovingly lingered over. I mean, the word “awe” can refer both to reverence and to dread.

Devotion is fertile ground for horror, is what I’m saying. And Saint Maud - a stark, carefully told story about the place where faith and madness overlaps - explores it skillfully. It’s equal parts drama, horror, psychological character study, and account of tragic decompensation.

The film opens on a woman huddled in the corner of some kind of institutionally tiled room. There’s a pile of rumpled bedding on a gurney, the dim flicker of fluorescents. A roach crawls across the ceiling as the woman, her face smeared with blood, stares blankly upward.

Flash forward to some time later. The woman is Maud, and she’s a nurse for a private hospice care organization in seaside England. She finds value and purpose in her work, bolstered by her recent conversion to Catholicism. She credits her faith for rescuing her when she was lost, and tries to be an agent of grace for the dying. She’s starting a new posting at the mansion of Amanda Kohl, a celebrated dancer and choreographer, who is in the late stages of spinal cancer. Dying and confined to a wheelchair, Amanda sits in her big house in small-town England, away from London, watching recordings of her old performances. There’s an anger there, a bitterness. It’s understandable. Maud helps her with her exercises, administers her shots, her vile-tasting medications, bathes her, cooks for her. And as they begin to converse, Maud explains the value of her faith to Amanda, and Amanda seems receptive, if not someone astray in her grief. And so Maud realizes what she must do - it is her responsibility to bring Amanda back into the fold of the saved, to make her soul ready for heaven.

You see, Maud hears God speaking to her.

This film is less balls-out horror than it is a relationship drama and character study - well, at least until things go bad, as they must, and then they go pretty damn bad. We mostly see the world through Maud’s eyes - the dreary English seaside town, its garishly lit main drag, the dimly lit interiors of Amanda’s mansion, Maud’s squalid bedsit. There’s not a lot of honest light in her world, so no wonder she seeks it elsewhere, seeing what she wants to see. And this is definitely a film with an unreliable narrator, with a division between delusion and reality that sharpens as the film goes on. We see what she sees, but we also see her through others’ eyes, and shifting between them starts off as slightly disconcerting, and escalates to, well, that’s where the horror comes in.

It’s told in small, smartly underplayed ways - this is a film that is very good about showing instead of telling. It’s not short on dialogue, but people’s behavior, how they say things, tells us as much as (if not more than) what they actually say. Occasional flashbacks and asides give us brief glimpses into who Maud might have been before, and how she ended up like she did, but it’s never entirely spelled out, and doesn’t really need to be. Something bad happened, she took it perhaps harder than she should, and it broke something inside. She’s looking for transcendence, penance, salvation, and she feels God moving through her, speaking to her. So for as much as we’re aware of her devotion (and the things underneath she’s repressing), we also see that she’s lonely, traumatized, and not really stable. It’s longing for connection, for forgiveness, for punishment. There’s a lot of guilt there, and she’s just barely holding it together.

And what this means is that at some point, she’s going to fall apart. She’s a devout young woman caring for someone older, someone unapologetically gay, someone angry at a world that has condemned her to a slow death and the denial of movement after a lifetime spent celebrating it. Amanda lashes out - somewhat cruelly - and Maud falls, and falls hard. There’s a lot to unpack in her fervor in contrast to the life she led before, suggestions of repressed or sublimated sexuality, a need to punish herself for her transgressions, real or imagined. Lots of stories about saints involve tribulations and mortification - for some expressions of religious faith, the line between agony and ecstasy is extremely thin, and there’s all sorts of stuff to be mined here, given what Maud seems to be grappling with and traumatized by. The second half of the film shifts the focus from Maud and Amanda to Maud alone, as she spirals into something masochistic and sordid, soundtracked by moody synthesizer which moves from minor key ambience to ominous swells, the rumbling before the storm and the thunder alike.

Maud takes her penance and her holy mission very seriously indeed, and as the movie goes on the contrast between how she sees herself and how she is seen by the world becomes sharper and sharper until the very end, which is as horrifying as you’d expect, in many of the ways you’d expect. And I think maybe in some ways this is a weakness of the film. As a character study, it’s pretty strong - it’s not often that the films I write about here remind me of Taxi Driver, for example, but this one sure does - but the shift in focus halfway through robs the film of some momentum and tension, and for me the end was forecasted maybe a little too heavily - it feels less shocking than it does a foregone conclusion (though it’s certainly strikingly conveyed) and would have benefited from a stronger commitment to the unreliability of Maud’s perspective that brings us to that point so well. Still, it plays fair with everyone involved, and for as horrific as it can be, it’s tragic as well. As so often is the case with martyrs.

IMDB entry
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