Ok, so the title's a bit of a sensational overstatement, I admit. 0:-)


But, seriously... I've been watching a lot of horror movies lately (I'm not even going to get into listing them... I'm sure you can think of a couple hundred each yourselves), and they all seem to place the bulk of their dramatic weight on whether the horror (ghosts, a murderer, monsters in the closet) exists only in the lead character's head, or if it's actually real.

Over and over again. New movies, old movies, high budget, low. They all keep teasing you with clues, back and forth, "the body's gone! Was someone really murdered!" "The mysterious figure I just caught a momentary glimpse of has disappeared... was he ever really there?" etc etc And the more I watch these - some out and out awful, some quite well done - I just keep thinking to myself, "this is not a compelling question."

The fact that Henry James was able to make this question work is a testament to his talent as a dramatic writer, and how it related to the specific characters in that specific story. But otherwise, in all these films... it's not something I, the audience, really care about. I just want the film to pick one - it's real or it's not - and get on whatever the movie has to offer.

Like: it's pretty much never a genuinely dramatically compelling question. And it's not deep or meaningful. It's certainly not suspensful (as much as some directors try to wring suspense out of it) or scarey.

It just consistently feels like the writer/director toying with the narrative, trying to keep it interesting (like "how to make 20 minutes worth of story last for ninety") by making the audience unsure of what's going on. "Keep them on their toes, guessing." But there's no impressive trick in keeping a plot vague - any jerk can film a couple characters walking around doing things and not explain what they're doing or why.

I don't know. I'm just really, really sick of this one horror fad that never seems to end. Maybe it's just because I'm getting to the bottom of my Netflix list and happen to be renting a lot of crappy movies lately. I sure would like to see this narrative device retired, though.

Henry James also pushed the story a bit further so that it's not whether the ghosts are real or not but that neither version can be true. If you go with ghosts-real then there's evidence in the story to contradict this and ghosts-imaginary evidence against that as well. In most real-or-not stories if you chose one alternative then that accounts for everything, it's just the way of telling that leaves it vague. James was also playing with narrative frames that don't work as well in film. Or at least this is one way of reading since folk have been arguing about this for decades.

Still, I agree with you completely that this is otherwise almost never a compelling question. It's like films or shows where Captain Kirk or whoever rejects being immortal or some kind of extended power or whatever, usually selfrighteously claiming it diminishes their humanity or something - so what? The current Spider-Man comics have him and Mary Jane deciding whether to have their marriage undone so that it never existed or to have Aunt May die. Groan.

I wouldn't say it ruined horror movies. I think there are some that are very well done like LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH, IMAGES, THE HAUNTING, THE INNOCENTS, VOICES, etc. Its the clones of SIXTH SENSE and THE OTHERS (which ripped off VOICES) that are responsible for a lot of these (including some more recent TURN OF THE SCREW adaptations).

I think its the actors and the script that aren't able to render this effective along with directors who can't decide themselves if its real or imaginary and producers who are trying to duplicate the success of the model films. My complaint with several of the TURN adaptations in another thread is that there's no effective progression from "did I really see that?" to "ghosts are trying to get the children" neither within the story itself or in drawing a character who is liable to believe in ghosts from the start and to glean their intentions from so little intel or a character who seems like they could be even open to starting to believe in ghosts. I'd say there aren't enough of these films where the character believably starts to question their own sanity (the ones with definite answers to "real or imaginary" let them off the hook too early).

Well of all the strange...
I just watched VOICES for the first time two days ago and was about to post the same thing! Have you been looking in my window??
The scene with the blindfolded little girl at the end is quite a chiller and the "revelation" is nicely understated. Good movie.

Maybe I don't get to see enough ghost stories -- certainly I don't get to see enough ghost stories -- but as they are all fantasies to begin with, the question is moot to me. When the filmmakers are visibly working the material too much, okay, yeah, it's been done, and I can see how that can get tiresome. But I see all such stories as psychological -- "spiritual" -- in nature, and so the intrigue for me comes in terms of whose fantasies are we seeing played out (and it's not always the most obvious: some characters are merely "receivers" for others' projections, or "transmissions"), and why. Most all are prismatic in some way, and so far it's been enough of a puzzle finding the focus that I haven't been bothered by the effect.

Now, VOICES I had never heard of. I'll have to search that one out.

I always like the ones where they have it both ways--the ghosts turn out to be elaborate tricks staged by a bad guy trying to get the inheritance or something and then at the very end a real ghost shows up. These include...well, to keep it vague so as to avoid "spoilers," a famous horror comedy from 1940 with a big, big comedy star minus his regular crooning co-star, and a William Castle production from 20 years later that got remade a few years ago.

This also reminds me of FAIRY TALE: A TRUE STORY (1997), the one where Peter O'Toole played Arthur Conan Doyle and Harvey Keitel played Harry Houdini, in which two English girls took some photos supposedly showing fairies by the water and Doyle endorsed them as genuine while Houdini denounced them as fakes. The movie took the "fairies-in-the-photos-are-real" position even though it's common knowledge that the girls responsible eventually revealed that the photos were faked. This bothered me a great deal and ruined the movie for me.

What about movies about similar phenomena like UFOs, Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, assassination conspiracies, etc.? It's very rare to find one of those that ended with the particular phenomenon revealed as fake or in somebody's head. I mean, movies about UFOs are invariably about flying saucers with actual aliens from outer space. And movies about Bigfoot are about the real Bigfoot. There was a TV movie once about Oswald and Ruby that took the position that Oswald was the lone assassin, but that's pretty rare.

Funny, I was enjoying both THE STONE TAPE and GHOSTWATCH again recently (finally got to my storage unit with the multi-region player) and they both work the "is it real or isn't it" approach in interesting ways (STONE TAPE by going down the "what does 'real' mean anyway?" route) so I can't say that it always means bad entertainment. It's just one of the tropes of the genre - the material is inherently "unreal" so one has to, usually, include some kind of sop to the real world or otherwise, well, where's the friction? Genre efforts where the supernatural is automatically extant and understood to be so by the general public, or which gloss over the expected reaction, tend to be comedies.

OK, it was a TV show but you can't have grown up suffering through the tantalizingly boring (when you're a kid. It may be dramatic gold nowadays for all I know) PROJECT UFO, I guess.

There are occasions where I would argue that the trick does have dramatic weight. For example, the original DARK WATER teases the audience with whether she's actually experiencing ghosts, is being cruelly hoaxed by her ex-husband, or is just going mad--but that question directly effects how she responds. If she's genuinely being haunted, then her child's life is at risk and she needs to get people to help her, but conversely if its not real then the more she acts like it is the more her own ability to remain an effective parent is compromised. So she's trapped by that question, and the movie's real dramatic heft is in her confronting her own failure as a mother--which is far scarier a concept than any ghost, and it takes the narrative ambiguity about ghosts to develop that more disturbing theme.

Or LIFE ON MARS, not a ghost story I admit, but similarly plagued by the is-it-or-isn't it question. Her, more in line with James, the two explanations are indeed mutually contradictory--it can't be one or the other.

For my money, the most tired narrative device in horror these days is the silly "hey-that-villain-is-actually-me" twist that in a post-FIGHT CLUB world seems to have spread like a virus.

David Kalat
All Day Entertainment

Somebody loaned this to me recently and I understand that there were some taken in by the original broadcast but I could only watch the first few moments before being aggravated by the clumsy staging that seemed completely contrary to the point of it.

SPOILERS FOR GHOSTWATCH

In the very first scene, we are shown what is supposed to be surveillance video of a bedroom that is supposed to have been recording through the night. However, the camera isn't fixed as you'd expect, rather it is operated by someone - unlikely in the context here. When a poltergeist activity commences, the camera moves away from the source of the "thrown" objects rather than towards them in the proper spirit of investigation. With the whole exercise stumbling at the first fence, I couldn't bear to watch another second of this poe-faced rubbish.

Victor

THE STONE TAPE and GHOSTWATCH are favorites of mine.

Well, I wouldn't discard GHOSTWATCH that quickly, but if something like that is going to turn you against it, perhaps it's for the best. On the other hand, you might want to give it a little more leeway. It's not a masterpiece but then almost nothing is...

(The "camera zooming in" bit could be justified with the idea that the camera is a remote, set to follow movement and so "follows" the pillows. How this works with later revelations may get a bit tricky)

When I'm the audience, I feel just the opposite. I enjoy a film much more when the director doesn't tell you, but makes you decide for yourself, what's going on. Maybe that's what the film has to offer, no clear answer. Give me ambiguity. I find David Lynch's films horrific, deep and scary as hell.

It's not so much that I prefer a direct answer over ambiguity... it's that I don't care if it's direct or ambigious - all three possibilities are uninteresting to me. I don't really have a preference between "it was all in there head" "it was real" or "it could be either" except in how it realtes ot the particular story. What annoys me is when the filmmaker tries to hang the audience's interest on whether the horror/whatever is real or all in one of the character's head. If it's going to be "undecided;" that's fine. But move on and stop spending scene after scene giving us "hints" that lean one way or the other.

You guys have (thankfully) pointed out a couple examples of films that play this game* ...though I'd argue that at least some of them - like The Stone Tape - aren't really asking us to puzzle whether the thing is real so much as what is the thing, where does it come from and what does it want (and it helps that The Stone Tape had a particularly inventive answer that I'm sure no one in the audience would've guessed in advance). And even those good ones that really are playing that game tend to be good despite it, rather than being helped by it.

Sure, any movie that isn't set up like Star Wars (in a galaxy far, far away) kind of HAS to address that issue when you've got supernatural or unlikely story elements. In fact, some movies feature characters absurdly ready to accept "oh, I see. There are vampires in that building? Well what do we do about it?" precisely because the filmmaker doesn't want to spend the entire duration of the film dealing with that question.

But after having seen hundreds and hundreds of films that turn that question into the thrust of the story... none of the three possible answers are ever going to impress me. And as long as the film draws out the wait to finding out which of the three answers it is, I'll be thinking of my grocery list.



*Though Let's Scare Jessica Death is more of a *worst case* example. I was wanting to kill Jessica in a much more direct fashion before that film was halfway through. ;)

See, this is funny because, on the one hand, I'm not with you John. I see this approach (real/unreal) as just a necessary function of the genre and so, boring and rote as it can be (especially in inexperienced hands), it's expected and almost inescapable. Being in the early 21st century and thus having unprecedented and almost instantaneous access to the vast array of supernatural genre material (as you say, and most of the people on these boards would attest, "after having seen hundreds and hundreds of these films"), to a degree never before attained or imagined (or is that all covered by my previous "unprecedented"? - probably. My loquaciousness is maybe a warning that I'm on a brain chemical upswing now, time for meds!) I feel like the onus is on me, not the material - to give leeway rather than expect something new every time (of course, that only applies to older films, more recent stuff should be held to stricter standards of originality, if not a complete dismissal of the fact that we are dealing with genre and genre, by definition, has built in structures, which can be undermined or played against effectively but usually end up setting the rules regardless).

But the reason I find it funny is that your statement of "none of the three possible answers are ever going to impress me" reminds me almost exactly of my feelings regarding LOST when it was getting accolades. I don't watch much TV to begin with and after reading about LOST, I thought "see, the problem with that set-up is that the answer/resolution is either scientific or spiritual and neither promises to be satisfying", so I never watched the show. Now, I did also think at the time that some weird third option that combines the two (like an enormous angel chained up and tortured by scientists in some vast cavern under the island) might be promising, but you get my drift. Efforts that don't answer the question (ambiguity) or offer "neither-completely-fits" options (contradiction, see TURN OF THE SCREW) can also be joined by weird hybrids that include both, like TWIN PEAKS (killer spirits and enigmatic messages to satellite arrays) or THE STONE TAPE.

The reason I mentioned the STONE TAPE earlier was that, other than being re-impressed by it all over again recently, I was struck this time around by how the narrative weaves the strands of real/"unreal" in a decidedly different way than the usual. For most efforts in this direction, "unreal" generally either falls to the psychological ("crazy", "delusions" or "emotionally overwrought") or stultifyingly mundane (hallucinatory drugs or the Scooby Doo - or what used to be called "Weird Menace" - approach). STONE TAPE does a great job of undermining those expectations (and I guess I should mark a SPOILER here for the next paragraph)

We start with the standard, "oh, there's no ghosts" but almost immediately engage with the "there's something, but let's treat it scientifically" (a "mass of data waiting to be explained" as the story has it). So there is something strange, but scientific hubris still assumes it is reducible. The "supernatural" concept crops up again and is dismissed ("this is no little shade that couldn't get through the gates of heaven"), but a distinct psychological element keeps returning, whether it be Jill's worry that the "ghost" is conscious and suffering while trapped in it's loop or her general psychic sensitivity that also manifests in the implications of potential nervous breakdown (played as "women's intuition", of course, it was still the 70's). But then the scientific angle is thrown a curveball with the realization that some of the scientists aren't experiencing ANYTHING, which leads to the rational expansion into "not just a recorded signal sporadically played back, but a signal that can be received by human brains... but only some brains" - which is what made me relate it to this discussion. At that point in THE STONE TAPE everything IS, in some sense, subjective and "happening in the character's heads", at least initially, but the scientific element is still included in the story formula (Nigel Kneale, you are wonderful!). And well, of course, it moves on even further than that, elegantly illustrating the dangers of a little knowledge, but you get my point.

In some ways it's a logical flip of TURN OF THE SCREW - the manifestations aren't "real" and yet they are, it's just that the definition of "real", and how the mind/brain informs reality, is the key. In James' story neither definition, supernatural or psychological, is completely satisfying, and deliberately so. In THE STONE TAPE either answer, it can be argued, is true in some sense and deliberately so.

Speaking of Henry James, has anyone ever adapted "The Jolly Corner"? It's a great quasi- ghost/doppelganger/Jekyll & Hyde tale and I could see it really bearing great visual fruit in the right hands. KPFA's Erik Bauersfeld did an audio adaptation back in the 60's on THE BLACK MASS but I've never seen a film attempt. Anyone know?

Man, I had a much better written reply, and when I hit "Add reply," I got a message saying, "Sorry, you do not have permission to reply to that topic" and it asked me to relog in. And when I did that, the post field was blank again. ARRGGHHH

But, essentially, what I said was something like...
The issue isn't that I expect to see a clever surprise or big dose of originality in every film I watch (although that would be nice). It's just that when a film spends almost all of its running time playing the "maybe there's something; maybe there isn't" game, the film and the audience are just stuck there. It doesn't move on to develop the characters, plot, or the issues the film is exploring. It just goes back and forth making the same two simple and boring points (1: X might be happening. 2: X might not be happening) over and over.


I said it all a lot better; and wrote some detailed examples with recent films, but... blah. It's gone; I'm not writing it all again. :(

(I also wrote something OT about Lost... maybe I'll feel inspired to rewrite that bit later.)

I was posting a giant CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST commentary on the Maniacs board last night, when I thought to myself, jeez, this one's getting pretty long, I should chuck it into a Word doc or something while I write so I don't lose the whole thing. At that exact point, my browser flickered, a window closed and the entire commentary post vanished into the ether. I'm sure if I'd picked Mobius to archive my rant Todd's more robust website architecture would have held up under the strain, or the generally more cheery browser window colors would have made me finish it more quickly, or something.

I've never seen GHOSTWATCH though an older issue of Headpress magazine rates it very highly. THE INNOCENTS is a wonderful movie which I only caught for the first time last year. I've read the semi-recent UK disc is a better transfer than all others, which I must investigate some time.

Not that I've never been burned, but generally I do a quick copy to my clipboard before posting anywhere - especially on blog responses.

There was an adaptation for PBS, done as part of a series called THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY COLLECTION of THE JOLLY CORNER with Fritz Weaver and Salome Jens. It was made in 1975 - I remember seeing it, but it's been so long ago, I have no idea how faithful it was to James' story.
It seems to be available on VHS.

The Jolly Corner

I actually do that, too (cut & paste long posts)... I had it cut onto my clipboard I *thought*, but after I lost it and I went ot paste it back in, I pasted the tilte of a single movie. I'd forgotten than I cut & pasted it into IMDB to check that I had the title right before posting. Oh well.

I'd like to see that. I can't see myself paying $25 for a VHS anytime soon, though.

Perhaps your public library system will have it or maybe throught an inter-library loan program.

The Fox R1 disc is solid in terms of transfer and extras but the R2 looks slightly better and has some great extras (even the commentary has English subtitles to itself).