The Others

Nicole Kidman gives a riveting performance in The Others, a reverse ghost story.  I say reverse because the movie is told from the perspective of ghosts that don’t know they are dead. The deaths of Grace, played by Kidman, and her two children, Nicholas and Anne, are too traumatic for their minds to process and they lived their lives as they always have.

When evidence of “hauntings” begins, Grace discounts them. She is convinced there are intruders in the house and, of course, she doesn’t listen to her daughter who tells her about Victor and the old lady prowling the house. Things start to move, curtains disappear, and Grace begins to believe the servants are involved. In a way, they are. The servants died many years ago and will do all they can to keep the house to themselves and not allow living people to move in. Of course, the viewer doesn’t get to learn this fact until closer to the end of the movie.

The plot follows Grace’s mental breakdown, much like The Shining with Jack Torrance, but the twist is that she already had the ultimate breakdown, one that led her to smother her children and kill herself. The breakdown as Grace fights to protect her children from unseen intruders is no less riveting considering the actions she has already taken. The fights with Anne, the desperation to keep them safe from their sun allergy and Nicholas’ fear of being alone, and the unsettling dispositions of the servants all set the mood perfectly for the shocking revelation that Grace and the children are haunting their own home, and the “intruders” are those that have moved into the home.

The revelation at the end that Grace murdered her children and then killed herself was shocking. Nothing in  her actions lead one to believe she would go to such excessive means to deal with the loss of her husband and the overwhelming fear and stress of being a single mother. The only clue is Anne’s anger with her mother, clear from early in the movie. The ending scene where Grace and the children stand looking out at the fleeing humans as mist rolls in to close them in to the home is chilling, and it sums up Grace’s overwhelming loneliness in one perfect shot.

The Shining

What hasn’t been said about The Shining? Though this is a wonderful ghost story, that is not my favorite aspects of this novel. Jack’s descent into madness, the slow etching away at his humanity, is what has drawn me to this work for years. Jack begins as a desperate man trying to rebuild his life after he has destroyed his opportunities with temper and drink. He is doing his best to keep himself and his family together, but his addiction and the violence witnessed and endured at his father’s hands have etched into his psyche leaving a deep scar the hotel was able to wedge itself into.

And that is what the novel is about. The haunted hotel and the endless party are tools used to tear Jack down one small hurt at a time. With unerring aim, the hotel finds every doubt, every imagined slight Jack has endured and it enhances them. Jack’s insecurities become an easy playground for the hotel, and it uses his guilt against him at every turn. The attack on the stuttering boy from the debate team, Danny’s broken arm, his inability to finish his play, and Wendy’s constant questioning of his decisions are wielded against Jack with extreme skill until the hotel, or his own doubts, infect him and he no longer sees reason.

As his mind deteriorates, Jack can’t tell the difference between his thoughts and the darkest reaches of his own soul, because the hotel didn’t corrupt; it merely fed on the negativity already inside Jack.  The snow isolates the Torrance family, and with each inch that piles up around the hotel, Jack delves deeper into the darkest aspects of himself. The light dims. He hyper-focuses on the history of the hotel, immersing himself in its bloody history, and he forgets the promises he made to himself. He forgets that he will never hurt Danny again, that he will never drink again, that he will no longer fail his family.

The madness takes over, and the hotel has what it wants. It takes over Jack’s physical body as its agent and is now free to act against Danny and Wendy. How much of the madness is the hotel and how much of it is Jack’s fractured mind? The story leaves that a bit ambiguous. Jack was the weak link in the chain. His mind was already touched by darkness while Wendy and Danny remained free if the taint until near the end. The peek into madness, the descent into the darkness of the human mind, is more haunting than  the ghosts in the hotel.

Ghost Sotry

I thought Ghost Story, by Peter Straub, would be a ghost story, but in reality it was so much more. Yes, there were ghosts. There were even a few zombie-like creatures, but there was also a hidden world and monsters that populated the world the protagonists never fully understood. The rambling path of the story with the time jumps to the past, present, and future helped to cement these feeling of disjointed reality. The blizzard burying the town of Milburn serves the same purpose and also adds to the isolation of the characters. These aspects fit a ghost story, but as the story goes on, it is revealed that Anna Moystn, and all the other ladies bearing the initials of A.M, are all reincarnations of Eva Galli, a creature called a nightwatcher and not a ghost at all.

The revelation that the antagonist is an immortal shape-shifter was not something I was expecting. Eva Galli appears, she captivates the town, and then she is accidentally killed because of her lack of humanity is finally revealed. And for fifty years, she patiently stalks the members of the Chowder Society, the men that killed her, and finds time to bring the younger Wanderly into the mix. Through all this, there is no explanation of why she is doing what she does. Eva and the other nightwatchers believe they are better than humanity; their arrogance is a given, but nothing in her interactions with the men she stalks is there an explanation of why she latches onto them for such a long time and one that would continue if Wanderly didn’t entertain the thought of killing a small child he is convinced is the new A.M.

The slow reveal of the Eva’s true origins kept the novel interesting. I kept reading and wanted to know, and the characters, unlike those found in Hell House, were interesting and I wanted to see them prevail even as the members of the society were slowly picked off by their adversary.

Hell House

Though I enjoyed reading Hell House, I found the story to be predictable, the characters uninteresting, and the antagonist familiar. Perhaps this is because, since the publishing of Hell House in 1971, other stories and movies have hit the genre that are similar in plot and characters. Ghost hunters and scientists trying to discover the truth of life-after-death are commonplace in the genre of ghost stories. Look at the slew of found footage movies. Many of them use these same investigators as the focus of their narratives. Even The Haunting of Hill House used the investigation of a haunted house as the basis for its plot, and it has been done many times since both of these publications.

Perhaps if the characters had been more interesting, I might have cared more about what happened. All the usual suspects were accounted for: the lone survivor, the scientific disbeliever, the spiritualist, and the sadistic dead man. For most of the book, Fischer, the lone survivor, the greatest source of first-hand information the investigators have, does nothing. His main goal is to protect himself even as he watches the house destroy Dr. Barrett, Edith, and Florence Tanner as it had the group he watched die in the house. The spiritualist embraced the house blindly, allowing the house manipulate her because she refused to open her eyes to the menace lurking in house even when it physically attacked her. Seriously? This woman didn’t realize it would be a bad idea to have sex with a ghost? And the scientist was so sure about his work, so sure that his special machine could end hauntings, he refused to pay attention to all the evidence around him things weren’t going as well as he thought they might. If they listened to each other and listen to the house, Dr. Barrett and Florence Tannwouldn’t have died, and they could have ended the haunting in the house together.

The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson

            Shirley Jackson’s Haunting in Hill House has always been one of my favorite novels. I can trace my love of dark, creepy things, supernatural occurrences, and ghost stories to her and her wonderful stories. And Hill House is one of the works that speaks to me the most because of the contradictory fragility of Eleanor.

            As Eleanor travels to Hill House, finding the courage to steal the car she shares with her sister to get there, she indulges in many fantasies. Each one of these fantasies involves Eleanor being alone, being walled away from society in her fairy tale world guarded by stone lions and hidden behind magical oleander. Yet when she arrives at Hill House, though she is intimidated by its creepy facade, she feels as if she has come home. During her time in Hill House, she half-heartedly crushes on Luke and forms a friendship with mercurial Theo. Despite these connections, she doesn’t seem to like either person very much even though she expresses desire to follow Theo home and help her in her shop.

            Eleanor’s attraction and repulsion of those that surround her are traits I often attribute to introverts. The dark thoughts are when the person desires to be alone, to be allowed to do their own thing with no one else laying a claim to their time. And yet, deep down, the introvert still desires to be near people, wants to spend time with others of a similar mind and interests so they know they are not as alone as they often crave to be. Eleanor wanted to be free of her mother’s needs and her sister’s often selfish demands, and yet at the same time, she wanted to be needed and to find a place where she belonged. Hill House, despite all the phenomena experienced within its walls, offers this sanctuary to her.

            Perhaps Hill House is not the Eden she desires. The fragile nature of her mind and her fanciful wanderings leave the reader unable to tell whether she is insane and self-obsessed or if the house has truly been waiting for her all this time. Did she write her name on the wall? Did she vandalize Theo’s clothes and paint graffiti in blood in the green room? I always felt that Eleanor was a lonely, lost woman who, after having given up her life to take care of her family, has lost her way and has no idea who she is. When faced with strong personalities, such as Theo’s, Eleanor cannot help but cling to dark thoughts while trying to find a way to entrench herself more firmly in Theo’s life because she has no life of her own.

            As Eleanor is forced to leave Hill House, she can’t take it, to be forced away from a place she was wanted and welcomed. All she desires is to stay, and if the only means by which to accomplish this is her death, then so be it. Now, she will remain forever in Hill House with the ghosts that so obviously wanted her. She no longer has to be alone.