Wow, that was amazing. People's expressions said so much. The glare of the sun. After watching the film I read the story--my first time to actually *read* it (I knew it by reputation but had never actually read it.)
I am so glad I did not oversell the film to you. I was really impressed by it: it seems to be the best remembered of the Short-Story Showcase and I can see why.
What was the story/history of you and The Daemon Lover? (Another story I haven't read.)
"The Daemon Lover" is a retelling of the Child ballad of the same name, drawing especially on the part where the lover is known in some versions as James Harris—the name of the male figure who winds through the collection originally subtitled The Adventures of James Harris, never overtly supernatural, but always disruptive, inexorable, uncanny. He appears in the ballad as a woman's long-lost love, persuading her away from husband and child to take ship with him to the flowery banks of Italy, only for her to discover mid-sea that their true destination is the dark hills of Hell. Nearly every version ends with the sinking of the ship. Jackson strips down her story down to the core idea of a woman expecting something wonderful when she marries for headlong love and finding herself thrust instead into a hell of disappointment which could be an ordinary jilting except for consistently odd notes like her inability to recall clearly the face or voice of her never-seen Jamie Harris or her unfinished allusion to the strangeness of the circumstances under which they met or the ever more desperate and disorienting ways in which her quest just to locate the tall young man in a blue suit who was supposed to pick her up at ten o'clock that morning runs her into a nightmare of all the minute and awful wounds of being a woman thirty-four years old and invisible and lonely that she thought she would escape with the marriage to Jamie, finally loved by someone. So obviously her pain upset me, and the way no one seems to take her seriously even in clear distress, and the way the story leaves her still suspended in the spell of being unable to let him go, but what it turns out really upset me, which I wouldn't be able to pin down until I had had some experience with genre protocols, is the way that no interpretation of the story can make it better. It is not more comforting to imagine she was conned by a demon instead of a normally faithless man, but to decide in the face of the all the little twinges of weirdness that there is an entirely rational explanation for his disappearance still leaves her enthralled, abandoned, her sense of self sapped as thoroughly as if an incubus really had battened on her. Resolving the ambiguity wouldn't make a difference. It's just bad either way. I am not sure I had encountered that kind of ambivalently hopeless horror before Jackson, or if I had, it hadn't whammied me the same way, and even though more than one story in the collection actually operates in this plausible-deniable mode, "The Daemon Lover" stuck with me. Like a lot of things which scared or upset me when younger, it is now a technique I really admire and even often prefer—if you want to bounce me out of a piece of horror or weird fiction, just punt all your ambiguity in the third act—but I still find this particular story upsetting and imagine I always will.
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I am so glad I did not oversell the film to you. I was really impressed by it: it seems to be the best remembered of the Short-Story Showcase and I can see why.
What was the story/history of you and The Daemon Lover? (Another story I haven't read.)
"The Daemon Lover" is a retelling of the Child ballad of the same name, drawing especially on the part where the lover is known in some versions as James Harris—the name of the male figure who winds through the collection originally subtitled The Adventures of James Harris, never overtly supernatural, but always disruptive, inexorable, uncanny. He appears in the ballad as a woman's long-lost love, persuading her away from husband and child to take ship with him to the flowery banks of Italy, only for her to discover mid-sea that their true destination is the dark hills of Hell. Nearly every version ends with the sinking of the ship. Jackson strips down her story down to the core idea of a woman expecting something wonderful when she marries for headlong love and finding herself thrust instead into a hell of disappointment which could be an ordinary jilting except for consistently odd notes like her inability to recall clearly the face or voice of her never-seen Jamie Harris or her unfinished allusion to the strangeness of the circumstances under which they met or the ever more desperate and disorienting ways in which her quest just to locate the tall young man in a blue suit who was supposed to pick her up at ten o'clock that morning runs her into a nightmare of all the minute and awful wounds of being a woman thirty-four years old and invisible and lonely that she thought she would escape with the marriage to Jamie, finally loved by someone. So obviously her pain upset me, and the way no one seems to take her seriously even in clear distress, and the way the story leaves her still suspended in the spell of being unable to let him go, but what it turns out really upset me, which I wouldn't be able to pin down until I had had some experience with genre protocols, is the way that no interpretation of the story can make it better. It is not more comforting to imagine she was conned by a demon instead of a normally faithless man, but to decide in the face of the all the little twinges of weirdness that there is an entirely rational explanation for his disappearance still leaves her enthralled, abandoned, her sense of self sapped as thoroughly as if an incubus really had battened on her. Resolving the ambiguity wouldn't make a difference. It's just bad either way. I am not sure I had encountered that kind of ambivalently hopeless horror before Jackson, or if I had, it hadn't whammied me the same way, and even though more than one story in the collection actually operates in this plausible-deniable mode, "The Daemon Lover" stuck with me. Like a lot of things which scared or upset me when younger, it is now a technique I really admire and even often prefer—if you want to bounce me out of a piece of horror or weird fiction, just punt all your ambiguity in the third act—but I still find this particular story upsetting and imagine I always will.