![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
What's to tell? The house tried to kill me. It almost succeeded
1. For about twelve hours more, B. is visiting. We did not manage to see much more than fifteen minutes of the MFA, although I was able to show him the glazed-tile lion from the Ištar Gate of Babylon, but we had dinner at Mulan (whole cuttlefish!) and then he showed me Pulse (Kairo, 2001). I understand it invented much of the visual vocabulary of J-horror, but it didn't register to me as a horror film so much as an extended meditation on alienation and loneliness so terrible that it becomes apocalyptic; I wasn't sure if it was meant to frighten or simply to explore that sense of exhaustion and isolation which extends even to the landscape of Tokyo. Streets are deserted, classes half-attended, apartments furnished even more randomly and anonymously than the student usual; the lighting is the washed-out overcast that eats shadows off the pavement or the last flat glare before sunset, or it's fluorescents and that hollow, too-bright look electric light gets too late at night, too long alone with your computer, dialing up, trying to connect. The characters don't converse, they talk into the air that sometimes contains someone else. Would you like to meet a ghost? You are living among them already. I wonder if it's actually a film about depression, cleverly disguised. In the face of desolation, do you choose to die? Do you fall into ashes of yourself, a motionless half-life belonging to no world? Do you keep going anyway, into the unknown? Have I done the right thing? And the ocean stretches away to all sides. So I didn't find that the film scared me, although there were sequences I found beautifully eerie; I do think it deals with terrifying things. If his films are all this intelligent, I'll watch more by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
2. On the horror front, though: don't ever watch Lassie Come Home (1943) in the same twenty-four hours as The Legend of Hell House (1973).
I watched the latter two nights ago on the recommendation of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
handful_ofdust; I quite liked it. I don't know how it compares to The Haunting (1963) or the original novel by Richard Matheson, but I found it a very effective cranking-up of genuine weirdness and interpersonal paranoia that never does tip over into the stupid, meanwhile needling at the limits of sex and gore as they could be portrayed onscreen. Four investigators are sent to the Belasco House, the so-called "Mount Everest of haunted houses," abandoned in 1929 after the disappearance of its ill-reputed, millionaire owner and the grotesque deaths of all twenty-seven of his guests at the time. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) is the designated leader, a physicist who believes that ghosts are nothing more than residual electromagnetic energy and has been building the machine to prove it; he is accompanied by his wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt) and assigned a mental medium, Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), who despite her youth is reckoned the best in her field. And then we get Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), who in 1953, at age fifteen, was the only survivor of the last attempt to explore or exorcise Hell House. Well, survivor if your criteria are limited to breathing, walking around, and being able to speak in complete sentences. Barrett refers to him, by introduction, as a "mental wreck." He doesn't look you in the eye, or he looks too long. He says very little, invariably as though he knows you'll be sorry you asked. He's snapped off somewhere inside himself, that long-ago morning when he crawled out of Hell House but never really left it; he was a precocious physical medium, but he hasn't shown that talent for years and no one knows if it's because he can't or he won't. But he knows the house, so he's indispensable . . . It's an odd, brave part for a former child actor—and though I had seen Roddy McDowall as an adult, I still wouldn't have guessed from sweet, obstinate Huw Morgan that he could grow up into lanky, lantern-faced Fischer, holding himself in so tightly behind his glasses that are both shields and blinders, all hunched shoulders and fists in his pockets and that curious light, almost toneless voice, as if there really is nothing left in him but the kind of terror that is so profound, it might as well be dispassion. And what the film ultimately comes down to is a battle of neuroses between Fischer and what might be the spirit of Emeric Belasco; and while of course you root for Fischer, that he should finally exorcise himself along with this house that has been his hell for more than half his life, you really are expecting him to blink first.
And so if you see Roddy McDowall the next night in a heartwarming children's movie, you look at that still-faunlike face, more like eleven than fourteen, with only that broad mouth and a bit of the eyebrows to show you the lines it'll draw down into—which, because it's the same actor, is how you must imagine Ben Fischer when he was brought to the Belasco House for the first time—and you think, kid, if you knew what you had waiting . . .
3. Rabbit, rabbit. Happy Beltane. Send poems to Strange Horizons.
2. On the horror front, though: don't ever watch Lassie Come Home (1943) in the same twenty-four hours as The Legend of Hell House (1973).
I watched the latter two nights ago on the recommendation of
handful_ofdust; I quite liked it. I don't know how it compares to The Haunting (1963) or the original novel by Richard Matheson, but I found it a very effective cranking-up of genuine weirdness and interpersonal paranoia that never does tip over into the stupid, meanwhile needling at the limits of sex and gore as they could be portrayed onscreen. Four investigators are sent to the Belasco House, the so-called "Mount Everest of haunted houses," abandoned in 1929 after the disappearance of its ill-reputed, millionaire owner and the grotesque deaths of all twenty-seven of his guests at the time. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) is the designated leader, a physicist who believes that ghosts are nothing more than residual electromagnetic energy and has been building the machine to prove it; he is accompanied by his wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt) and assigned a mental medium, Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), who despite her youth is reckoned the best in her field. And then we get Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), who in 1953, at age fifteen, was the only survivor of the last attempt to explore or exorcise Hell House. Well, survivor if your criteria are limited to breathing, walking around, and being able to speak in complete sentences. Barrett refers to him, by introduction, as a "mental wreck." He doesn't look you in the eye, or he looks too long. He says very little, invariably as though he knows you'll be sorry you asked. He's snapped off somewhere inside himself, that long-ago morning when he crawled out of Hell House but never really left it; he was a precocious physical medium, but he hasn't shown that talent for years and no one knows if it's because he can't or he won't. But he knows the house, so he's indispensable . . . It's an odd, brave part for a former child actor—and though I had seen Roddy McDowall as an adult, I still wouldn't have guessed from sweet, obstinate Huw Morgan that he could grow up into lanky, lantern-faced Fischer, holding himself in so tightly behind his glasses that are both shields and blinders, all hunched shoulders and fists in his pockets and that curious light, almost toneless voice, as if there really is nothing left in him but the kind of terror that is so profound, it might as well be dispassion. And what the film ultimately comes down to is a battle of neuroses between Fischer and what might be the spirit of Emeric Belasco; and while of course you root for Fischer, that he should finally exorcise himself along with this house that has been his hell for more than half his life, you really are expecting him to blink first.And so if you see Roddy McDowall the next night in a heartwarming children's movie, you look at that still-faunlike face, more like eleven than fourteen, with only that broad mouth and a bit of the eyebrows to show you the lines it'll draw down into—which, because it's the same actor, is how you must imagine Ben Fischer when he was brought to the Belasco House for the first time—and you think, kid, if you knew what you had waiting . . .
_NRFPT_02.jpg){kind=link}
3. Rabbit, rabbit. Happy Beltane. Send poems to Strange Horizons.
no subject
no subject
I've been trying to figure out why I'm fond of Roddy McDowall. I never imprinted on Planet of the Apes, although of course I saw it in childhood like everyone else on the planet; I missed all of his famous early roles until How Green Was My Valley (1941) last year at the Harvard Film Archive; I think I remember him best from Evil Under the Sun (1982), where he's very entertaining as a Noël Coward-style theater critic, but doesn't have much to do with the plot that I can recall. But he must have gotten into my brain somehow, because he was one of my reasons for seeing The Legend of Hell House and I think it is the film I'm going to love him for. (I'm taking further recommendations, of course.) Go know.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
I regret to inform you that that is adorable.
(. . . Does it still exist?)
no subject
no subject
I shall have to look for it.
no subject
And yes, seeing How Green Was My Valley that quick after Hell House must've shook some foundations. He was a pretty guy, in his time--very untouched. While Fischer has been touched plenty, and not by angels.
no subject
That's fair. I still want the stories, though.
I loved him so much! He was my go-to woobie for years, I think.
I would have imprinted on him so hard if I'd seen this movie at a formative period in my life. As it is, I appear to be pretty damn fond of him.
He was a pretty guy, in his time--very untouched.
I should find one of his films from between these two periods. What do you recommend?
While Fischer has been touched plenty, and not by angels.
Yes.
How does he compare to Fischer-in-the-book?
no subject
no subject
Nice.
So I should read the book, then?
no subject
no subject
It really IS mainly about loneliness--the loneliness of the crowd. HOw being part of the collective just doesn't work, pretty much for anybody, but there's always this awful fear that there's nothing outside it. And then that gets translated into "normal" fear of death and dissolution, or lack thereof. Of there never being an end. The Japanese are really good at that, or at least K. Kurosawa is.
no subject
B. mentioned one of his other films, Cure, which sounded like a character study of a society in the shape of a police procedural; any others I should look into?
(This conversation is full of questions. This is what happens when I discover new stuff.)
no subject
no subject
I'll watch both of those things!