The Spider's House

Nina Allan's Homepage

Category: films (Page 1 of 4)

Birthday wishes

July 14, 2024 /

Today would have been Chris’s eighty-first birthday. How I wish he were here to see it.

Isle of Bute, October 17th 2018. Mary Turner/Panos Pictures

It is a perfect July morning here on Bute, the hills reflected in the waters of the firth, truer likenesses of themselves than you might see on more unsettled days. Reading Sarah Gristwood’s piece in the Guardian about her recent bereavement – her husband the film critic Derek Malcolm died last year – I find much that resonates. Like Gristwood, reading the words of other writers who have been here before me has been both incredibly helpful and strangely reassuring.

I find it difficult to say the word ‘widow’; the photograph above still feels truer to me than most things about the current situation. I have been luckier though than many of the writers Gristwood talks about in that work – writing – has been an unerring support to me. Some of you may know that Chris had been working on a biography of JG Ballard, a project he had very much hoped to complete but sadly did not. It was agreed between us before Chris died that I would finish the book, an undertaking we very much saw as our way of continuing to be together.

As the practical tasks that follow in the wake of a death are gradually completed, so I have been able to transfer more of my time and energy to working on the book. At times this still feels surreal but for the most part it is energising, life-giving. I know Chris would be pleased with how it is going.

Reading also continues to be a constant. At the moment I am finding great pleasure in rereading Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, a novel I discovered with wonder and joy in my late twenties, the first Highsmith I read. On rereading it is if anything even better – darker and more Machiavellian. I am certainly finding it less funny this time around!

To coincide with rereading the book, I am finally catching up with Steven Zaillian’s TV adaptation on Netflix, and what a thing of terrible beauty it is. I love the 1999 Minghella adaptation – Chris always said it was too long, but it’s in my Top 25 films of all time for sure – but Zaillian’s vision keeps more of the novel’s cruelty, its sense of unease. If anything, Minghella’s film is too beautiful, too – dare I say it – joyous? Maybe I’m placing too much emphasis on that incredible jazz sequence with Guy Barker but whenever I think of the Minghella film, in spite of the horrible things that happen in it I feel bathed in the endless sunshine of Positano. The black-and-white cinematography of the Zaillian adaptation is equally masterful but it lends to everything it touches – intentionally – a sense of the end-times, of dissolution. Andrew Scott is a more sinister, more morally bankrupt Ripley than Matt Damon, whose portrayal I love, I think, precisely because it allows me an emotional insight into the character. There’s no coming to terms with Scott’s Ripley; he is cold, selfish, opaque – exactly as Highsmith intended.

The Talented Mr Ripley happened to be the last of Highsmith’s novels Chris read. ‘How is this so good!’ he kept exclaiming. He had been looking forward to the new series. I think it would have gone down very well.

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors

December 16, 2023 /

From what I can remember of that time, I think I saw him as some kind of integral role model. Incautious, unfettered, improper, untethered. But also… getting the work done.

At this blackened, stub end of the year, it is hard to express what a comfort this book has been for me during the greyish hours between four and six when I have not been sleeping. Because of what it says. About art, about German culture, about death. About the missing link, as Penman puts it, between one era and another.

Because of what it says and because of its sentences. Because of the sense this book gives me, that if I could write something even halfway comparable then I would have succeeded in expressing something of the kind of writer I aspire to be.

Did I ever wonder: why are so many of the things I love either French or German? Did I ever think: how European is it? Or why does the UK feel so parochial and un-European? Why are we so time-stranded and small-c conservative? Such a hidebound culture at the time; plenty of newspapers and small magazines and arts programmes but all of them so Oxbridgey and middlebrow. Absent a whole education in European culture, ancient and modern. I don’t recall ever feeling particularly English or British or Anglo-Saxon or Celtic or whatever; this may partly have been the punkish, puckish spirit of the time, and partly a result of my own, wildly dispersed, non-settled, non-linear childhood, which had nothing like a home town or immediate circle or anything like a secure sense of nationality.

You don’t have to know Fassbinder to love this book. I have seen only a couple of his films: Effi Briest (which I remember as a claustrophobic vision of Bismarck-era Prussian propriety as if viewed through the lens of an unsuccessful film maker from the thirties, thinking about going over to the Nazi party), Die Ehe der Maria Braun, bits of Berlin Alexanderplatz. (Of course I want to see more now. I want to binge-watch.) You don’t need to know Fassbinder to love this book, because this is really a book about how to write biography – your own, someone else’s – and I have been thinking about that a lot recently.

For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms reflecting me increases. (Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye)

The book’s epigraph, from the novella by Nabokov that only VN completists ever read, a postscript to Dostoevsky’s The Double, a precursor to VN’s own Despair, the most Dostoevskian of his novels, this from a writer who was forever insisting how he hated Dostoevsky, how cheap his sentiments, how gaudily lit his scenes. VN, estranged from Dostoevsky as from his own twin brother. A kind of self-hatred, the classic Fassbinder material, the rain across the opening credits neither the ecstatic catharsis of the rain that enshrines Solaris nor the terrifying downpour that powers Suspiria. The grey pouring-out of winter, somewhere in-between.

Watched two episodes on Netflix of the Spanish crime series Bitter Daisies, including now almost obligatory scenes of the detectives’ wall of clues and photos, linked together by differently coloured bits of wool or string. Later that night I dream that eventually I am going to have to assemble this book the exact same way. But what is the underlying mystery or transgression here, crying out to be solved?

A biography of the film-maker, an excavation of self. Writing as if it matters, which it does.

If you loved this book

Or this book

Then you will love this book too.

Tár, dir. Todd Field 2022

January 27, 2023 /

I first heard about Todd Field’s new – and now Oscar-nominated – film Tár sometime last year. I was immediately drawn to and excited about it because of its musical theme, and because the trailers looked amazing. The movie has excited controversy from the outset. The first online commentary I came across was written by someone feeling outraged and, as I recall, ‘cheated’ because they discovered after seeing the film that Lydia Tár isn’t a real person. Since then we’ve had claims that the movie is anti-woman, that it’s racist, that it’s working-class-phobic, or something, plus comments from conductor Marin Alsop that the film is ‘offensive’ because it doesn’t portray women conductors in a positive light. I admire Marin Alsop tremendously but confusing one’s own life with that of a fictional character and then being ‘shocked’ that no one thought to tell you about the film sooner? Major eyeroll time. Cate Blanchett’s response to Alsop’s objections is both dignified and intelligent, as one would expect from such a fine actor defending what might just be the greatest performance of her life.

I went into Glasgow to see the film yesterday, and it affected me so powerfully that I kept waking up in the night still thinking about it. Todd Field’s script is brilliant. The film is musically literate to a degree that filled me with relief as well as delight. The history of the Berlin Phil – itself no stranger to controversy over the decades – and the peculiarly oppressive hierarchies of the classical music world are treated with candour and without scruple. Tár’s own musical insights, expressed though they are with brutal disdain for dissenting opinion, are clear-eyed, passionate and musically astute.

But while there has been some intelligent commentary on the film – for anyone interested, this piece stands more or less in alignment with my own views on how the movie relates to contemporary discourse on cultural power structures – what typically has not been talked about anywhere near enough is the film as film. In terms of its narrative, Tár is both a magisterial character study and a brilliant dissection of the corrupting influence of power. The film’s imagery and narrative devices are both extraordinary and richly compelling in conveying these aspcts.

From early on in the movie we are given a sense of the precarious balance in Lydia Tár between power and fragility. Tár’s whole life has come to be about control, not just on the podium but in her personal relationships and in her environment. The pressure of maintaining control is, as the film opens, about to become still more destabilising as the result of the dramatic intrusion of external circumstances. Lydia attempts to control these, too – and it is precisely when her panicked, jumbled, ill-conceived manipulations prove insufficient that the slide towards breakdown begins. We see how Tár’s sleep is repeatedly disturbed, not by noisy neighbours or street traffic but by sounds inside her apartment – a ticking metronome, white noise coming from inside the fridge – so minute they would not even be registered by most people. Tár’s innate vulnerability to these recurrent disturbances serve not only to highlight her sensitivity as a musician, but to indicate her increasing paranoia.

Tár comes increasingly to believe that she is being watched – that the sounds inside her apartment are being deliberately triggered, that someone has stolen her practice score, that books and papers have been moved or misplaced. While there is no overt evidence of this – the film leaves it open – the suggestion that she is being sabotaged comes increasigly to dominate Tár’s mind. The scene in which Tár goes in search of the orchestra’s new cellist, Olga Metkina, gives us a startling and horrific visual snapshot of her crumbling mental reserves as we pass from a normal Berlin streetscene into a dilapidated pre-WW2 back courtyard, piled with rotting mattresses and overflowing rubbish sacks. The sudden shift is both a literal revelation – under what conditions exactly are more junior members of the orchestra forced to exist? – and a metaphorical insight into the reality of Tár’s relationships and aspects of her past she is desperate to keep hidden.

Is Tár really attacked, there in that place? As with the sounds in her apartment, we never find out for sure, though the creeping horror of that particular film sequence comes back to us again and again as Lydia spirals towards her downfall, both public and private. We see how in the toxic mirror-world she has created for herself, the music itself cannot be enough. Separated from the power and influence it has bestowed on her, even the memories of what she once had are no longer real memories but cardboard tokens, literal and symbolic, of the self that has been destroyed.

‘You don’t seem to know who you are or where you’ve come from or where you’re going’, her brother says, as we enter the nightmarish final twenty minutes of the film, a hallucinatory shift in realities so sudden and so brutal I kept expecting it to be revealed as a dream. Here, the film turns to the language of nightmare – dissociation, jump cuts, appalling situations, queasy lighting and a sense of total disempowerment – to entrap us together with Lydia within a world so far removed from where we started out it gives us the sense of having been removed to another planet… And those who have seen the film will understand the ellipsis.

Tár will not win Best Picture – Oscar typically runs scared of controversy, and a win for this film in that category would no doubt trigger all kinds of ridiculous reactions – but I live in hope that Todd Field might at least win Best Original Screenplay, and Cate Blanchett Best Female Actor. Tár is original, provocative and demanding film-making of a kind all too rarely seen outside the arthouse, and deserves due credit. In a scene early on, Lydia Tár speaks of the orchestral conductor’s ability to halt time, to hold it in abeyance. It says something then, that throughout the film’s 2 hours and 40 minutes’ duration I did not find myself tempted to look at my watch, not even once. Tár undoubtedly takes its time, but it is time marvellously spent.

Girls Against God #1: Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

November 19, 2020 /

Jenny Hval’s prickly second novel turns out to be the perfect place to begin my current reading project, because Girls Against God is a confronting text in every sense. At the surface level, the novel poses as an autofictional account of a young woman growing up in the stiflingly religious, provincial atmosphere of southern Norway. Raging against a society that presents a whiter-than-white face to the world whilst harbouring and nurturing attitudes of racism, intolerance and petit-bourgeois philistinism, our narrator finds a focus for her rebellion through the world of black metal music and its aggressive iconoclasm. Her passionate desire to ‘be in a band’ allies her with two other like-minded young women, Venke and Terese. Together they flirt with various styles of performance and expression, entwining their musical experimentation with the practice of modern witchcraft. They begin to think of themselves as a coven, an irritant in society’s gut, a literal ‘trash stench’.

The timeline jumps between the narrator’s schooldays and her years at college to residencies in London and New England to a moment in the near-present in which an older version of the narrator is engaged in the making of an experimental film. Girls Against God rejoices in filmic imagery and references. Derek Jarman makes an appearance, and Dusan Makavejev’s ultra-transgressive 1974 film Sweet Movie is referenced and analysed before being partially re-enacted in a scene of phantasmagorical weirdness in a school canteen. The Blair-Witch-like film Forest, whose description and analysis forms the third part of the novel, is both a metaphor for the book as a whole and a marvellous act of ventriloquism; Hval is able to translate the elusive visual language of film to the written word with remarkable acuity and power.

There is still more to be had from this book, though. Girls Against God reads almost as a polemic, a manifesto – Hval’s examination of the taboos around women’s self-expression, the persecution of ‘witches’ (and witches) and the authoritarian suppression of individual acts of rebellion and protest is the cold steel, the anger that gives this narrative its resonance. As a piece of weird fiction that places passages of memoir alongside strange slides into hallucinatory otherness and sublime terror, this book is unique, The Craft on LSD. As a record of the slow commodification of Nordic Black Metal, Girls Against God works as a fascinating piece of documentary. As a rebel yell, a scream of protest in the endless white night of Norwegian summer, it is lacerating, eloquent and exhilarating.

The novel goes still further in examining the nature and purpose of writing itself in breaking down atrophied systems and challenging norms. I especially admired Hval’s juxtaposition of the forest interludes with her startling and imaginative use of the electronic sounds (text tones, old dial-up modem sounds, skype calls) that make up the ‘cosmic internet’, a parallel natural history, a modern cosmology.

Impassioned, original and revelatory, Girls Against God is a dense, occasionally stubborn book that rewards the effort involved in reading it. Hval opens up the possibilities of fiction, fusing together music, image and thought in a web of text that is refreshing and inspirational in its integrity. One to keep.

The far north

August 3, 2018 /

When I won the Kitschies Red Tentacle earlier this year, I decided I would spend the prize money on making some forays into the Scottish landscape, seeing places that were new to me and generally getting to know this country a little better. I spent some time in Edinburgh back in June. Other than one brief lunch hour between trains, this was my first visit to the capital and it was a memorable experience, not least because I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Alien at the Filmhouse while I was there – talk about excellent timing! In terms of its architecture, history, culture and overall vibe, Edinburgh is so very, very different from Glasgow, and I came away with the sense that my understanding of Scotland as a nation had been increased substantially.

In July, Chris and I visited Arran, our nearest island neighbour. We took the longer, three-ferry route via  Claonaig and Lochranza, a spectacular approach, especially under piercing blue skies. Arran is a marvellous place in every respect and we will certainly be back (I need to climb Goat Fell…) Then at the beginning of this week I undertook what turned out to be my most memorable rail journey since taking the sleeper train from Leningrad to Moscow in 1987., when I boarded the Far North Line to Thurso.

There is no better reminder than this of how big Scotland actually is. After travelling the three hours from Glasgow Queen Street to Inverness – a spectacular stretch of railway extending right through the Cairngorms – there are still another four hours of journey time to go, all accompanied by far-reaching views of the northern Highlands and the strange, vast interior of Caithness, the unique and environmentally important peat bog known as the Flow Country.

The journey will forever be characterised in my mind by the acreages of fireweed – rosebay willowherb – that daubed bright pink along the whole length of the line, in full and vivid bloom on my way up, just beginning to go over on my way back. Strangest of all though was the fact that I happened to be reading Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, a powerful and original work very different from Glazer’s film, and travelling through places – Dornoch, Tain – almost in the very moment that I was reading about them.

In the Caithness Horizons museum in Thurso, they have Pictish stones, whose elusive, unreachable mysteries move one to tears. They also have the original 1950s control room equipment from the Dounreay nuclear power station. You can sit in the seat where the controller would have sat – a cup of tea and a bourbon biscuit on the side lend a particularly grounding touch of realism – and lift the telephone they would have used in the event of an emergency. You can see and touch the SCRAM buttons. It really is quite something.

On my second day in Thurso I made the crossing to Orkney on the Hamnavoe, leaving from Scrabster and landing in the old port of Stromness, whose history has been shaped equally by the herring industry, Arctic exploration and WW2. Travel logistics made it impossible to stay on Orkney more than a few hours on this occasion, enough time at least for me to gain a sense of the place, to climb up to the heather moorland behind the town and look down towards Scapa Flow. The Hamnavoe ferry’s route takes her right past the Old Man of Hoy, and as we passed by on our return journey – our captain made an announcement that orcas had been sighted alongside us, but in spite of our rushing immediately on to the decks, none of us passengers were lucky enough to catch sight of them – it seemed inevitable that I would think of Peter Maxwell Davies, the life he made on Orkney and his perennially lovely and timeless Farewell to Stromness.

Holy Isle from Lamlash Bay, Arran

Piers, Stromness

Main street, Stromness

Above Stromness

Is it just me??

June 16, 2018 /

Following on from my post on scary movies last week, do take the time, if you possibly can, to listen in to this lively discussion of horror movies on Radio 4’s Front Row and featuring the ever-wonderful Kim Newman. Hearing Kim talk about horror never fails to reinvigorate my enthusiasm for the genre. It’s not just that he’s incredibly knowledgeable – he’s clearly still just as passionate about the subject as when he first started writing and given the quality of many of the movies he’s had to sit through over the years, that’s no mean achievement.

The discussion focused closely on Polanski’s classic horror movie Rosemary’s Baby, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this week. I could scarcely believe it. I’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby about five times and it never seems to age. Krzysztof Komeda’s fabulously eerie score, playing out over sweeping footage of New York rooftops must rank with the opening of Kubrick’s The Shining as one of my favourite opening sequences ever. Much of Rosemary’s Baby takes place in confined interiors, the old-world grandeur of those brownstone apartments contributing much to the mounting sense of paranoia and entrapment that permeates the movie.

I love the film. I am also in what I suspect is now a minority position of having read the novel before I saw the movie. I first discovered Ira Levin’s suspense thrillers when I was about fourteen, picking up his relatively unknown dystopia This Perfect Day at my local library and subsequently devouring everything by him I could lay my hands on. In my memory at least he remains one of the best pure plotters in the business. Neither of the two screen adaptations of his A Kiss Before Dying matches up to the edge-of-seat thrill of that novel when I read it in the 1980s. Other films have served him better – The Boys from Brazil and The (original) Stepford Wives are both classics – but it is Rosemary’s Baby that comes closest to recapturing the gut-churning suspense of Levin’s original.

They don’t make ’em like that any more. As the Front Row discussion passed from Rosemary’s Baby to Ari Aster’s new film Hereditary, with which it has been enthusiastically compared, my hackles began to rise, the question on my lips: is it just me?

I saw Hereditary on Thursday, at a preview screening in Glasgow. I know by now that I am going to be more or less alone here, so I’m just going to say it: Hereditary is not scary. Not even a little bit. Everything you see in this movie you will already have seen in at least ten other movies. I was honestly more scared by As Above, So Below and that similarly ridiculous film about people chasing demons under a church on Dartmoor. (I was also about to say that I was more scared by The Hollow but that would probably be a lie.)

It makes me angry when respected film critics like Peter Bradshaw give films like Hereditary five stars, because they are clearly not judging them according to the rigorous standards they apply to non-genre movies. Bradshaw’s reviews of European cinema, film classics and US and UK arthouse movies are knowledgeable, entertaining and generally enlightening. But for me at least his record on horror and SF is terrible, giving a free pass to clonker after derivative clonker, waving aside poor scripting and over-used tropes as if they don’t matter in this case because it’s a horror film, and horror films are meant to have that stuff.

Other mainstream critics are just as lax, and it makes me mad.

[Light spoilers ahead] As in almost every other case of Hollywood horror over-hype, the central problem with Hereditary is with the script, or rather the complete and utter lack of one. There is nothing the brilliant Toni Collette can do about that. She works what she has with gusto – but there is fuck all for her to work with. The problem is not so much that the material used in the construction of Hereditary is derivative – it is, but so is more or less everything in horror cinema – it is in the screenwriter/director’s inability to make anything of that material. I mean, things are pretty strange here: the death of Annie’s mother at the beginning of the film marks the culmination of a long cycle of abuse and repressed emotion – yet we learn very little about Annie or Annie’s (potentially interesting) work as an artist or her mother, how Annie felt bound to her in spite of everything and the deleterious effect this has had upon her marriage to Steve. Steve? What does he even do apart from act long-suffering? (And how come every Hollywood horror family is rich enough to live in a magnificently isolated house sparkling with old wood and gorgeous antique furniture?) Steve and Annie’s youngest child, Charlie, is clearly disturbed – and that’s before stuff starts happening. She’s supposed to be thirteen, but acts about nine. There’s terror in this house, with all real feelings and natural behaviour pushed underground. What has been going on before the action begins, and why, why, why the fuck does nobody talk to each other? Even after ‘the event’ (which I’m not going to spoil), a sequence that has the potential for genuine horror and traumatic aftershock, no one says a word to anyone about anything, until Toni Collette’s dinner-time rant, that is, but by then our suspension of disbelief has been thoroughly shaken.

I would suspect that the director, if faced with these questions, would reply that he wanted to portray deep trauma, that the silence between family members is meant to suggest a complete breakdown in the ability to communicate. I suspect that the real reason has more to do with his inability to write dialogue, to imagine properly realised scenes between real human beings, as opposed to actors in a horror movie. Beyond the broadest brushstrokes, there is zero characterisation, and therefore zero reason for us to care about the outcome. (I would suggest to any aspiring screenwriters that having your characters act like zombies right from the first scene is not going to do you any favours. Unless they are zombies of course, in which case, best go with it.) The outcome is also pathetic. It’s been done to death. If I had time on my hands I might begin to make a checklist of films with variants of this particular ending – of which Rosemary’s Baby is the only valid example worth a damn BECAUSE THAT FILM WAS PROPERLY SCRIPTED, and OK, The Omen was fine, a masterpiece in fact when compared with the current iteration  – but I have work to do.

I do not exaggerate when I say that every single avenue of interest in Hereditary is systematically bypassed in favour of – well, nothing, apart from people wandering around darkened interiors in typical horror film fashion (the house is wired for electricity, you fuckers, TURN ON THE LIGHTS!) waiting to be set on fire by demons.

Ari Aster can’t write. Therein lies the problem. Aside from that, I had a good week! Go see Hereditary if you have to, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Or better still, re-watch Rosemary’s Baby instead.

Scariest films ever

June 8, 2018 /

To celebrate the imminent release of Ari Aster’s much-heralded movie Hereditary (which I cannot wait to see), Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw posted a list of his Top 25 scariest horror films ever. I very much enjoyed looking over his list. But as so often with these kind of rankings it offered more questions than it answered. What exactly is a scary movie, and will the criteria for scariness be different depending on who is watching, how many horror films they’ve seen previously, what they prefer more generally both in terms of cinema and horror literature. Of course they will be – and that only makes the question more interesting.

The question I asked myself most frequently while reading Bradshaw’s list was: OK, but is that really scary? Is American Psycho, for example, actually scary? There’s blood and there are bodies – or at least body parts (a lot of body parts) – but the mood of the movie is so blatantly satirical (it might be contentious to say so, but it’s played more for laughs than for terror) I can’t remember being scared even once while I was watching it. Disgusted? That was the whole point. Horrified? Sometimes. But scared? I honestly don’t think so.

Zombie movies (with one or two honourable exceptions – see below) don’t scare me, period. Neither do slasher movies, surely horror cinema’s most boring subgenre and yes I include Hallloween in that judgement. Torture porn I choose not to watch because it’s cheap and lazy and – once you get over the vileness of it – also really boring. Carrie isn’t scary, the overwrought, trope-laden The Babadook certainly isn’t scary, and The Silence of the Lambs isn’t a horror movie, it’s a crime drama – like David Fincher’s Se7en, the emphasis is very much on the solving of a mystery, the unravelling of clues, not the evocation of dread that is essential to a true horror movie (anyway, Zodiac is scarier just by virtue of the opening scenes).

Any brand of scary that depends on jump-scares gets an automatic red card from me. And am I the only person on the planet who didn’t find The Exorcist frightening?  Maybe I would have done if I’d seen it when I was younger but by the time I finally caught up with it – sometime in the 90s – the Catholic psychodrama felt very old fashioned and I’d seen the set pieces so many times they’d become part of the lexicon. I much prefer Daniel Stamm’s 2010 The Last Exorcism. Masquerading as a documentary, The Last Exorcism is bleak and brilliant and underappreciated. I had my hands over my face for multiple scenes. I think it’s due a revival.

Three of the films on Bradshaw’s list – The Wicker Man, The Shining and Don’t Look Now – would count among my favourite pieces of cinema, but as scary movies, The Wicker Man and Don’t Look Now are too reliant on their devastating final scenes, The Shining is magisterial rather than terrifying, just a great film.  And again with Get Out, one of the most original additions to the canon in recent years, it is the social satire that does most of the work, with the horror movie elements more as knowing nods than outright scares.

By now, most of you are probably thinking I’m a spoilsport who’s seen too many horror movies and there may well be something in that. After a while, you get inured to the tropes. For some, it is a badge of honour not to be scared, to sit there with your arms folded going yeah right – I have definitely been guilty of that, on numerous occasions! And yet, as I began trying to decide what my own Top Ten would be, I did see a pattern beginning to emerge. The elements that scare me most in horror cinema have to do with a gradual slide into abnormality, a mounting sense that something is wrong here and there is no way out. Claustrophobia and loss of autonomy rather than savagery. The threat of violence, rather than blood and hacked off body parts. This is probably why I often enjoy the set-up in horror films so much more than the denouement – a variant on the rule ‘don’t show the monster’.

So, after much internal argument, are my Top Ten Scary Movies. Some people will say I have cheated – there are actually seventeen films listed here – but Peter Bradshaw had twenty-five, so what the hell…

10) Suspiria (Dario Argento 1976) The Beyond (Lucio Fulci 1981) I recorded Suspiria off the TV sometime in the late 1990s and had it stashed away on a VHS tape for months because I was too scared to watch it! I hadn’t seen nearly as many horror films back then and was more susceptible to hype. Suspiria was considered ‘most scary’ by so many critics I wasn’t sure if I could take it. I finally watched the ‘making of’ documentary to acclimatise myself and immediately became so interested in the film I saw Suspiria itself the following evening. And of course it wasn’t scary in the way I’d been expecting – it’s way too over the top for that – but it was scary in a different way, and also like nothing else I had seen up to that point. The opening sequence by itself would be notable, and brilliant, and it’s always this scene of confusion and torrential rain – not the barbed wire one – that remains most potent in my memories of Suspiria.  The soundtrack (by Goblin) is famous and justifiably so as it presents a defiantly original approach to scoring a horror film. The gradual slide into madness, the increasing extravagance of the imagery make Suspiria one of the most convincing evocations of nightmare seen on screen, and it is this – its defining illogic – that makes Suspiria worthy of a place in the most scary canon.

I’m including Fulci’s The Beyond in this spot too – my giallo double bill – because it reminds me of Suspiria in so many ways. Again, this was a film I’d heard so much about I was nervous of watching it. More than a few trusted horror comrades pronounced it terrifying, so it would perhaps seem churlish of me to say that I really enjoyed it! Like Suspiria, it is essentially a haunted house movie, but the sheer lunacy of it – the gradual stripping away of reality itself – makes it a genuinely horrible thrill ride and also rather daring.

9) [Rec] (Jaume Balaguero 2007) Here’s that zombie movie I mentioned earlier. Regular readers of this blog will know I’m fond of found footage movies, and this remains one of my favourites. A young TV reporter and her cameraman embed themselves with a team of Barcelona firefighters working the night shift. The evening starts off pretty boring, but then a call comes in from an apartment building suggesting that one of the residents may be trapped… [Rec] is scary because it unwinds in real-time – the film is just 78 minutes long but what a 78 minutes – and the sense it gives to the viewer of actually being there is brilliantly sustained. I spent most of the final ten minutes of this film with my hands over my eyes and that does not happen often. Result! (Honourable mention in this category: Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night, from 2017. More than just a zombie movie, and full of dread. I loved it.)

8) Wolf Creek (Greg Mclean 2005) What raises Wolf Creek above run-of-the-mill torture porn for me is the director’s audacity with regard to the set-up. The best thing about this movie is that for the first half of the run-time, nothing happens. We get to know the characters – your usual bunch of gap-year students – their relationship to one another, their minor feuds, the escalating tensions between them. What happens next is appalling precisely because it irrupts without warning into ordinary lives – lives we feel we’ve come to know intimately. I saw this film shortly after I moved to London in 2005, an afternoon screening, and still remember the sense of dislocation I felt on re-emerging into the light. I remember hurrying to the station, anxious to get home, even though I was safely shielded by hundreds of shoppers on Tottenham Court Road! I remember one of the characters’ final words – ‘So long, Wolf Creek’ – before everything begins to go wrong. An engine that won’t start – that’s all it takes. Still chills me, even now.

7) Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol 1970) And Soon the Darkness (Robert Fuest 1970) If I were to see either of these films for the first time now, I would probably not include them in this list. Their importance to me stems from the impact they had on me when I did see them – when I was about sixteen, I reckon, certainly before I left home. I hadn’t realised until I checked the dates for this post that they were both released in the same year, but it makes total sense. Both films are set in small French rural communities, each with something disturbing and hidden at its heart. The sense of creeping dread – something is wrong here – is paramount, and the seminal moments (the spinning bicycle wheel in And Soon the Darkness, the bloody hand hanging over the cliff edge in Le Boucher) leave you with your pulse racing. These films offer a fascinating snapshot of the original 1970s brand of folk horror.

6) A Field in England (Ben Wheatley 2013) I loved this film. I also found it horribly disturbing, frightening in ways I cannot adequately explain. One of those rare films that makes you feel changed in the act of watching it. Wheatley’s debut feature Kill List has rightly become a horror classic but for me, A Field in England is scarier. (Spiritual father to A Field in England? Jerzy Skolimowski’s truly great 1978 movie The Shout, based upon a short story by Robert Graves. This film is terrifying because the viewer feels co-opted into the abuse of power that is going on, almost coming to believe in the shout themselves.)

5) The Thing (John Carpenter 1982) The Fly (David Cronenberg 1986) I’m listing these together under ‘body horror’. The Thing, ridiculous though it may seem, took me three goes before I could actually bring myself to watch it through to the end, mainly because of the opening half hour, which I still find unbearably tense, one of the most frightening sequences in horror cinema, again, because nothing happens but you know it’s going to. This movie is so much better than Halloween. The Fly counts as one of those films I had to psych myself up to watch, I’ve now seen it three times and it is still hideously unnerving, the ultimate loss-of-control movie. My scariest moment? When Brundle is looking at the data readouts after the first teleportation and begins to appreciate the full horror of what is happening to him.

4) The Blair Witch Project (Myrick/Sanchez 1999) Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli 2007) My found footage faves! Anyone interested in horror cinema needs to watch these, basically. They’re both ultra-slow burn, both contain moments of genuine terror. When Heather realises they’ve been walking in circles. When the timer on the digital camera reveals that Katie has been standing motionless by the bed for three hours. Brrr. Brilliant.

3) Audition (Takashi Miike 1999) Ringu (Hideo Nakata 1998) How can you sum up Audition? Most people remember the needle scene, but for me the most terrifying moment in Miike’s film involves a woman sitting alone in an empty room with a telephone that doesn’t ring and a folded-over burlap sack. It was only on my third viewing of Audition that I began to properly understand its timeline, which appears to be linear when you first watch the film but is so…not. Ultimately, Audition is a tragedy, about loneliness, grief and abuse. It is also a brilliantly executed piece of cinema. Much the same could be said of Ringu, which actually came out a year earlier and kick-started the ‘haunted video’ trope. Of course Nakata’s original is the best – elegiac, queasy and deeply strange – but Gore Verbinski’s 2002 US remake isn’t at all bad, either – the opening sequence is cover-your-face scary.

2) The Vanishing (George Sluizer 1988) Maybe it’s just that this film pushes all my buttons – loss of freedom, entrapment, deception, obsession, huge mistakes made for no reason – but my God it’s brilliant. And horrifying. I don’t watch it all that often because it still gets to me. Please do not watch the Jeff Bridges remake. The word ‘travesty’ does not begin to cover it.

1) Alien (Ridley Scott 1979) The word that covers this one is simply ‘iconic’. Alien has everything: narrative economy, groundbreaking aesthetic, superb characterisation, shit-your-pants tension. It also has Ellen Ripley. Still hard to believe that we’re coming up on Alien‘s fortieth anniversary because to my mind it hasn’t dated a day – you could put this out as a new movie and it would still be better than ninety-nine percent of everything you see at the multiplex. Alien defined an era and it would always be in my Top Ten, regardless of genre.

You Were Never Really Here

March 21, 2018 /

I was in Glasgow yesterday evening for an event that ran as part of the Aye, Write! literary festival and featured an interview with crime writer Nick Triplow about his recent (and excellent) biography of fellow crime writer Ted Lewis, followed by a screening of Mike Hodges’s Get Carter, the film that brought Lewis’s most famous creation to a worldwide audience. I enjoyed the event tremendously, not least for this rare opportunity to see Carter on the big screen. Michael Caine will always be Michael Caine, for good or ill, but the film’s extraordinary sense of place, its grimy textures, its evocation of a certain time remain an extraordinary achievement. Get Carter captures the seventies in a way its creators would not – could not – have been aware of at the time, the surest test of a piece of art that actually appears ageless.

I booked for this event some weeks ago, and when I realised I would also be able to fit in the matinee showing of Lynne Ramsey’s new film, You Were Never Really Here, the trip suddenly became doubly worthwhile. You Were Never Really Here is based on a 2016 novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames, a text that turned out to be short enough for me to read in its entirety during my journey to Glasgow. I was thus able to experience the movie literally within an hour of reading its source text, something I don’t think I’ve ever done before and that made seeing the film almost like a weird kind of flashback. Whether this makes for a good way of looking at and thinking about adaptation I couldn’t say, but it is certainly a powerful and discomfiting one.

The Ames novella tells the story of an ex-Marine named Joe. Beaten and abused as a boy by his violent father, Joe’s trauma is broadened and deepened by his experiences in the military. He thinks constantly of suicide, and it is only his loyalty to his eighty-year-old mother, who was equally abused by Joe’s father, that keeps him going. Joe now works as a hired ‘fixer’ with a special ability in retrieving kidnap victims from their abductors. Violence is Joe’s tool, and he is an expert in its deployment. Returning to New York after a bad experience in Cincinnati, Joe is given a new job by his handler, McCleary: a senator’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Lisa, has been kidnapped. After six months of inconclusive police investigations, Senator Votto has received an anonymous text, informing him that Lisa has been put to work in a brothel frequented by rich businessmen and politicians. Joe is to recapture Lisa and return her to her father. There will be a rich reward. There are also risks, however. Votto’s father was known to be in deep with the Mafia, and there is reason to suspect that Votto may have come under pressure to conduct his political affairs in a similar fashion…

You Were Never Really Here was an almost perfect reading experience for me. Transgressive, sometimes horribly violent but often surprising in its twists and turns, fastidious and economical in its use of language, this is a novella that chews up the rulebook on show not tell (any kind of successful rule-breaking in fiction is a pump-the-air moment for me) and streams through the consciousness in a rush of blazing streetlamps and concussive hammer thwacks. Joe is a broken man, most would argue a bad man, yet as a protagonist he refuses to be categorised in such reductive terms. As a piece of writing You Were Never Really Here is a gem, as a work of noir fiction it should be famous. If you’re not keen on physical violence on the page, I’d advise caution, but otherwise I’d recommend it wholeheartedly.

I love Lynne Ramsey’s films, and her adaptation of Ames’s novella is a great piece of work that has already won prizes and should transport anyone who sees it. For me though, almost certainly because I came to the film feeling an unusually close kinship with the original text, it became a demonstration in how often film fails to reproduce the peculiar and unique intensity of a reading experience, the particular and perhaps irreplaceable intimacy of the printed page. Lynne Ramsey’s sense of place – her film-maker’s understanding of the urban landscape – is sensational, with a darkly alluring streetscene that reminded me somewhat of Steve McQueen’s 2011 film Shame.  I loved the film’s composed soundtrack and its use of incidental music. And yet in spite of some standout scenes – the death of the cop in Joe’s house (a certain eighties ballad will never be the same again), the ‘funeral’ at the lake – Joaquin Phoenix was never quite ‘my’ Joe. Perhaps he just talked too much. More importantly, I found myself mystified by some of Ramsey’s choices with regard to plot changes. In the novella, much of the horror lies in our discovery of Senator Votto’s obscene betrayal of his own daughter – which in its turn mirrors the way Joe was himself betrayed by his father’s abuse. By making Votto a victim, Ramsey has stripped the story of much of its urgency and narrative drive.

I sympathised with Ramsey’s ending – her desire to give Joe a second chance – and for this reason alone I would hesitate to say that we have lost something, exactly. It is more that we have been given something different, in its own way powerful but perhaps – perhaps – less memorable. Even the violence in Ramsey’s version, though we can see it right there on the screen in front of us, feels less impactful than what we are faced with on the page.

I am sure to watch this film again at some point, and when I do, freed from the immediate influence of the text, I will almost certainly admire it more. For the moment though I am still in the world of Ames’s novella, envious and rejoicing in the power of the writer to deliver something special that cannot be replicated.

Books of 2017

December 31, 2017 /

This year has been a strange one, reading-wise. For me, the first seven months of 2017 were entirely dominated by the Shadow Clarke – thinking about it, reading for it, and of course writing for it, too. In terms of the experience it provided it exceeded every expectation, mainly on account of my fellow Sharkes, whose skills as thinkers, writers and critics cannot be overstated. As a group, I think I can say we enjoyed ourselves throughout, even when we didn’t – it was that kind of project. But while the experience of chairing the Shadow Clarke counts and will remain in the memory as one of the outstanding highlights of 2017, the reading landscape we were travelling through did – towards the end especially – begin to take on some of the characteristics of a blasted heath. Even in this respect, there were pluses: having to read and write detailed criticism of books one might not ordinarily have chosen to spend time with was a fascinating and worthwhile experience in and of itself. But by the end of July my reading brain felt battered and skewed by a ‘science fiction of 2016’ remit I needed to move on from. I was more than ready to take in new perspectives.

Having said all that, 2017 did deliver some outstanding reading experiences. My novel of the year is an easy choice to make. Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY is a short book, but it made a huge impact on me. I have seen some hardcore SF readers perplexed by it, feeling that as a portrait of dystopia it fails to offer anything substantially new. I think such a reading misses the point. Barker’s novel is not interested in the outward mechanics of dystopia. Rather it seeks, through a layering of narrative strands, conflicting ideas about ‘happiness’ and formal textual experimentation, to offer an inside perspective. How might it feel to be a citizen fundamentally out of step with the grounding principles of one’s own society? How might it feel to doubt one’s identity within a climate of absolute certainty? H(A)PPY was, for me, a fully immersive experience – textual, typographical, musical – of a wholly original stripe. It is a wonderful book. To see Barker win the Goldsmiths Prize for it was a happy moment indeed.

Close behind H(A)PPY comes Katie Kitamura’s A Separation.  This hard little gem of a novel starts out reading like a missing persons thriller but delivers so much more. The formal execution of the prose is nothing short of masterful, while the strange, open-ended story it relates is one that sticks in the memory for a long time and demands a reread (always my test for truly worthwhile fiction). Again, I loved this book. I loved the subtlety of its characterisation, its directness, its formal brilliance. It should have received a lot more attention than it did.

While I was in Paris I finally caught up with Daniel Kehlmann’s 2014 novel F, and what an extraordinary book it turned out to be. Like all the most interesting fiction it is hard to sum up in just a few words what F is ‘about’.  We have three brothers, an absent father, an interweaving of timelines and familial relationships that come together to make a story that is surprising, strange, moving, occasionally uncanny, and always, always brilliant. F turns out to stand for all manner of things: fame, fake, fear, forgery, faith, fraud, fat. If F reminded me of any book at all it was Bernhard’s The Loser, still an unassailable highlight of last year’s reading. I would also highly commend Kehlmann’s work from this year, the novella You Should Have Left. A screenwriter takes his wife and daughter to a mountain retreat so he can concentrate on his work in progress, a script that is proving more than a little intractable. The house they’re staying in has other ideas, though – rather like the Navidson place in House of Leaves. This is a creepy little work, genuinely unnerving, and I only wish Kehlmann had seen fit to expand it to novel length. I would have enjoyed learning more about these characters and their situation. And, of course, about that house…

A similarly unorthodox approach to the haunted house story, J. Robert Lennon’s Broken River was another fabulous book that deserved more attention. Lennon’s fiction is everything you want fiction to be: unarguably of our time but never trendy, satisfyingly, determinedly odd, tight as a drum in terms of its construction and use of language. Broken River contains moments of chill-inducing tension that will keep the most stalwart crime fiction fan happy, whilst providing the kind of narrative ambiguity and strength of characterisation that would make it equally compelling as story on a second or even a third reading.

I would also like to mention two not-so-recent novels, firstly Georgia Blain’s 1998 debut Closed for Winter. I first heard of Georgia Blain when I happened to read a moving memorial of her in The Guardian around this time last year. She sounded like such an interesting writer, her death at the age of 52 a genuine loss to Australian letters. What with the Shadow Clarke to keep me busy, it wasn’t until August that I finally found time to read her first novel, the story of a child that goes missing and the repercussions of the tragedy down the years. A true delight, I found Closed for Winter to be as close to perfect as this kind of short, interior ‘slice of life’ novel could hope to be. A wonderful achievement, and all the more so given that this was Blain’s debut. A wonderful writer, who deserves to be remembered.

Earlier this month and following a run of less-than-satisfying reads that shall remain nameless, I turned at last to Margaret Elphinstone’s 2003 novel Voyageurs, the story of Mark, a Northumberland farmer and Quaker who sets out to find his sister Rachel, missing thousands of miles away in the Canadian wilderness. The experience of reading Voyageurs immediately put me in mind of the experience I had about five years ago reading Margaret Drabble’s The Peppered Moth. Coming in the wake of a similar ‘reading drought’, The Peppered Moth was like a miracle, a novel that in terms of its craft, its depth of field, its richness of perception far outshone anything I’d read all year. Voyageurs is like that: almost literally a transporting experience, the kind of novel that deserves to become a classic.

Away from the world of the novel, 2017 saw the publication of some notable collections of short fiction. First among them is of course M. John Harrison’s You Should Come With Me Now. Harrison’s first collection since 2000’s Travel Arrangements, YSCWMN presents a sequence of longer stories and flash fictions, woven together to form something significantly more substantial than the word ‘collection’ might suggest, yet simultaneously more wayward and less easily definable than a novel. While stories like ‘The Crisis’, ‘In Autotelia’ and the unforgettable ‘Entertaining Angels Unawares’ are standout events in themselves, this book is best appreciated as a continuum. YSCWMN is an extraordinary work, the most recent instalment of an oeuvre that is that rare thing: of lasting importance.

The stories in Camilla Grudova’s debut work The Doll’s Alphabet read like dispatches from a madhouse, or a magical realm. Some are fragmentary, some are longer pieces, all announce the arrival of a major new talent. Reading The Doll’s Alphabet put me in mind of how I felt when I first read Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, in which lyrical beauty rubs shoulders with shivery horror in what feels like a series of flashbacks from an unsettling dream. The stories are flawlessly crafted, and – as suggested above – have the feel of lost European fairy tales. I would love to see a novel from Grudova, especially as I can barely imagine what such a work would be like!

Another notable debut collection of 2017 was that of Malcolm Devlin, You Will Grow into Them. Devlin has been publishing short stories in Black Static and Interzone for several years now, and this collection marks a new high point in what he has achieved so far. In its preoccupation with character psychology and the uncanny, there’s a hint of Robert Aickman in Devlin’s fiction, but its political and social astuteness make it something else again and wholly Devlin’s own thing. As with Grudova, I’m looking forward to seeing more from Devlin. I’ve heard he’s currently at work on a novel, which is good news for all of us.

In film, I have loved and admired Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Aquarius, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth, Sally Potter’s The Party, Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless, and Paul King’s Paddington 2, which we saw last night and felt like the perfect new year celebration. Joint film honours though have to go to Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, which must surely count as a masterpiece and possibly Park’s greatest film yet, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out, a horror film of startling originality and importance. The moment where the title words are spoken (or rather screamed) literally made my blood run cold. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure you do.

If I have any reading goals for 2018, it is not to have ‘reading goals’. I want to read more books like Margaret Elphinstone’s, I want to feel less preoccupied with what’s coming out next month and more involved with the books that might be relevant to me personally. I want to be inspired and challenged, not frustrated and annoyed. I’m looking forward to bringing you news of my next novel, and beginning work on something entirely new.

Thanks to the very many friends, colleagues, readers and thinkers who have shared their time, insights, talent and fellowship throughout 2017. You are needed, and important, now more than ever.

A Happy New Year to everyone reading this, and here’s to turning the tide in 2018. .

Le retour

November 5, 2017 /

I’m now back on Bute after my month in Paris – a residency that saw me visit ten museums, innumerable places of interest and seven cinemas, culminating in a matinee at the St Andre des Arts, a unique and fantastic independent cinema just a five-minute walk away from Shakespeare and Company and within easy reach of a host of excellent bistros (but then again, that’s true of anywhere in Paris). To have seen Sally Potter’s new movie The Party – a film so British in nuance, in tone, in its political concerns – at this most Parisian of venues added up to a strange sense of cultural disjuncture. The film itself was brilliant: merciless, excoriating, stunningly shot and laugh-out-loud funny, even while providing a salutary reminder of everything I’d be returning to the following day…

What I did mostly in Paris, though, was write, and think about writing, both the project I was engaged in while I was there and what might come afterwards, the way those two entities seemed increasingly, as time progressed, to bleed into one. The piece of writing I completed – some 15,000 words of first draft – while staying at Les Recollets is a strange hybrid of pure fiction and detailed account of actual stuff I was actually doing, inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée, prompted by my own experience of being in Paris, expanded by thoughts on the novel I’m about to start writing. Indeed, I have started writing it: the piece I wrote in Paris, suitably edited and redrafted, will form the prologue.

This past month has been instructive and inspiring in ways that cannot – at this early stage – be fully articulated, and I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all those involved in making my trip possible.

It is wonderful to be home. There is much to be done, with hopefully some more good news to report in the coming weeks.

« Older posts

© 2024 The Spider's House

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑