An Anomalous Room

One of the stories included in H.P. Lovecraft Selects which Lovecraft did not talk about in his essay on supernatural horror is "The Southwest Chamber" by Mary E. Wilkins. He does talk about Wilkins, though, saying that her collection of stories, The Wind in the Rose-Bush, "contains a number of noteworthy achievements." But he singles out the story "The Shadows on the Wall", not "The Southwest Chamber". I can only guess why the editors of H.P. Lovecraft Selects chose one over the other but "The Southwest Chamber" is a nice allegory of generational psychological influence in a family.

A pair of sisters, Amanda and Sophia, inherit a large house which they decide to let to boarders. Their aunt has recently died in the southwest chamber and the story begins as they're making it ready for a new boarder, a school teacher named Louisa Stark who absolutely does not believe in the supernatural. Over the course of the story, four people try to sleep through the night in the room--each enters with very firm convictions on the non-existence of ghosts, and each is forced to admit they're wrong. Stark goes in believing only in rational, empirical evidence.

She was more credulous as to her own possible failings than she had ever been in her whole life. She was cold with horror and terror, and yet not so much horror and terror of the supernatural as of her own self. The weakness of belief in the supernatural was nearly impossible for this strong nature. She could more easily believe in her own failing powers.

"I don't know but I'm going to be like Aunt Marcia," she said to herself, and her fat face took on a long rigidity of fear.

It's the peculiar response exhibited by each subject to the haunted room that makes the story fascinating, disturbing, and amusing. Is Louisa's belief in her own madness really no worse than belief in ghosts?

More in the amusing category is the next wouldbe lodger, the widow Elvira Simmons, who figures even ghosts would be preferable to her previous room which gets too hot in the summer. The evidence of haunting that succeeds in terrifying her is as appropriately trivial.

The final person to attempt sleeping in the room connects the story back to psychological compulsions connected with physical inheritance. Sophia starts finding herself thinking the thoughts of her aunt, a sort of haunting many people might well attest to having experienced.

I find myself intrigued by the idea that a story like this might have influenced Lovecraft. The heart of the story is certainly very different than what he normally produced though arguably The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is just as much about an involuntary psychological inheritance.

Twitter Sonnet #1301

Confusion tilts against a stubborn glass.
In paying eyes the creature took the house.
In never keeps the food sustains a class.
A finished meal disturbs the picky mouse.
In carrot grids the scaling tip reverts.
A measured book includes the sparser rules.
To trucks the talking car at times reverts.
The cherry sword in water slowly cools.
The Shire reels in wavy lines of mint.
Important cards disrupt the science test.
Computer blues prorogue the parliament.
Superbly done is something like the best.
In metal pants the clanging knee offends.
On sturdy trunks the mammal long depends.

The Different Car is Always the Same

For many people, riding in a cab is an experience peculiarly mundane and invariably strange. It's a routine reason to put one's life in the hands of interchangeable strangers in cars that are almost, but not quite, identical. In a series of short anthology films released in 2014, 賃走談 1号車 and 賃走談 2号車 ("Renting the first car" and "Renting the second car"), director Soichiro Koga finds this experience fertile ground for ghost stories. I watched the second film, which is available free for Amazon Prime subscribers under the title Ghosts of the Night, and found it to be a nice set of four ghost stories, effectively creating a sense of strangeness through editing.

Each story involves a few people and each story doesn't directly indicate until its climax who the ghost is. But it's generally clear enough early on to anyone familiar with this Carnival of Souls style story and the film wisely doesn't take any pains to keep its secrets. It's not about the puzzle; each story is about slowly coming to terms with what is kind of obvious.

A high school girl comes home to her apartment and looks outside to see a strange man get out of a cab and hurry into the building. The next day, she sees the same thing--eerily, the exact same thing. It's so close it's probably exactly the same footage but, because it's such a mundane action, she and the viewer can't be sure. It's a nice, subtly strange effect.

In another story, a little girl accidentally leaves her ribbon in a cab. When her mother tries to phone the cab company, of course they don't recognise the name of the driver. Then the mother notices the little girl has been drawing the same distorted face over and over.

My favourite is the final story in the film in which a weary, melancholy cab driver picks up an excited young woman who's relieved to finally get a cab to take her to her job interview. He points out to her, in a tone of voice that suggests he knows there's no point in saying anything, that employers don't normally hold interviews this time of night. The mystery here is not who's the ghost, it's finding out why this guy is so used to talking to ghosts. I love his weariness and sadness, trapped in this position of always knowing something bad about these people, seeing them carrying on with their misapprehensions plain as day, but knowing he can't say anything to enlighten them and also knowing it might well be cruel to enlighten them. None of this is said, it's all in his attitude.

It's only 50 minutes, all the stories together. It's not a masterpiece but it's a nice little film.

The Wonderful Spirit of Time Travel

In 1918 a man shows up at the dilapidated London flat of a poor single mother and offers her a job as caretaker of a haunted manor. He doesn't tell her it's haunted, he entrusts this knowledge only to her two elder children. He's a lawyer and a ghost himself; he's The Amazing Mr. Blunden, which also happens to be the title of this delightful fantasy film from 1972.

Elmer Bernstein composed the score which has a wonderful, distinctively 70s charm to it with its rapturous strings and brass as Lucy (Lynne Frederick) and Jamie (Garry Miller) explore their enormous, creepy, and partly fire damaged new home. It's not long before they do encounter ghosts--a pair of children much like them, Sara (Rosalyn Landor) and Georgie (Marc Granger), from exactly a hundred years earlier.

It's arguably more of a time travel story than a haunting story but, then again, the implicit connexion between the two concepts is fun. It kind of reminded me of Inland Empire.

Sara and Georgie are being terrorised by their half brother's mother in law, Mrs. Wickens, played by Diana Dors.

One of my all time favourite actresses, Dors was well past her bombshell years, though she was only 40. On the one hand it's admirable she was willing to take these roles when so many former leading ladies would insist only on more flattering parts. On the other hand, it must have been liberating to be able to play such over the top characters as this and the brash matriarch she played on the sitcom Queenie's Castle. And, yeah, I'd still go out with her, even in the Mrs. Wickens getup.

The Amazing Mr. Blunden is a simple enough story about kids versus cruel adults while also having some intriguing and aesthetically pleasing subtext to its concepts. The form Mr. Blunden's (Laurence Naismith) buried conscience takes occupies a fascinating part of the story, especially since it turns out he has very little screentime. He's kind of a free-floating psychological preoccupation that outlived his physical body. I love it. I also love the method of time travel shown in the film, which is revealed to Sara and Georgie by the house's apparently sentient library.

It's a potion, the ingredients for which must be strained through a muslin cloth. Amusingly, Sara and Georgie test it on Mrs. Wickens first to make sure it's not poison.

With a cast that also includes James Villiers, Madeline Smith, and Graham Crowden, it's a fun film with a lot of atmosphere. Lynne Frederick is particularly good, the point of view character for much of the film. The Amazing Mr. Blunden is available on Amazon Prime. You could do worse for something to watch on Christmas--though only the beginning of the film is actually set during Christmas, most of the action occurs during April of 1918 and 1818.

Twitter Sonnet #1185

The eggs of ducks were blue as ships in space.
The careful paint would still escape the pod.
A grid between the suns creates a face.
There's nothing darker dwelling here or odd.
The hammocks creak and sway in inky seas.
Tomatoes lined the battlement and watched.
A drop of rain was just a cloudy tease.
A blade of grass was but a flower botched.
In constant glowing hands the sky was held.
In braided breads the ghosts were growing great.
The greatest lump in truth was soundly frelled.
A mob of ghosts would batter down the gate.
A cable carried out a hundred years.
Electric shows react with water tears.

The Cornea of Another

Adjusting to a whole different way of perceiving and interacting with the world seems like it would be hard enough without it entailing things no-one believes or understands. A woman blind since childhood has her eyesight restored in 2002's The Eye (見鬼) with the unexpected added ability to see dead people. Some overwrought stylistic choices on the part of the filmmakers, particularly in score and sound, don't detract too much from the film's effectiveness and it's a good horror film with keen attention to a sequence of sensory experience.

Mun (Angelica Lee) undergoes surgery to replace her corneas and finds this is only the beginning of the journey to being able to see the world. Light is too bright and things are too blurry and she meets with a psychotherapist (Lawrence Chou) who explains she needs to build up her "visual vocabulary". To demonstrate, he holds up a stapler and shows that, although she might instantly recognise it by touch, she has no idea how to identify it yet by sight.

I suspect there's even more physical therapy and rehabilitation involved in such a situation but the movie gives us just enough to appreciate the circumstances. It makes it much more effective when Mun starts to see things that other people can't. Naturally, she herself doesn't even realise immediately she's seeing anything she's not supposed to when an elderly woman across from her stands up, is led away by a shadowy figure, and vanishes. It's all new for Mun and this has the effect of making the audience even more afraid for her.

When Mun does first become really alarmed by the ghost of an old woman in the hospital corridor, the music goes up to a screech and the sound mix adds in a bunch of screams that don't come from anyone. Something about it seemed very dated, a cinematic auditory trick from the late 90s and early 00s, and now it had the wrong effect on me, making me think, "I suppose really one would get used to seeing dead people all the time."

And the appearances of the dead do get gradually less alarming so it's good the film comes up with new wrinkles, one arising from a very effective twist that pulls a rug out from under Mun's perspective on everything that happened in the first two thirds of the film. There are two explanations offered for Mun's abilities and a few other plot strands that seem like remnants from an earlier draft, like a woman at a cafe who casually mentions also being able to see ghosts but who's not questioned by Mun and is never seen again. In a way, though, even this adds to a nice sense of free flowing ideas in the film which remains effectively suspenseful to the end.