Nothing But The Night

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NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT (1973). Directed by Peter Sasdy. Script by Brian Hayles, from a book by John Blackburn that I have not read. (Blackburn's tepid prose never fails to push me out before each book's Chapter Two.)

Why certain films become popular while others, no worse in technique or imagination, become ignored or even hated, remains a mystery. As a case in point, we have NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT -- hardly a great film, but at the same time, nowhere near as bad as reviews might imply. It moves at a rapid pace, it offers an escalating series of surprises, and it ends with a climax that even its detractors often praise.

One source of trouble might be the film's marketing. Promoted as horror, NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT is for the most part a police-procedural / manhunt / criminal investigation story. On these terms, I think it functions well, but anyone who expects the atmosphere and oddness of a horror film might be disappointed -- until the climax, which does convey a mood of sinister peril, and which does make the film stand out.

I would call this a structural flaw. At the heart of the film lurks an uncanny concept: far-fetched, but interesting. Yet this idea is tossed at the viewer in the final minutes. A writer like Nigel Kneale would have built up this concept at length, to explore its disturbing implications. Here, once the concept is revealed, the movie ends -- powerfully, strikingly, but abruptly. I would have preferred to see this idea given more attention.

I would have also preferred to see the good cast given more to do. After all, any film that includes Kathleen Byron had damned well better use her strangeness to its full extent, but this film never matches the courage of BLACK NARCISSUS. NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT's acting, like its direction and cinematography, are never less than competent, but could have been more.

The entire film could have been more, but it could have also been less. It never bored me, never forced me to look at the clock, never made me regret that I was watching it. Nothing would compel me to call this a bad film.

I only wish the film as a whole could have matched the power of its climax.

Robert Altman's IMAGES

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Certain films not usually categorized as horror might as well be called horror. KISS ME DEADLY, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, SECONDS, THE SILENCE, THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, SHAME, PERSONA, THE SERPENT'S EGG, THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, all create a mood of escalating dread in ways that can rival or even surpass films people think of as horror.

In a similar way, Robert Altman's IMAGES, from 1972, might as well be called a ghost story. Even if the lead character is haunted not by ghosts but by mental illness, the manifestations of her condition appear and vanish like ghosts, lurk about like ghosts, cause eruptions of panic and anxiety that we would expect from ghosts. The result is a film that kept me on edge in ways that HEREDITARY and SINISTER never could.

Altman achieves his effects with simple techniques from horror films of the past, but applied here with a focus and confidence that stand out. Characters transform from one person to another in mid-conversation. The room-within-room complexities of an ordinary cottage in full daylight become frames-within-frames for sudden appearances and disappearances. "Ghosts" can wait quietly in the background in full view, or they can erupt from the foreground without warning or motivation.

In the role of protagonist, Susannah York shrieks in panic when these manifestations begin early in the film, but as the story continues, she develops a sinister tone: knowing, calculating, almost gleeful in her mental collapse. Her performance is aided by one of the few John Williams musical scores that I like: in its abstraction, its emphasis upon detached or unmotivated sounds, it reminds me less of a typical score by Williams than of a beautifully experimental score akin to those created by Jerry Goldsmith in the 1960s and '70s. I wish that John Williams had written more like it.

Compared to Altman's later quasi-horror film, 3 WOMEN, with its wide-open buildings and stark desert spaces, IMAGES remains more focused, more intimate, with a smaller cast, with smaller rooms, and with beautifully-photographed Irish hillscapes that seem at once grandiose yet magically compact, that begin to seem as haunted and sinister as the film's protagonist.

Never as popular as it should have been, IMAGES deserves to be rediscovered.

WENDIGO (2001), Directed and Written by Larry Fessenden

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"You know, a lot of people make up stories to make sense of the world. It's a big world, after all, and nobody really understands how it all works.... That's what myths are: they help us talk about stuff.... It's important to know that they're just myths, they're just stories. You'll end up being very disappointed when things don't come true that you're wishing for."

After I saw WENDIGO for the first time last night, I went online to check reviews. These were almost universally negative, which took me by surprise and saddened me.

The trouble, I think, is that WENDIGO comes with expectations of its being a horror film, when it actually works better as a film that, like THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, like THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, looks at the fears of a child too keenly aware of the fears of his parents, of the world around him, yet a child unable to fall back on experience or on mature insight to understand these fears. And so the child mythologizes: a method of coping that leads to complications of its own.

For most of the story, WENDIGO focuses tightly on this chilhood perspective, and in my view, succeeds. The hyper-awareness of a child, which, for an adult, might seem like paranoia, is conveyed well by dark rooms in an unfamiliar house, by shifting trees and gusts of snow, by the sudden dead stillness of a frozen landscape, by the barely-understood comments and conversations of parents who must deal with fears of their own.

WENDIGO captures these ordinary yet heightened aspects of life with good attention to detail, with dramatic set-ups and pay-offs that seem down-to-Earth yet unsettling. At the climax, however, its tight focus on the child and on his family shifts to something else, and this, I think, is a mistake: it jettisons the intensity of that narrow focus, and it also drags in traditional horror images that the film lacks technical resources to pull off. I regret this choice: it might not kill the film, but it does harm it.

In the final moments, WENDIGO returns to its narrow, subjective focus on child and family. The result is an ending that carries emotional weight, that succeeds on its own terms, that made me glad to have spent my time with a film that many despise as a waste of time.

WENDIGO plays by its own rules, pays attention to its own concerns, and if you can accept this, then I can recommend it.