Horror Madness returns to what is perhaps the oldest type of horror: the ghost story. Stanley Kubrick’s acknowledged (by everyone except Stephen King) classic The Shining faces off against Dario Argento’s colorful (as always) masterpiece Suspiria.
See the introduction and full slate here http://oftenveryvile.ghost.io/introducing-horror-movie-madness/.
There’s something about a woman running away from a haunted house - it might be one of the most indelible images in horror. It seems relevant that it’s a frequent image on covers of pulp gothic novels - books which maybe aren’t quite horror, but aren’t quite romances either. You can probably find a copy of Jane Eyre with this image on the cover. Or Rebecca.
What that image forces you to remember is that this is a genre for women. Because what is it that makes a house frightening, really? There’s no reason to overcomplicate things: a house encloses. It separates the private world from the public one. A house is the place where the labor of women happens: domestic, reproductive, silent, and uncompensated. A house is where your family is, for better and (in the gothic, and in horror) for worse. And families are haunted things; the places where they reside are haunted places, full of secrets and inheritances and obscure, opaque rules. The people who can hurt you the most are in your house.
Both The Shining and Suspiria close with a woman running away from a haunted house. Leaving, for those women, means leaving more than just the place. It means leaving family, security, ambition, friends. It means leaving what’s known and venturing into god knows what, because what’s known is too dangerous to be stayed with. Both women, significantly, run out into a storm. We don’t know what happens to either one of them, except that they do escape. Whatever they leave behind, with nothing for it to haunt, can only destroy itself.
The Shining is a story about an abusive father, and the wife and son who find the strength to escape him. Kubrick understood this, much to the anger of the story’s writer. Stephen King thought he was writing a story about an alcoholic writer who was too weak for his own demons; his Jack Torrance is a flawed human being who is turned into a monster. The Jack Torrance of Kubrick’s film was always a monster; his wife and son were always terrified of him.
The gender matters in Suspiria are a little more opaque; this is a story mostly populated by women. There’s something here (maybe something sexist) about the suffocation of single-sex environments, the way they can become consumed with paranoia and gossip and oppressive hierarchies. There are few men here, but that doesn’t make this place a refuge from violence. That’s the message, ultimately, of both films and of the gothic in general: there is no refuge from violence, because it was never out there. It was always in here, at home, and in the family.
Both of these films are frightening, very much so, but I think The Shining holds more personal, deeply felt terror. Kubrick doesn’t need to be given any more flowers, but his films are always astonishingly beautiful, and I don’t know that they deserve their reputation for coldness. Nothing about The Shining feels remote to me; everything is visceral and real, almost too real. Shelley Duvall, truly, is the beating heart of the film. She needs to be that fragile, that brittle, and that terrified for her later bravery to mean something. When we meet her she has already been ground down by years with an abusive man; the Jack she sees in the Overlook is a more extreme version of her husband but the elements of him were always there, and we know she knows it. She has always been afraid of him. He has always resented her, both her fear and her loyalty, and he has always needed both. Her triumph (and her son’s triumph) is that they finally deprive him of both. He’s left alone with his demons.
Suspiria is also beautiful, in a different way. The beauty is not austere; it’s hot and feverish. No one could accuse Argento’s films of being remote. The atmosphere inside the dancing school is like that of a too hot greenhouse, where the flowers are ripened to the point of rot. You can almost smell what it’s like in there. The repressed emotions and histories seem ready to explode, and they do.
I like both of these films very much. But as you can probably already tell, The Shining is a richer text. There’s a reason a documentary was made about the various insane theories around the film; it’s a film that can support many and varied readings, and multiple watches. I think I’ve seen it at least ten times, and will probably see it many more.
The winner is, has to be, The Shining.