My partner and I were speculating in the course of a long drive last week about favorite authors we would like to have met. We've met a fair few of them, but she would like to have met Toni Morrison and I would like to have met Robert Bloch. I don't know what that says about us. An author I decided I would prefer not to have met is Shirley Jackson. On the evidence of her work and the general outline of her biography, I don't think I would have liked her. The dominant theme of her work is a neurotic paranoia that in her own life was apparently completely justified by the dynamics of her marriage. I watched the recent biopic starring Elisabeth Moss as Jackson and found myself nodding along even when I knew that they were fudging the details (they fudged the details a LOT). Jackson has been enjoying a bit of a renaissance lately, what with the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House and renewed interest in her last completed novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which serves as an ur-text for Park Chan-wook's Gothic potboiler, Stoker, and which was made into a film in 2018 by director Stacie Passon based on the book itself. Passon's film does an admirable job of meeting Jackson on her own terms, neurotic paranoia and all.
The story concerns the Blackwood sisters, Mary Katherine and Constance, who live in Blackwood Manor with their Uncle Julian, who is an invalid. Their parents passed away under mysterious circumstances and the general consensus among the townies is that Constance poisoned their parents with arsenic. Constance no longer goes into town. That job falls to Mary Katherine--Merricat, as she is known to everyone--who endures the scorn of the townies when she goes to get groceries and library books. The Blackwoods have always been the town squires. They have always lived in Blackwood manor. Only a handful of town people ever visit them, and Constance greets them politely, but they never drink their tea, or eat their food. One day, their estranged cousin Charles arrives with the intention of looting the safe in which the sisters protect their inherited wealth. Charles is dashing and sweeps Constance off her feet and plies her with promises of traveling the world. Merricat distrusts Charles, and when her distrust comes to a head, they have an argument that results in a fire that burns the mansion. The townies use this as an opportunity to vandalize and potentially loot the place. Merricat and Constance hide from Charles in the woods, and when they return to Blackwood Manor, the upper floors have been ruined and their Uncle Julian has died. But Charles isn't done with the sisters. And Merricat isn't done with him...
Film adaptations of Jackson have traditionally been a mixed bag. There are several short films and at least one feature film derived from "The Lottery," one film derived from "The Summer People," one film from The Bird's Nest, one film from the uncompleted Come Along With Me, and the various versions of The Haunting of Hill House. Some of these are good--Robert Wise's version of The Haunting is a damned masterpiece--but some of these are not. It is a surprise that it has taken this long for the movies to notice We Have Always Lived in the Castle, though in retrospect, it's also understandable. Because, what is this story? It feels like a horror story, but isn't really one. It feels like a melodrama, too, but isn't one. The catch-all of "Gothic" doesn't seem to do it justice, even though an enumeration of its themes and narrative strategies scream "Gothic." It seems a singular story from a particular author's private universe. We'll stick with Gothic. And Gothic melodrama isn't the same as Gothic horror. So how do you market this? Jackson's name, associated with Horror for decades at this point, helps. The filmmakers have tweaked the narrative some to align it more with the Gothic's offspring, the horror movie and the mystery story. It loses a little by doing this, even if it gains an audience.
In truth, it doesn't need the tweak. Merricat is an ideal goth girl heroine, whose psychosis drives her to extreme lengths. The bits of magic she places around the borders of her world align the film with a folk horror sensibility, while her secret is the kind of secret that motivates much more violent films. Jackson's touch is more delicate than that of someone like Jim Thompson or Robert Bloch, who both specialized in first-person accounts of murderous psychopaths, but Merricat in her way is both crazier and deadlier than those characters. At the outset, she lists both Richard Plantagenet and amanita phalloides among her favorite things in a paragraph that rivals the start of Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House for linguistic virtuosity. The film takes its cue from the Wise version of The Haunting when it comes to translating that paragraph by having Merricat--played by Taissa Farmiga--narrate the opening in voice over. But not the whole thing. The film leaves Richard III and death cap mushrooms out of the narration and prefers to show the audience these things instead. The filmmakers are very keen on showing and not telling, even though the choice of using Merricat's narration throughout undercuts that a little. It keeps the important parts, though. It keeps her musings about poisoning the whole town, and her desire to eat a child only to have Constance tell her that she doesn't know how to cook one. The main change is a big one, though, in which the sisters become accomplices in a crime that doesn't appear in the book, perhaps as an offering to a horror audience that might demand a higher body count. In truth, it's a path that the book very much could have taken, if Jackson were a more conventional writer. It makes for a more conventional film regardless.
Given the first-person nature of the film, even more than in the book, a viewer can be forgiven for wondering if the torment Merricat endures from the townies isn't her own paranoia. The taunting from children throughout certainly makes one understand why she might want to murder them all. There's a class element to this, too, given the wealth of the Blackwoods and the envy of the townies. The feeling of constant persecution is unsettling. So is the feeling of isolation.
The "facts" of the deaths of the rest of the Blackwoods would seem to be a warning to fortune hunters, but Charles shows up anyway. As I was watching the film, I kept wanting Charles to be played by Matthew Goode, even though Sebastian Stan is a perfectly fine actor and eye candy to boot. This is the lingering impression of Stoker, I think. Fortune hunters never come to good ends in Gothic films, and this film, unlike the book, follows that trend. Charlie is dashing and oily in equal measures here and it's entirely understandable why Constance might fall for him. It's equally understandable why Merricat might loathe him, even if there weren't that vague undercurrent of incest running through the film.
This is unusually well-cast. Farmiga has apparently gone into the family business, starring in her own line of horror movies in parallel with her sister Vera, but the parts she chooses are strikingly different. She's a good fit for Merricat. I wouldn't have thought Alexandra Daddario would be a good fit for Constance Blackwood, but I am happy to be wrong about this. Crispin Glover's performance as Uncle Julian is a nice bonus. He gives it a touch of strange. Where the film falls down is in its generation--or lack thereof--of mood. This is a digital production where the crispness of its image is a disadvantage. The visual quality of the film has the airlessness of a film made for streaming. There's nothing wrong with the actual direction of the film and the actual production design is handsome, but the cinematography drains some of the life out of it. It could stand to have more shadows.
Even so, a nominally faithful adaptation is surprising enough. My dad used to say "close enough for government work" all the time, and that's probably the case here. It's not bad at all. Not transcendent, mind you, which is its own kind of disappointment, but it'll do until transcendence comes along.
Welcome to this year's October Horror Movie Challenge. I'm participating in my friend, Aaron Christensen's annual fundraiser during this year's challenge. Aaron has chosen the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project as this year's recipient for our community's largess, so if you've got a few bucks lying around, here's a donation link for the donor drive. You know what to do.
As usual with the challenge, I'll be prioritizing films that are new to me, so I'm off to a good start there. I'll also be prioritizing pre-Code and silent horror this year, because during the last few decades, the genre has gotten too big to really track. We'll see how it goes.
My current progress:
New to me films: 1
Total films: 1
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