IN FABRIC
A cursed red dress brings destruction throughout In Fabric, the new ghostly tale from Berberian Sound Studio director Peter Strickland
Director Peter Strickland gives us the measurements for his new movie about a haunted dress.
To look at the films of Peter Strickland is like being transported into a rarefied universe, somehow both familiar and otherworldly. “I guess that’s what I look for personally when I watch a film – I want to lose myself in something,” he says over coffee at London’s Hospital Club. “I don’t want to see real life. I don’t want to see social realism. I get enough of that reading the paper!”
From his 2009 debut, the rape-revenge drama Katalin Varga to Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and The Duke Of Burgundy (2014) – films immersed respectively in Italian giallo and 1970s soft-core erotica – Strickland has brought a stylish and cine-literate touch to everything he’s done. And so it goes for his new film, In Fabric, a supernatural-tinged tale of what can only be described as a killer red dress.
It begins as middle-aged divorcee Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) buys a crimson gown for a date from an old-fashioned department store, Dentley & Soper’s, run by the linguistically florid Miss Luckwood (Fatma Mohamed). It just so happens the garment’s cursed, wreaking havoc upon those who wear it. For Strickland, it’s a far cry from most contemporary horror.
“What’s terrifying about death is that it’s random,” he says. “My problem with some horror films is that there’s a tacit understanding that the victim deserves to die, perhaps because they’re fornicating behind the bike sheds, and I never saw what the problem with that was anyway! I don’t think anyone deserves to die. If you make a death moralistic in some way, then you lose that irrational power.”
secrets of success
When it came to casting, it was Berberian star Toby Jones that suggested Jean-Baptiste, who famously starred in Mike Leigh’s 1996 adoption saga Secrets & Lies. Despite his lack of interest in social realism, Strickland went out and bought a copy on DVD. “Thank God [it’s 20 years old], it was cheaper to buy!” he laughs. “I just fast-forwarded to the bits with Marianne… I thought she was wonderful. I still haven’t seen the whole film in one go.”
With the striking production design and evocative musical score by Cavern Of AntiMatter, In Fabric appears to be another nod to the grisly Italian giallo genre made popular by directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento. “I did a press junket the other week and every question was about Italian horror,” he sighs. “I’m not bothered by it – I love those films – but it just wasn’t on my mind. What was on my mind was mostly just department stores.”
Come again? “My attraction to department stores is the same as my attraction to those films,” he continues, entirely seriously. “They’re very flamboyant, very heightened – the artifice, the colours, the production design – so there are similarities between
Death’s random. If you make a death moralistic, then you lose that irrational power
department stores and giallo. I think that’s why the connection is being made.” This may be the very first – and last – time that these two disparate elements ever get compared.
Strickland, who grew up in Reading, goes all nostalgic when he recalls Jacksons, the Berkshire town’s flagship department store. “It closed down five years ago. We wanted to shoot there because the building was intact inside. They shot an episode of Endeavour there. I’m still jealous of that episode! It was wonderful, Jackson’s, really wonderful, but we missed the boat. It was completely gutted out.”
The production instead shot in Allders in Croydon, another defunct department store, while Strickland turned to other influences to make In Fabric. From Ricky Gervais’s The Office to the mannequin sculptures of Edward Kienholz, Herk Harvey’s 1962 horror Carnival Of Souls, the “homoerotic leg-lock” in the lawnfight in Lethal Weapon and, most bizarrely, ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) videos on YouTube.
“It’s just these videos of people whispering or turning the pages of catalogues,” he says. (It’s used partly to aid sleeping, but fits right in with Strickland’s very tactile atmosphere.) “I guess this film was designed to fall asleep to – it’s an extended ASMR YouTube video,” he laughs. “You get what you’re walking into. If you fall asleep, you’re not going to lose yourself.”
For all Strickland’s protestations that In Fabric is not strictly horror, it has the capacity to seriously creep you out. Like the scene with Sheila’s “possessed” washing machine, possibly the scariest domestic appliance since the TV in Poltergeist. “If we had more money, more time, we’d have re-set another washing machine,” he sighs. “But we literally had one take and we had to work with it, so it was frustrating!”
Working on a budget lower than most Hollywood horrors, Strickland has nevertheless crafted something mysterious and multilayered. “There’s no single meaning or single message,” he says. “I guess a lot of the cinema I love is experiential and sensory. For me, it’s all about writing characters that I love and putting them in a world which is very atmospheric and textured, and seeing what happens.” JM
In Fabric opens in cinemas on 28 June.