Pitch black
THE POWER | Writer-director Corinna Faith sets out to enlighten with her chilling ghost story…
As a child, Corinna Faith loved dark fairytales. As a teen, in the ’80s, she attended sleepovers with girlfriends to watch Fright Night, A Nightmare On Elm Street and “all the slashers”. But it was gothic ghost stories that especially appealed, and she always knew she wanted to make one… if only she could find a tale with enough substance to sustain the shivers.
“At the time, the whole institutional scandals around Jimmy Savile and the children’s homes were breaking,” she remembers. “Those lost young lives felt very close to being a ghost story. So I was doing some research of the time and I came across an image of a woman working in an office with a gas lamp beside her. It really spoke to me because it was of that moment but so gothic, so classic – that Victorian iconography around ghost stories.”
In the UK, in the 1970s, there were blackouts when the miners and electricity workers went on strike, and Faith’s unnerving film, The Power, takes place in 1974, at a hospital in
East London where most of the wards are plunged into darkness each night. Val (Rose Williams) is a young nurse just starting out, and as if navigating the patriarchal power structure isn’t enough, she’s soon convinced that the hospital is haunted by a girl who suffered a terrible fate.
“It was such a loaded time in our history – sexual politics were so awry and dangerous,” says Faith, who conjures truly disturbing scares by having Val experience unseen hands tug at her clothing. “The bigger picture was talking about institutional misogyny… the experience of being a young woman walking into a situation where there are a lot of other powerful elements that are around you. But then I also realised, in the edit, I’d pulled myself into it. I’d made a story about a girl who doesn’t have a voice in a situation. The journey is one of a girl finding her voice, however angry that voice is.”
She ponders. “I was not ever involved in institutional abuse, but I don’t think it’s any secret, postMe Too, that there are very few women who will not look at that situation and relate. Things happen that are hard to respond to and hard to articulate. Some are subtle, some extreme. Big things, insidious things. I was trying to get all of that into the story.”
So while The Power works as a classic ghost story, it also delivers an important message. Some of those slasher movies Faith watched as a teenager were rather dubious, she now realises, and she took that on board: “I thought about 14-year-old girls being my audience, and what I wanted to say to them.” JG
ETA | 8 APRIL / THE POWER STREAMS ON SHUDDER THIS MONTH.