Go down to the basement and you’re in for a brilliant surprise
SUPERNATURAL
W‘It has the best use I’ve seen to date of Detroit’s famous suburban decay’
E’VE all seen the moment in a horror film when the young central character hesitates at the top of the stairs leading down to the sort of darkly sinister basement that no creepy American house can apparently be without.
And we all know what happens next: either the door to the stairs closes behind them, the basement lights flicker and then go out, or there’s something really nasty down there. Just waiting.
But it’s a sign of what a good and effective horror picture Barbarian is that when just such a moment presented itself in the press screening, battle-hardened critics who really ought to know better found themselves shouting at the screen. ‘Noooo, don’t go down there…’
But Tess, played very nicely by British actress Georgina Campbell, ignored us completely. Down into the darkness she duly descended, as genre rules dictate she must. Big mistake. Huge.
But not her first in a film so cleverly set up by film-maker and actor Zach Cregger, who hasn’t directedafeaturefilmformore than ten years but may find himself pretty busy after this.
What Cregger, who supplies the screenplay as well, does so impressively is anchor his story in a modern world we recognise all too readily. So when Tess arrives at her Airbnb and finds it double-booked, it feels like the sort of foul-up that might happen to any of us.
She should leave but it’s late at night, there’s a medical convention in town and her fellow occupant, Keith (Bill Skarsgaard), seems nice enough, even if she doesn’t trust him completely.
So, having taken the precaution of washing his sheets first, she takes the bed while he kips down on the sofa. I’m not going to spoil what happens next, but look out for a brilliant switch of direction halfway through and the best use I’ve seen to date of Detroit’s famous suburban decay, where unwanted houses are literally returning to the forest. If you liked Smile, you’ll love this.
First things first: Bros is pronounced not as in Matt and Luke Goss and When Will I Be Famous fame but as in the American contraction of ‘brothers’, which rhymes with ‘toes’. That duly established, it is also quite camp, modestly touching and wickedly funny.
This is essentially a gay romcom with Bobby (Billy Eichner), an uptight New York intellectual who has turned campaigning for the LGBTQ community into a full-time job, falling almost instantly in love with hunky Aaron (Luke Macfarlane) who, when he’s not prowling dark nightclubs with his shirt off, is actually a probate lawyer.
It won’t be for everyone, but if you’re mystified by the minefield that gender politics has become – as the film begins Bobby has just won ‘Cis White Gay Man Of The Year’ – it’s refreshing to find a film that confidently pokes fun at the subject while, deep down, taking it very seriously indeed.
With Eichner also co-writing,
‘It turns out to be a ponderous overlong satire addressing the evils of capitalism’
look out for an almost endless stream of one-liners that includes gags about AIDS, Glee, the musical Dear Evan Hansen and even Albus Dumbledore.
Triangle Of Sadness – a title that refers to the frown lines between the eyebrows – may have won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival but turns out to be a ponderous, overlong satire addressing the evils of capitalism.
With the world’s financial markets in disarray, it couldn’t be more timely, but it’s hard to enjoy spending time with this ghastly collection of the mega-rich on board a luxury yacht where the captain is drunk and a big storm happens to be approaching.
There are no prizes for spotting the metaphor and, be warned, with sea-sickness featuring spectacularly, you won’t want to eat beforehand.
With his ubiquitous handkerchief and hallmark growl of ‘Oh, yeah’, the legendary jazz trumpeter and singer Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong undoubtedly did play up to his largely white audiences – Uncle Tom-ing, as it is now derisorily termed.
But as Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, Sacha Jenkins’s documentary on Apple TV+, acknowledges, he did what he did to survive.
The Haunting Of Borley Rectory: The Story Of A Ghost Story Sean O’Connor Simon & Schuster €28 ★★★★★
LA 17-year-old labourer’s death during the houses’s construction set the tone
ikeSeanO’Connor, author of The Haunting Of Borley Rectory, I too was obsessed with the story of that sinister Essex house when I was a boy. As part of the socalled ‘Haunted Generation’ who grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I’m sure we weren’t alone… My introduction to ‘the Most Haunted House in England’ was via my much-thumbed copy of the Usborne Guide To The Supernatural World, though O’Connor’s came from The Hamlyn Book Of Ghosts In Fact And Fiction, which just happened to be written by Bram Stoker’s great-nephew.
He reproduces the garish cover of that formative book inside his exhaustive new account: it depicts a burning Borley – complete with ghostly figures at an upper-floor window – loomed over by a terrifying, gaping-mouthed, blank-eyed apparition and the bewildered nightdress-wearing victim at the heart of the hauntings. No wonder O’Connor – and a whole generation – was captivated.
However, we were not the first to be drawn into the otherworldly orbit of this ordinary-looking (some would say ugly) red-brick Victorian house, perched on a ridge near the North Essex/Suffolk border. Built opposite the church and completed in 1863, the sprawling country residence was commissioned by the Rev. Henry Bull. The signs were unpromising from the start, with the death of a 17-year-old labourer, John Whyard – who drowned in the local river during the house’s construction – setting the tone for what was to come, and causing mutterings among the superstitious locals about bad omens.
Classic English haunting tropes soon became associated with the house: a ghostly horse-drawn coach driven by two headless men was sighted by Harry Bull, the new
rector and Henry’s son; the grounds were allegedly the site of an ancient plague pit; and, in July 1900, four of Harry’s sisters claimed to have together witnessed the figure of a nun walking through the garden in the gloaming, a tale that would become etched into Bull family folklore and oftrepeated over the next 50 years.
Supernatural phenomena began to ramp up, however, with the arrival of Eric and Mabel Smith, an Anglo-Catholic couple from India, who took over religious duties in 1928, following the death of the Rev. Bull the previous year. (Soon, Harry’s own restless spirit would be said to walk the house’s corridors.) Arriving as outsiders in a place that had become accustomed to decades of the same family tending to their spiritual needs, the Smiths must have come as something of a shock to the isolated rural parish.
The by-now rather outdated and difficult to maintain rectory would not have helped matters: cold, damp, rat-infested and without electricity, the 26-room mansion seemed perfect for a ghost or two. During their first days of residence, Mabel found the skull of a woman among a pile of
The rector’s sisters witnessed the figure of a nun walking in the garden in the gloaming
rubbish in the library, which can’t have settled her nerves. Before long, peculiar noises, mysterious lights, the movement of objects and even the possible manifestation, once again of the spectral nun, had all occurred.
In desperation, the Smiths wrote to their daily newspaper, the Mirror, for advice, keen to have the rectory investigated by a respected psychical research organisation. What they were to unleash was a media furore – with hundreds of drunken sightseers descending on the grounds of the house, desperate for a glimpse of the nun or the ghostly carriage – and, crucially, the introduction into this strange narrative of ghost-hunter extraordinaire, Harry Price. A charismatic, self-made ‘psychic detective’ who would later drive a Rolls-Royce, Price was to become one of the two central figures in the Borley story – a story that was to dominate the next two decades of his life, and to cause endless controversy long after he had departed this mortal plane.
The Smiths did not last long in the dank old house, replaced in the summer of 1930 by another expat couple (from Canada), 52-year-old Rev. Lionel Foyster and his glamorous – soon-to-be-notorious – 31year-old wife, Marianne. With their arrival, poltergeistic activities in the rectory spiked (as did extramarital affairs and things that go bump in the night) – with increasingly violent episodes seemingly directed at Marianne. Mysterious messages appearing on the walls surely provided the inspiration for Shirley Jackson’s horror masterpiece The Haunting Of Hill House.
O’Connor’s book painstakingly takes us through all these decades of the rectory’s existence, while also giving us background context to the esoteric events on that Essex hilltop. At times, the sheer amount of detail can get a little overwhelming, but O’Connor’s account is entertaining and deftly told.
At the end, the most remarkable thing we’re left with is not the house but the complicated, haunted lives of the two main protagonists, Harry Price and Marianne Foyster. Their ghosts are sure to linger long in the memory of readers.