Unlike some more
strictly art-house films, a lot of Horror cannot be viewed entirely
outside of its cultural context. As a form of popular culture, it
corresponds closely to social or political circumstances, including
the appetites of the public. This is what makes Horror so interesting
as a genre, it reflects the dynamic between people and institutions.
The brief success of the Paranormal Activity series is a prime
example of this, illustrating a clear logic of supply and demand.
Just as the effects of a horror film linger with us long after the
credits have rolled, so too can its ideas and implications stay and
influence us on a wider cultural level. Establishing an orthodoxy of
popular Horror can be damaging to those that stray from it. Such was
the case for M. Night Shyamalan's The Village (2004) and
Robert Egger's The Witch (2016), both victims of false
expectations. Currently, Horror suffers from a very narrow emotional
and intellectual spectrum. In truth, we're horrified by a lot more
than we ever see on screen, and we're scared in a variety of
different ways. The industry has abandoned this in favour of simple,
tried and tested formulas that bring the production of new culture to
a halt. Ofcourse genre is defined by its conventions, but it also
relies on innovation within these conventions, approaching things
from a different perspective and bringing in new elements, to
progress.
As such, Both
Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity, despite their good
bits, can be partially blamed for their contribution to popular
culture. Whilst we live in a world where pop culture can be
transported and replicated across the globe, these films highlight a
specifically American tendency which arises from its own cultural and
social formations. This week I'll be looking at the British film;
Jonathan Miller's Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968).
The Ghost, with its attachment to place and time, serves as a very
good illustration of cultural differences in cinema, and comparing
these two films to Poltergeist
and Paranormal
Activity is
proof of this. In The
English Ghost
Peter Ackroyd writes,
"The popularity of
the English ghost tradition – the English see more ghosts than
anyone else – is deeply rooted in its peculiar mingling of
Germanic, Nordic and British superstitions. The English are also in
many respects obsessed with the past, with ruins, with ancient
volumes. It is the country where archaeology is placed on national
television, and where every town and village has its own local
historian." (Peter Ackroyd, The English Ghost, 2010)
In Poltergeist,
there is a gap between the pristine, new suburban house and the
Native American burial ground it stands on, whereas the continuity of
History is a lot more present in English ghost stories. Rather than
echoing the utter devastation of racial genocide and colonisation,
the English supernatural is usually found tucked away in small and
hidden corners. The ghost is far more likely to be a Romantic
manifestation of the vertigo felt by people when confronted by
sublime, ancient places. This is the case with many of M. R. James'
stories, which often involve a city-dweller travelling out to
somewhere in the countryside and undergoing a supernatural
experience. A lot of the time, usually in country houses, the
supernatural presence (often ancestral) is tolerated and accepted as a
necessary part of the home, providing some sort of bond between
family and place, and thus spiritually legitimising heritage and
ownership. The English ghost can still be hugely political though;
its poetic undercurrents embody the uneasy relationships between
classes and the shifting of urban/rural dynamics. Sometimes the ghost
is a manifestation of tragic, forbidden love, or deeply buried family
secrets, dead relatives who refused to conform in life. Other times
the ghost represents the oppression of rural peasantry, the moving of
the nation from agriculture to industry and then to finance,
resulting in the depopulation of the countryside.
By the time of M. R.
James, the English countryside was an eerie and uncanny place, the
pastoral qualities often shrouding something much darker and
disturbing. An example of this can be found in his story, A View
from a Hill, cited by Robert Macfarlane as one of the author's
"most unsettling" in the article, "The eeriness of theEnglish Countryside" (click for link). It's about a Cambridge
academic who travels down to the deep south-west of England to stay
with a friend. When they propose to go on a long walk, the academic
asks if he can borrow some binoculars, whereupon his friend gives him
an old, heavy pair in a wooden box which he explains were made by a
local antiquary who died mysteriously years earlier. On a hilltop,
the academic looks out to another green hill which is dense with
trees and then, viewing it through the binoculars, sees that it has
altered radically and become barren and bleak, with a dead body
hanging from a gibbet. This is only the opening of the story, but it
serves almost as a checklist for M. R. James stories; the rational
academic, the deep and idyllic countryside, the deceased antiquarian
and the ancient artefact, the reveal of an unsettling, eery other
side. All these elements can be boiled down to a narrative of
progress versus conservation, wich isn't so much a battle as an
exploration of the two forces. The same goes for James' other story,
Oh, Whistle, and I'll come to You, My Lad, which was adapted
in 1968 by Jonathan Miller for the BBC and re-titled, Whistle and
I'll Come to You.
Whistle and I'll
Come to You (1968, dir. Jonathan Miller)
Set along the coast of
East Anglia, Whistle and I'll Come to You sees
Geography and History converge in a way wholly typical of M. R.
James. It follows an arrogant Cambridge academic, Professor Parkin
(played by Michael Hordern), staying at a guest house who, one day,
stumbles upon an old grave. From it, he finds a bone whistle which he
decides to keep and, back in his hotel room, he notices that it's
inscribed with the words, "Quis est iste qui venit", which
translates to, "Who is this who is coming?". After blowing
on the whistle, the wind picks up outside and, later that night, he
hears noises in his room. Parkin's self-assured, academic rationality
is slowly and steadily brought into question as he faces increasingly
bizarre occurrences that one wouldn't hesitate to call supernatural.
The
film builds to a quiet and unnerving climax which is made all the
more powerful for its simplicity. It is an efficient and effective
horror masterpiece that is by turns chilling and hilarious, and it is
perhaps this latter quality which maintains its status as a classic.
Professor Parkin is a brilliant creation, detached from reality by
his introvertedness and pompous pretension. He mumbles incoherently
like a pot boiling over with useless self-importance, and his
pedantically calculated responses seem unaccustomed to physical speech,
perhaps rather more suited to being written out on a letter behind a
cushy desk. He is a cartoon philistine whom the audience can laugh at
as much as they can be frightened with simultaneously. These small
details and comical flourishes do more to characterise and entertain
than many latter day "non-believer" horror protagonists.
Incidentally, a lot of recent horror seems so much engaged
in creating a marketable and scary monster
that they forget to give their protagonists a personality. With a
monster so intangible and seemingly absent from sight, it is
Hordern's job to imbue the ghost with a psychological presence and
reflect it through his character. And when he finally drops his
condescending
affectation out of sheer terror, one can only be convinced of a
supernatural presence.
This
psychological reflection serves as one of three essential ingredients
to any good ghost story, with the other two being; place and time.
The bleak and windswept Norfolk coast, punctuated by the eternal roll
of the waves and a watchful but apathetic sun, encapsulates these
other ingredients perfectly. A grave, overgrown with vines and hidden
away, evokes a sense of temporality, of life returned to the Earth,
whispering from a forgotten corner of the landscape. Parkin, the
mortal intruder, disturbs this natural balance and pays the price for
it. But one can only be sufficiently moved by this paranormal threat
if they invest themselves enough in the setting. The place-time
continuum is one that has the effect of dwarfing the individual and
his ability to reason. They become overshadowed by not just the scars
and memory of a shifting and eternal landscape, but their innermost
thoughts and feelings, a primal instinct which is much greater than
them. Ghost stories are about our involuntary animal reaction to a
place, anthropomorphising it with a malevolent and omnipotent agency.
The idea of a "ghost" draws on the inexplicable and
concentrates it into a mysterious phantom Other who always has a
greater claim to place than the mortal individual. Where the
individual has conscious knowledge, the ghost has unconscious
knowing.
The
geographical focus of a ghost, though, cannot be attributed to a
nation. Rather, a ghost belongs to a locality. Folklore and myth
precede the existence of nations, and are created from the act of
dwelling. Ghosts are particular to a house or village, tangible
places. The nation, on the other hand, is abstract. The only way in
which one can have a discussion about the ghosts of different nations
is simply to find patterns in their geographies. America has a lot of
wide open flat spaces, deserts, mountains, old sacred grounds and new
developments, and therefore the type of ghost which occurs will
correspond to these features of landscape. The English, on the hand,
have a landscape filled with history, green rolling hills, curving
roads, ancient villages and towns, ruins. Both nations have their own
civil wars to draw from (historical violence and struggle always
makes a good ghost). Britain has the ghosts of Empire, the US has the
ghosts of the slave-owning south. But only in these patterns can we
associate the paranormal with a nation. Culture exists first and
foremost on a regional scale, and the folklore of, say, Yorkshire,
would differ greatly from that of Somerset. One has to take into
account the socio-economic aspects of an area, how populous it is,
its language and colloquialisms, its own particular history, to get a
true understanding of the ghosts one can find there.
I'm
currently reading George Monbiot's Feral
(2016), in which there's a chapter about how the drastic spike in
big-cat sightings is a collective psychological response to our need
to re-wild ourselves, attributing it to a much older phenomenon,
"Certain paranormal phenomena afflict every society, and these
phenomena appear to reflect our desires; desires of which we may not
be fully conscious." He notes how Victorians saw more ghosts
because of their higher mortality rates. This is analogous to my own
ideas, of the ghost as a romantic response to the place-time
continuum. Their attachment to the land could be seen as inherently
conservative, but in the impermanence of things they could also be
simply distant memories. There isn't a simple answer to what a ghost
represents; they are that which is beyond
reason, as we see in Whistle and I'll Come to You.
This is more the case than in Poltergeist
and Paranormal Activity,
which essentially rationalise the ghosts into being. There could be
any number of reasons for this, be it; historical, religious,
cultural or geographical. Typically, the English ghost story stops
where the comprehension starts.
