If you like your horror cinema to be easily classified바카라the common categories include 바카라psychological바카라 vs 바카라supernatural바카라, or 바카라quietly creepy바카라 vs 바카라full of jump scares바카라바카라you might be intrigued by the Malayalam film Bhoothakaalam, about a middle-aged woman and her son battling personal demons. In tone, setting and characterisation, this is a subdued work rather than one of explicit terrors. Asha (Revathi) and Vinu (Shane Nigam) seem afflicted by a sadness, the causes of which aren바카라t spelt out, though we grasp things about their past and present바카라a husband/father who died, leaving behind unhappiness and debt; a boy who misses him and sees his mother as clinging; a woman who can바카라t conceive of life without her son.
But while Bhoothakaalam maintains its grounded tone, it also has things that go bump in the night바카라 and there is a haunted house too (albeit, in a bright residential area, far from the archetype of the isolated mansion). Without giving away too much, midway through the narrative there is a slight shift in our perceptions about what is going on, and a sense that subtle and supernatural can go together.
바카라Isn바카라t it just a house?바카라 someone says when the possibility of demoniac spirits comes up, 바카라made of stones, cement, mud, wood.바카라 But what if a brick-and-mortar entity can respond to the conflicts of the people living in it? In one tense dinner-table scene, as mother and son start to argue and voices are raised, the camera pointedly focuses on the window curtains in the background바카라they might be moving a little more than expected, or is it just the wind? Here and elsewhere, one gets the impression that the house is somehow feeding on their negative energies. Asha and Vinu have become distanced from each other, and they need to rebuild their trust for the monster to be defeated.
Which means that like so many horror films, Bhoothakaalam is essentially about loneliness and alienation. 바카라If he leaves, who will I have? Won바카라t I be alone here?바카라 Asha asks in an early scene when it is suggested that Vinu travels elsewhere for a good job. There is an echo in her despairing words of the most famous horror film about an intense mother-son bond, Alfred Hitchcock바카라s Psycho, in which a young man is seemingly tied forever by an umbilical cord, unable to move away from his mother바카라s presence.
When I first watched Psycho as a shy adolescent living with a recently divorced mother, the film touched me in ways I couldn바카라t articulate. There was something so powerful about the sense of decay and stasis, about the vulnerable awkwardness on Norman Bates바카라s face as he tried to express his feelings to a stranger. Or his indignant response to the accusation that he might be trying to leave the Bates Motel and start a new life elsewhere. (바카라This place happens to be my only world. I grew up in that house up there.바카라) Today I still spend much of my working day in the flat that my mother and I moved to in 1987, and Psycho is never far from my mind when I wander its empty rooms바카라including the room she died in a few years ago. I think about how our living spaces can inhabit us as much as we inhabit them.
The horror genre offers plenty of room for reflections of this sort. Perhaps this is also why it is a surprise to learn, late in Bhoothakaalam, that Asha and Vinu had been living in their house for a short time, and on rent바카라I had assumed it was an old family house where their entire personal histories had unfolded.
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Horror literature and cinema have long mined the idea of a haunted house as a mirror to the states of mind of the people in it바카라from Shirley Jackson바카라s iconic novel The Haunting of Hill House (about experiments in fear conducted by a doctor with a small group of people) to Stephen King바카라s The Shining (a writer takes up a position as the off-season caretaker of a large, snowbound hotel and finds the place exerting a spell on him) to Sarah Waters바카라s The Little Stranger (a family that was once well-off continues to stay in their crumbling estate). The filmed adaptations of these works make visual or aural links between the ominous setting and the dark crannies in the inhabitants바카라 minds. In the 1963 film The Haunting바카라adapted from Jackson바카라s novel바카라a distorting lens suggests the oddness of the house바카라s spaces; Stanley Kubrick바카라s 1980 film The Shining uses long Steadicam takes that emphasise the agoraphobia-inducing vastness of the hotel.
Many modern horror filmmakers make a fetish out of being restrained and realistic, as if there were something inherently distasteful about making viewers jump out of their seats in the old way (or maybe it바카라s just that the popcorn is now so expensive that nobody wants to risk spilling it!).
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But once in a while we still find films like Jennifer Kent바카라s The Babadook (2014), which successfully operate in multiple modes. This is at one level a 바카라creature feature바카라바카라the half-glimpsed bogeyman is as otherworldly as they come바카라but the story바카라s heart is the relationship between a protective single mother and her little boy whom others see as disturbed. Other acclaimed recent films바카라from Ari Aster바카라s Midsommar and Hereditary to Jordan Peele바카라s Us and John Krasinski바카라s A Quiet Place바카라also get their bleakness, and in some cases their redemptive power, from strained filial relationships바카라a young woman tries to cope with the sudden suicide-murder of her family, another family has to perfectly plan and synchronise its every action if it wants to stay alive in a dystopian scenario.
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While the alienation theme can derive from complex parent-child relationships of this sort, there are other ways of being cut off from the 바카라normal바카라 world. 바카라I must have gotten off the main road,바카라 says Marion Crane, a young woman who finds herself at the Bates Motel after having escaped her home-town with stolen money. 바카라Nobody ever stops here anymore unless they바카라ve done that,바카라 replies Norman. Marion바카라s theft has led her, literally, into the 바카라galat rasta바카라 and a subterranean world.
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The trope of the lonely or isolated woman has also fuelled many classics over the decades, going back at least to Val Lewton바카라s 1942 Cat People (and extending forward through the 1970s and 80s to films targeted at male viewers, which centred on the voyeuristic thrills that came from seeing a woman in peril). In these stories, the protagonist might be alienated by circumstances or personality, and dealing with some combination of mental illness or societal repression. There are obvious subtexts, especially when the story is set in conservative frameworks where it is seen as undesirable for women to be untethered (or 바카라too independent바카라).
Thus the pregnant Rosemary in Rosemary바카라s Baby (1968) needs to be controlled by smiling neighbours who are really a satanic cult; they can바카라t allow her autonomy, she must be cut off from close friends who might form a support circle. In the poignant French film Eyes Without a Face (1960), a disfigured young woman wanders sadly around her large mansion while her surgeon father바카라another concerned but controlling parent바카라tries to restore her face. In the Japanese classic Onibaba (1964), an old woman becomes unhinged as she realises that she might be abandoned by her daughter-in-law (they live alone in the grasslands, stealing from wounded samurai). And in one of my favourite B-movies, the cheaply made but very effective Carnival of Souls (1962), a woman named Mary emerges from a lake after an accident and, disoriented, tries to negotiate her surroundings. Is she literally dead바카라a zombie바카라or is her confusion an allegory for trying to make a fresh start and repeatedly coming up against dead ends?
It바카라s easy to imagine some of these lonely-people films in conversation across space and time. For instance, think of Roman Polanski바카라s Repulsion (1965), Pavan Kirpalani바카라s Phobia (2016), and Ram Gopal Varma바카라s Kaun? (1999). In each, a woman is in a confined space, trying to make sense of her predicament. The specifics are different바카라one character may be sexually repressed, another might be the caged victim of a domineering man, the third may be dealing with a menacing threat outside the house바카라but each of them is trying to keep monsters, real or imagined, at bay.
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But to my mind, the best horror film about loneliness and despair is one that doesn바카라t yet exist바카라it is the never-made film version of one of the scariest, saddest books I have read, Helen McCloy바카라s Through a Glass Darkly. The story centres on this indelible idea바카라a melancholy young woman named Faustina is faced with the possibility that she has a ghostly doppelganger, a shadow self that is impersonating her and getting her into trouble, and will eventually come to claim her soul. 바카라In early childhood,바카라 she muses, 바카라You stare at your face in the mirror and look at your hands and feet and say to yourself: I am me. I am not anyone else. Yet, something inside you goes on feeling that it바카라s not quite true.바카라 The book바카라s climax involves both this spectral double and a reflecting surface in a house바카라a perfect depiction of inner and outer spaces바카라glass and cement and a tormented mind바카라coming together to devastating effect. If there is ever a film of this novel, make sure to hold that expensive popcorn tub as tightly as you can.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Under the Skin")
(Views expressed are personal)
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Jai Arjun Singh is an independent critic and author
