The Kasturi/Files: Episode Lucky 13: What Lies Beneath

It’s Lucky Day 13 for The Kasturi/Files here at Speculative Chic! If you’re new to this journey through horror movies for the month of October — welcome! And if you’ve been following us every day — welcome back! We bring you chitchat about our favorite (and sometimes not-so-favorite) dark and weird movies, and we throw you some book recs, and cocktail recipes — all from the demented minds of Sandra Kasturi and Gemma Files! For the Canadians reading, it’s Thanksgiving weekend, since ours is on the second Monday of October — very civilized! — not a month before Christmas! Honestly, I don’t know how you Yanks cope.

Sandra: Today we’re covering a movie I am completely and totally obsessed with. Seriously, I watch this movie every few months, to the point where my husband asks me, “Are you watching this again?” I cannot get enough of it. I mean, it’s a good movie — but even I can’t explain my crazy need to re-watch it ad infinitum. I’m talking about What Lies Beneath (2000, directed by Robert Zemeckis). I’m going to give you a HUGE SPOILER ALERT, even though the movie is twenty years old. Because if you haven’t seen the movie, you should really go and watch it before reading the rest of this column.

Gemma: This is always a good idea when the film in question is almost twenty years old, IMHO. 😉

Sandra: First of all, What Lies Beneath was written by Clark Gregg. Yes! Agent Coulson from the Avengers movies wrote the terrific script! (I am not sure why I find that incredibly exciting, but I do.) [Gregg adapted it from an earlier project by documentary filmmaker Sarah Kernochan, who used what she claimed was her own psychic experience as the basis for a considerably less thrilling script. —GF.] Director Zemeckis is also at the top of his game here, giving us an entertaining thrill ride as he almost always does, but with deeper, nastier themes at play as well: murder, infidelity, the give and take of marriage, and sacrifice . . . very specifically, what women give up to make marriage and children work, and how these sacrifices are still considered de rigeur.

The movie opens with Claire Spencer (a luminous Michelle Pfeiffer) submerged in her claw-footed bathtub, suddenly sitting up amidst weird whispers. Even that small moment is filled with tension, because you immediately wonder how long she’s been under water. Water, bathing, drowning are recurring themes in What Lies Beneath, bathroom water scenes linked to moments in and on the lake overlooked by the giant old house the Spencers live in. Norman Spencer (Harrison Ford) is a research scientist in genetics at a prestigious local university, endowed with a Chair for his discoveries by Norman’s own, even more successful (and dead) mathematician father.

Claire’s daughter from a previous marriage is heading off to college, so Claire finds herself at a loss in her big house, with Norman constantly at work. (“Well, I have the garden . . .”) It’s fascinating to watch Pfeiffer in this role. She plays Claire as a twitchy but controlled, fussily neurotic but still sweet, privileged WASP. Even her clothes are conservative and precise, just as everything in the house — no doubt filled and maintained by her — is equally immaculate and beautiful. It’s “Restoration Hardware porn” as author Michael Rowe calls it. Claire seemingly has everything together, but there’s obviously something wrong, something she’s repressed. What lies beneath, indeed.

Gemma: In my own review of What Lies Beneath, I remember talking about how beautifully it builds a haunting that expresses itself at first entirely through the manipulation of household objects, using them to trick Claire into discovering what she really does need to know — to look, literally, beneath the perfectly curated surfaces of the life she’s built, this cage of lovely furniture and assumptions that both shelters and traps her. It’s a bright, seemingly happy mirror which reflects a self-image that’s becoming increasingly difficult for her to recognize, especially when said reflection is carried over onto the surface of a murky lake underneath which she seems to glimpse the image of a drowned woman whose sharp, delicate bone structure just happens to almost match hers. Similarly, Claire’s soap opera-ish suspicion that the hard-fighting, hard-makeup-sexing couple next door might be swinging closer to murder than divorce is a superimposition, Claire refusing to look at her own marriage’s undercurrents by obsessing about someone else’s. “Sometimes I just think . . . it’s just too much . . . this thing, him . . . I think he’s going to kill me!” the woman next door sobs, through a creepy hole in Claire’s fence; is she talking about the blending/eating away of individual personality that accompanies most sexual and emotional passions, or it something more? Or is Claire on some level worrying that her love for Norman, coming when it did — in the traumatized wake of her first husband’s death — might have simply subsumed her, eaten away the person she was before, converting her into just one more faculty wife in a faculty town, let alone one more sharp-faced blonde in Norman’s bifurcated life?

(She did wrap her car around a tree a year ago, after all, doing 80 . . . for no reason, per se. And ever since Norman’s been acting like it’s because she’s fragile and loopy, but could it be she suspected things weren’t perfect, even then? That Norman might, one day, want to trade her in for a newer and slightly less annoying model?)

Sandra: Yes! And because of her loneliness and boredom, Claire’s suspicion about those neighbors becomes an obsession: the Feurs (Miranda Otto and James Remar) and their kooky (dangerous?) hijinks! When Mary Feur seems to have disappeared, Claire experiences weird phenomena, like pictures falling, her computer suddenly typing “MEF” and so on. She becomes convinced that Warren Feur has done away with Mary. In a wonderfully creepy (and hilarious) moment, Claire holds a séance with her best friend Jody (impishly played by Diana Scarwid) that’s designed to contact Mary’s supposedly dead “spirit,” to no avail. It’s a wonderfully Hitchcockian nod to Rear Window. Of course, Claire is proven wrong in her assumptions — publicly — and Norman says he’s starting to think she’s going off the deep end, empty nest-ing herself into a breakdown: skepticism, or gaslighting? Hard to tell the difference, in context. Afterwards, however, the supernatural occurrences still continue. Doors keep opening and unlocking, the tub fills up on its own, there’s writing on the mirror. It’s all dripping, steam and shadows, and beautifully shot.

Gemma: Zemeckis has an amazing facility for these almost Rube Golberg-ish sequences where something leads to something else that leads to something else, over and over, ad infinitum. One of my own personal favorites involves Claire overturning and breaking the glass of a particular photo again and again, discovering something new every time. Eventually she embeds a piece of glass in her toe that — in turn — slithers out of her grip when she extracts it; the bloody glass falls through a grate in the floor, leaving a trail like an arrow for her to follow. She then gets down on her knees to raise the cover, sees something gleaming, and feels around in the dust at the bottom, raises her hand with something else entirely . . . a necklace, someone else’s. She’ll recognize that necklace in a picture of a woman who, as far as she knows, has never entered her house. It’s proof, of what she doesn’t know yet — a crack in her perfect life, widening, widening. Tearing it until it shatters.

Sandra: Accidentally, Claire discovers that the “MEF” refers to Madison Elizabeth Frank, a beautiful young woman who went missing the same year Norman got a big award for his work — a woman who looked a lot like Claire. She tracks down Madison’s mother, impulsively stealing a lock of the missing woman’s hair from her room, and tries to do a séance of her own, to no effect. But Claire keeps fondling that lock of hair, and when Norman gets home, she’s . . . different. Claire’s dressed in a sexy red dress, and her eyes are now green instead of blue. She aggressively (and a bit violently) tries to seduce Norman — and there’s that great bit of dialogue that was in all the trailers. Claire, on top of Norman, whispers, “Do you think she’s beginning to suspect?” Norman, confused, says, “Who?” And Claire leans forward, green eyes practically glowing: “Your wife.” Norman, of course is completely freaked out. We know Claire’s obviously possessed, but does Norman?

I won’t go into further detail, but to recap, the missing Madison was having an affair with Norman — he admits it, and says the girl killed herself in despair, jealousy and rage. Of course, this is a lie — Norman killed her, which Claire finally figures out. The way Norman continues to gaslight Claire is simply amazing — really, only Harrison Ford could have pulled it off. It seems so obvious in hindsight, but we must remember that this was 2000; Harrison Ford, to that point, had been Han Solo. He had been Indiana Jones. Jack Ryan. The President. A good cop. Harrison Ford was a hero. And because of that, you absolutely believe that he’s a good guy — if maybe a bit distracted and neglectful of his wife. Later, you buy that, okay, maybe he cheated on his wife, but he made a bad mistake, and he’s genuinely sorry and desperate to save his marriage. And then, you finally realize that no, no, that’s not it at all. Norman is a murderous, sociopathic shit-weasel who will basically do whatever it takes to make sure he comes out on top. And that comes as a tremendous shock, because your mind rebels: Not Indy! Which was an inspired and brilliant bit of casting, I have to say.

The whole cast is top-notch cast — even the smaller players, like Joe Morton as Claire’s psychiatrist (“There’s a ghost in my house,” she tells him, “and she looked like me.”), and Wendy Crewson as her long-lost friend, the woman who says: “I completely believe in things like [what’s happening to Claire],” just before asshole Norman deflects and shoots Claire down with a big, crap-eating Han-Solo-Trying-To-Get-By-Stormtroopers grin. The whole movie is like an elegant clockwork mechanism, precise and beautifully oiled, all the gears meshing and turning round and round, bringing you to the inevitable tension-filled conclusion. I know there are people who felt that the ending went on too long, but, whatever. THEY’RE WRONG. Full of great creepy moments and great performances, What Lies Beneath remains as elegant a piece of cinematic bait and switch as I’ve ever seen.

Gemma: Agreed. It’s a master-class in visual storytelling, too; excessively so, on occasion. The tone, however, rings true as a struck crystal — not only twenty years on, but always.

Cocktail: Drowned Out Cocktail

Sandra: From the friendly Difford’s Guide, here’s an interesting one. Now, I personally cannot bear the taste of licorice and licorice-flavored things. Ugh! No fennel, no Pernod, no Sambuca. But Gemma likes it, so this one’s for her.

Ingredients:

• 2 shots of Pernod anise
• 1 shot freshly squeezed lime juice
• Ginger ale to top up

Directions: Pour everything into a tall Collins glass over ice, and stir. Easy-peasy, lime-squeezy!

And I also give you this one, because it made me laugh — The Drowning Ophelia, from “Shakespeare, Not Stirred,” on YouTube. I’m totally in love with them, because their motto is “cocktails for your everyday dramas.”

Book Recommendations 

Sandra: I have to recommend Halli Villegas’s collection The Hair Wreath & Other Stories. It has the same eerie flavor as What Lies Beneath, and is so often about women in untenable (and supernatural) situations. Shirley Jackson-esque, lyrical, and disturbing. The last story in the book, “Salvage,” I read in manuscript form while staying at a friend’s flat in London — in a creaky old Victorian. I had to stop reading halfway through because I was so creeped out. Deliciously creeped out!

Gemma: Again, I’m in total agreement! It’s like we’re friends with congruent interests, or something.;)

My own book rec for this week will be The Vanishment by Jonathan Aycliffe (1993, HarperCollins), a doppleganger-ish ghost story full of lacunae that constantly plays with both unreliable narrative perspective and protagonist likability throughout — in a way, it’s about how a malign enough ghost may deform time around itself somehow so that only the very worst of history keeps on repeating. Then again, you could also say it’s about how what comes around eventually goes around, and vice versa.

Sandra Kasturi is the publisher of ChiZine Publications, winner of the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and HWA Specialty Press Awards. She is the co-founder of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the Executive Director of the Chiaroscuro Reading Series, and a frequent guest speaker, workshop leader, and panelist at genre conventions. Sandra is also an award-winning poet and writer, with work appearing in various venues, including Amazing Stories, Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Prairie Fire, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Chilling Tales, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, Abyss & Apex, Stamps, Vamps & Tramps, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. She recently won the Sunburst Award for her short story, “The Beautiful Gears of Dying,” in the anthology The Sum of Us. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. Sandra is currently working on another poetry collection, Snake Handling for Beginners, a story collection, Mrs. Kong & Other Monsters, and a novel, Wrongness: A False Memoir. She is fond of red lipstick, gin & tonics, and Idris Elba.

Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work, two chap-books of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). Most are available from ChiZine Publications. She has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).