It’s Day 20 of The Kasturi/Files at Speculative Chic, where Gemma Files and Sandra Kasturi do some trash talking about horror movies for the month of October. By “trash talking” we of course mean erudite and thoughtful examinations of genre tropes as represented in current and past films, and their impact on the cultural conversation. Or saying stuff like “me like!”
Gemma: Back when we discussed Brad Anderson’s Session 9, we spent a little time talking about how difficult it often seems to be to name horror film narratives — especially ghost stories — structured around working-class people. In a way, I guess this is just the general “escapist glamor of film” syndrome: the same thing that explains why someone like Bridget Fonda just happens to already occupy a ridiculously huge New York apartment in Single White Female, when the sheer unlikeliness of an apartment that size even existing was actually part of the plot of Rosemary’s Baby. (How’d I get this lease? Well, being a Satanist definitely helped!) “People like seeing how the other half lives,” a teacher of mine once explained. “They don’t want to see their own problems reflected onscreen when they go out for a night at the movies.” “Or they really like seeing rich people suffer,” I suggested.
Sandra: Who doesn’t like to see rich people suffer? Unless I ever become a rich person, in which case I strongly object to seeing me suffer. As you and I have talked about before, Gemma, it is fascinating to examine the role that class and social strata play in horror movies. Enormous old houses and mansions are practically de rigeur in order to be haunted. Hill House, Hell House, that one in Thirteen Ghosts, Dracula’s castle, the House of Usher, various pseudo-gothic monstrosities in The Others, The Innocents, you name it. It’s like having wealth is a requirement for even being allowed to be ghost-ridden. Or once having had wealth. Decayed nobility is okay. How can you possibly have unruly ancestors bothering you from beyond the grave, unless you have enough of posh pedigree that you actually have what one would call ancestors — a lineage going back to William of Orange, or who-the-fuck-ever, and not just common and garden moms and dads, Uncle Phils and Aunt Ednas. So it’s nice to see movies that are set in, well, the real world. (That was one of the joys of The Sixth Sense, that Haley Joel Osment and Toni Collette played characters whom one could call working class, or, hell, maybe even poor. This is of course offset by Bruce Willis’s white-collar psychiatrist.) In Stir of Echoes, the entire narrative takes place inside that blue-collar milieu, and it’s hard to describe how unusual seeing that was, even twenty years ago. Like non-slasher horror movies had to have some weirdly British or Ye Olde American Puritan pedigree in order to operate as horror movies in a successful way. I feel like someone needs to write that Master’s thesis.
Gemma: But part of the fun of David Koepp’s Stir of Echoes (1999, adapted from the novel by Richard Matheson) is that, much like an old Val Lewton movie like Cat People, The Seventh Victim, and Ghost Ship, it begins with an acknowledgement that working-class people A) exist and B) are more than capable of seeing ghosts, reading books, knowing stuff — i.e. having the type of interior life that renders them susceptible to supernatural influences. Better yet, it acknowledges that having ongoing financial problems might, in fact, be a wonderfully realistic way to make people more susceptible to stuff like that. Ya know, on a psychological level, and what have you.
Sandra: Yes! I do love it when the terror of being haunted or being manipulated by forces beyond your control is dovetailed into financial anxiety and the ongoing pressure of simply fighting to earn a living — where one thing going wrong (health problems, an unexpected pregnancy, getting laid off) can nearly destroy your whole life, because you are already teetering on the edge of dissolution through no real fault of your own, except, well . . . life is sometimes fucking hard, man.
Gemma: The movie begins by outlining the close-knit little Chicago neighborhood that Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon) lives in, along with his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) and their son Jake (Zachary David Cope). Tom is a telephone lineman, Maggie a nurse, and Jake . . . well, Jake talks to dead people, and appears to have skipped right over the The Sixth Sense’s Cole Sears “Please leave me the fuck alone” phase of things. (He’s younger than Cole, which probably helps.) At one point, Tom may have had delusions of rock-star grandeur, but getting Maggie pregnant the first time probably did it in for those, and he’s just done it once again, which is going to make things tight. Still, they’re a tough, happy, sexy couple, completely in love with each other and the life they’ve made together.
Sandra: That’s another thing I love so much about this movie — the marriage, the family, the neighborhood, all seem real, seem to share a history that you believe. And the performances are great — no one is phoning it in.
Gemma: Things start to change after a party one evening, when Tom challenges Maggie’s sister, Lisa (the wonderful Illeana Douglas), who’s a true believer in all the spooky shit Tom finds most surface-hilarious and bedrock disturbing, to hypnotize him. After putting him under — in a creepy sequence I love so, so much, not least because it involves her telling Tom to picture a ratty-looking cinema on whose screen something begins to form, just a bit too blurred to interpret — Lisa plants a post-hypnotic suggestion in Tom urging him to “be more open-minded” from now on. Soon, Tom begins experiencing visions of a violent scuffle involving a girl who he later learns is Samantha Kozac, a bespectacled 17-year-old girl with “something wrong in her head” who disappeared from the neighborhood six months prior. (And did I identify with Samantha the first time I saw this, considering she’s physically overdeveloped but socially r-worded, the object of attention she barely understands from the neighborhood boys who think it’s hella fun to tease her? Well, yes, sure. You betcha.)
Sandra: Illeana Douglas is another one of those underrated actresses, whom I always want to watch, because they’re always interesting when they’re on-screen. Maybe she and Xander Berkeley can have their own show. I would watch that. I love her trippy medium act in Stir of Echoes, and how irritated Tom is by it — because you know, sometimes people who believe this stuff seem so flaky, and we all want to roll our eyes. That doesn’t mean, of course, that underneath we aren’t 100% convinced that this shit is real. Like you, I love the scene when Tom is hypnotized, floating in an armchair in front of the movie screen of his mind.
Gemma: Tom starts undergoing a scarily quick down-spiral that has him unable to sleep when he wants to and sleeping all day when he shouldn’t, constantly popping pills for a headache that just won’t go away and obsessed with an infuriatingly familiar five-note tune he just can’t seem to identify. At one point, Maggie comes home to find him out in the back yard, covered in dirt, having dug holes all over their property. He’s sure something terrible happened to Samantha, something that hurt her head, knocked her tooth out (the same one he dreams of self-extracting, in a brief, bloody nightmare), and probably killed her. He’s also pretty goddamn sure she died somewhere in his house, especially after she appears to him and slides her freezing-cold phantom hand over his heart, causing him to have a semi-epileptic seizure.
Sandra: Ugh, the tooth thing! I have that nightmare. There are so many creepy moments in this movie, and I love the escalating level of “pay fucking attention to me” harassment the ghost inflicts on poor Tom.
Gemma: Even though it was ostensibly made and released before M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, as I recall, Stir of Echoes still took a bit of blowback for being what people thought was ripoff-close to the latter in terms of Jake Witzsky’s offhanded mediumistic tendencies, as well as Samantha’s J-Horror-esque way of moving in blurred fits and starts, or appearing lurking palely behind Tom, her dark hair long and loose. “Yet another creepy kid,” I remember at least one of my friends saying, dismissively; “Yet more The Ring BS.” But from my POV, that’s like saying yet another vampire that drinks blood, or yet another werewolf who turns into a wolf. (It’s right there in the fuckin’ name, guys!) The line between trope and archetype is far thinner than most people want to think, and while archetypes can be used well or badly, they don’t just run out — no one declares a moratorium on stuff just because it bores you. Here endeth the lesson.
Sandra: Preach, gurl!
Gemma: What Stir of Echoes does both brutally and beautifully is what the best sort of ghost stories should — it humanizes Samantha without ever making her less scary, shows Tom first-hand that she’s stuck in a moment of trauma so awful it’s made her literally forget herself, become a hollow echo of her own enraged pain that doesn’t simply want to communicate what happened to her, it wants vengeance, reparation, retribution. If she has to ride Tom until he’s all used up to get it, she doesn’t care, because at their worst, the dead . . . well, maybe they don’t hate the living, exactly, but they sure don’t love us, either. They just want what they want, and we’re in their way. We’re tools for them to use, and discard, and perhaps take a certain vengeful pleasure in discarding.
This last part definitely rings true when it comes to Samantha, given the way she died and what she died for. There’s a reason that Stir of Echoes has always reminded me of a supernatural version of a Law & Order franchise episode, and it’s not just because of Kathryn Erbe’s participation — the bleached-out realism, the horrible detritus of Samantha’s murder remind us that it happened because she was seen as — and used as — an object, a piece of garbage whose sole function was to provide brief pleasure for somebody else. She wasn’t ever going to be the kind of girl you married, after all: too weird, too blunt, too unable to play the game. Interacting with her like she was worth something would be lowering themselves, for the people who brought about her death. She was an impulse, an inconvenience, reduced by accident to something to be tidied up and hidden. It’s completely gross, and Tom — as a man — probably shares some of her murderers’ guilt, from her point of view, so fuck him, literally. Fuck him hard, no lube.
Sandra: I am always fascinated by, and drawn to (and sometimes repulsed by), movies involving the revenge narrative, particularly ones — as so often happens with ghost stories — where the dead use the living as the instrument of revenge. It’s like having a literal monkey on your back, chewing your ear off.
I love that this story takes place in a tight-knit, working-class neighborhood, where everyone has grown up there, had kids there, had their kids grow up there and have kids of their own. This is a place where you don’t call the cops, you handle your own shit. Just like you do your own house repairs, or maybe get your buddies to help put up new drywall over a couple of cold ones, you take matters into your own hands when you’re taking care of other business that might concern you. Or that might concern, say, a ghost of someone who’s from the neighborhood. The cops are outsiders. Stir of Echoes is, in many ways, a kind of insular movie, existing in a microcosm of a neighborhood, like so many other neighborhoods of this kind, all over cities in America, each with their own peculiarities and rules. Throw a ghost story into that world, and you really get something interesting happening.
My original reaction to the film twenty years ago was irritation, strangely enough — I had wanted it to be just a ghost story, not a ghost-story-meets-crime-story. On re-watching it, I can’t quite figure out why this was an issue, since one of the other things I love is a narrative that starts as one thing and becomes another (like Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, or Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Til Dawn), or a narrative that is a good genre mash-up, which this absolutely is. Or maybe all ghost stories are really crime stories? Anyway, whatever the hell my problem was, I didn’t have it this time around and Stir of Echoes has now become something I want to keep re-watching.
My only teeeeeeensy quibble remaining with the film is that I wanted to see more of those people that Tom and Jake go see — the other people who “see dead people” or experience supernatural phenomena on a regular basis. Or to see Tom and Jake (and new kid?) somehow amalgamate weekly meetings with that group of ghost-seeing weirdos (the new Hellfire Club?), or whatever they are, into their regular lives. I feel like The Others TV series could be the other half of this movie — where you get to see that group of supernaturally gifted folks hang out and try to solve the ethereal mysteries of the world, and control their own powers. Also: more Illeana Douglas, please. In general.
Cocktail: Blue Collar Cocktail
Sandra: From the fine folks at Kindred Cocktails!
Ingredients:
- 2 oz Rye
- 1⁄2 oz Sweet vermouth
- 1⁄4 oz CioCiaro
- 1⁄4 oz Maraschino Liqueur
- 2 dashes Orange bitters
- 2 dashes Bitters, Angostura
- 1 twist Lemon peel (garnish)
Directions:
Stir, strain into champagne-type glass (not flute), garnish with twist.
“History: Sam Ross claims Madrusan [the famed mixologist] came up with this drink by accidentally combining the recipes for a Brooklyn and a Liberal cocktail.”
Since CioCiaro also has a bitter orange flavor, I’m not sure you need to add it as well as the orange bitters later. If you don’t have any of that stuff, perhaps some grated orange peel will work just as well. Or, do like people everywhere do who actually have to, you know, work, who don’t have time for this shit: pour some rye in a glass, throw in an ice cube, and have at it. That’s my vote.
Book Recommendations
Sandra: Obviously Richard Matheson’s Stir of Echoes. I think it’s generally a good idea to read the source material of films, if only to see what was changed and what wasn’t. Particularly if you’re a writer — seeing variations on narrative structure and character development (for good or ill) is always instructive. Here endeth that lesson! Picking Up the Ghost by Tone Milazzo from ChiZine: a curse meant for his father condemns a young boy to a slow death even as it opens his eyes to the strange otherworld around him. Ghosts, African Loas, and shapeshifters abound as the boy gets ready to confront the ghost of his dead father. The Good Brother by E.L. Chen — it’s Hungry Ghost Month, and a young woman is haunted by her former selves as well as her dead brother. And hey — it’s horror and fantasy with non-white people, which still doesn’t happen as often as it should.
Gemma: Before his tragic death in 2015, Tom Piccirilli wrote some truly amazing books set in working-class milieus that everyone should avail themselves of. My picks to go with this particular film would be Headstone City (think a random episode of The Sopranos, but with more ghosts and maloccia) and The Dead Letters, two stand-alones in which everyday problems head-butt up against both the ill mechanics of death and whatever else might come after, if anything does. Existential dread abounds! For a good time involving the endless, unslakable rage of dead girl, meanwhile, I’m going to recommend James Brogden’s The Plague Stones (Titan Books), because I just read it recently and it rocks hard, so to speak. 😉 Yes, its backstory dates to the Black Plague and it’s set in a charming British historic community, but so what? The tone’s congruent, very much so. You will enjoy.
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).
Ooooh, Samantha was played by Jennifer Morrison!!! I like her!
I’d love to watch this, but apparently it’s not available for “free” streaming right now.