The Kasturi/Files: Episode 11: The Others (and, Briefly, the Other Others)

Day 11 of our ongoing October horror movie series here at Speculative Chic! Chitchat, film discussion, book recs, and cocktail ideas from Sandra Kasturi and Gemma Files! Welcome back to The Kasturi/Files!

Sandra: Today we’re talking about The Others (2001, directed by Alejandro Amenábar), the movie, not to be confused with the short-lived TV show, also called The Others), which was also about hauntings. I know, it’s confusing. Need I give spoiler alerts here? This movie has been out a while, darlings.

Gemma: I came to The Others having already encountered Amenábar through his earlier films Tesis and Abre los Ojos, the latter remade by Hollywood as Vanilla Sky, the former overdue for similar cross-cultural translation (it’s an amazing thriller about voyeurism, violence by proxy and the difference between film as art vs film as product, co-starring a prim female film student and the Fangoria-loving “filth” expert she hires to evaluate whether an apparent snuff film she’s accidentally gotten hold of is real or fake), so the idea of him making an English-language movie starring actors I actually recognized was incredibly exciting — especially once I found out it was going to be a ghost story! (Not to mention Amenábar’s last real flirtation with genre, given the fact he’s now far more well-known for equally brilliant yet far more overt Oscar-bait like The Sea Inside and Agora.)

Sandra: When The Others was released, it followed on the heels of that filmic juggernaut, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, which redefined ghost stories for movie-goers for the next twenty years. The layperson’s scuttlebutt was that The Others was just another take on “I see dead people,” and everyone rolled their eyes and said, “I could totally figure out they were ghosts!” to anyone who said they’d liked the movie. It was nominated for a bunch of awards, including a Golden Globe and BAFTA for star Nicole Kidman. The film also won seven Goya Awards (Spain’s national film awards), the only English-language-only film to ever have done so. But all of that really meant nothing to the average North American film goer.

It was that terrible post-Sixth-Sense timing really — it couldn’t have been worse. But The Others did make a little more than it cost in its initial theatrical run, and eventually found its audience in secondary runs on DVD, Netflix and other streaming services, and eventually grossed more than ten times what it cost to produce, so I guess it all worked out okay? I do think that if it had come out before The Sixth Sense, things might have been different — perhaps The Others would have been the movie that made everyone revisit ghost stories, both in homage and in lampoon. Well, we’ll never know. Or perhaps it was the very fact that Shyamalan’s movie became such a phenomenon that gave The Others some legs it might not otherwise have had — this “small” movie from some barely known (in North America) director?

Gemma: One wonders indeed. But then again, Shyamalan himself has become such a weird figure of cultural love/hate in the intervening years, his very name converted into shorthand (via Robot Chicken, amongst other satirical venues) for “Ooooh, tweeeeests!!!!” I’m personally still a big fan of most of his movies, not least because I actually enjoy things that code-switch in the middle (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn, anyone?); not as big a fan as my husband, granted, considering he even likes Lady in the Water. But I cried my eyes out at The Village long before I had an “innocent” son of my own to try and bring up in such a way that I could save him as much grief as possible. Much though the guys on the Weird Studies podcast might disagree, Shyamalan’s ambition and handicraft really do stand the test of time, overall — especially in terms of The Sixth Sense, which remains a gorgeous puzzle-box of shifting perspective and emotional manipulation, set here and there with images that’ll chill my blood ’til I die.

Sandra: The plot of The Others is a deceptively simple one — widow Grace and her two children, staying in a house in the Channel Islands right after the end of World War II, are introduced when Grace hires three new servants to help her out — and they’re all a little creepy, so we already know something is Not Right. Grace’s children, Anne and Nicholas have an “allergy to light,” (solar urticaria, the most extreme form of photosensitivity) so all curtains must be kept closed during the day and only candles used inside the house, to keep them safe. Grace is a bundle of nerves, always on the thin edge of hysteria. Nicole Kidman is wonderful in the role, that barely restrained nervous energy, that pale luminous skin, that high forehead that makes her look like an alien at some angles. She’s also never been more beautiful — in an untouchable, alabaster-tinged, inhuman way. The servants obviously know some secret, and are waiting for Grace to discover whatever it is that she needs to know. In the meantime, the house is full of strange phenomena — doors lock and unlock, the piano plays by itself, curtains are constantly flung open despite Grace’s best efforts. When Christopher Eccleston shows up as Grace’s long-absent soldier husband, we’re pretty sure he’s dead, but just dropping by on some kind of flying visit before heading off into the Great Beyond. Anne, the daughter, claims to see other people in the house, and in one of the creepiest scenes in the book, Grace comes upon her playing with a puppet, covered in a veil, but’s not Anne, it’s an old woman with blind eyes. When Grace screams at her, “Where’s my daughter?” she replies, in Anne’s voice: “I am your daughter!” (Watch here, at about the 1:11 mark, though it’s worth watching the whole clip, at a bit under three minutes, just for the unbearable tension.) The question becomes for the audience: is Grace ever going to figure it out? Whatever “it” is? Are we?

Gemma: The mood Amenábar creates here is Gothic with the largest possible G — delicate mental and physical health, hints of gaslighting, oblique secrets, darkness, a house which seems simultaneously empty and way too full, a woman alone, barely clinging to her sanity. What amazes me more than anything is how he also uses Grace’s intense Catholicism as an additional source of fear, not comfort or protection; the problems Grace has with Anne all come from Anne’s fierce, questioning intelligence, the braininess that leads Anne to call martyrs idiots for not simply lying about their faith in order to escape martyrdom, only to have Grace try to “save” her from her own heretical nature by explaining that that’s the kind of lie which condemns you to eternal damnation, a hell made from equal parts grinding torturous monotony and the awful loneliness of having forever denied yourself God’s love. It’s the sort of religious instruction that turns kids into atheists, but Grace has almost no other option in order to keep her parental authority — her children are already sick, they’re not even going to get better, and every decision she makes seems like a mistake in utero, guilt on top of guilt on top of guilt. Of course, it’s not until Act Three that we finally understand why Amenábar’s structured it this way. . . .

Sandra: One of the standard tropes of horror is the art of building to the scare — then giving us the scare — aaaah!! — wait, no! — it was just a cat. Whew! BLAM. There’s the real scare! And we jump in our seats. The Others refuses to capitulate to our expectations. It’s a long, slow build, like Ravel’s “Bolero” only the scary version. The tension rises and rise until we can’t bear it any more. There are no false scares, no jumps, no release of tension. The entire movie mounts an assault on your adrenal glands until it gives you that final (and only) payoff. The thing is — that scare is not actually scary, in the sense that the xenomorphs in Aliens are scary, or the girl coming out of the well in The Ring (gah!) is scary —

Gemma: No, it’s worse: it’s tragic, morally dread-full. It’s the sudden understanding that everything is already ruined, and you’re the one who ruined it. Love turned inside-out. It’s literally horrible.

Sandra: Even without its final sting factored in, The Others is a masterpiece of tension and suspense — one long breath held for 104 minutes of running time. I tell you, I was so wound up when watching the film in the theater, that when that final scare happened, my eyes involuntarily shut. I’d never had that happen before. I was so angry that I’d missed the moment, I still haven’t gotten over it! I’ve seen The Others many times since, and of course have watched the ten seconds I’d missed, but man — it’s not quite the same as that first time, when you really don’t know what’s coming. It takes a lot to get to me like that since I watch a lot of horror movies — that’s saying something.

Gemma: Well, you know I agree. 😉

Sandra: I did want to give a shout-out to the TV series The Others (which aired on NBC in 2000 for a few brief months), however, given I’ve already mentioned it. The show had nothing to do with Amenábar’s film, though it also dealt with the supernatural. Despite the cultural success of The Sixth Sense, this show never really found its footing and was canceled quickly. It was like whatever had inspired audiences to love Shyamalan’s film didn’t quite translate to a similarly themed show. And you know — it’s a pretty good show, with a great cast (Julianne Nicholson, Bill Cobbs (!), Gabriel Macht, John Billingsley, Missy Crider and Kevin J. O’Connor), decent production, and episodes directed by the likes of Mick Garris and Tobe Hooper. And produced in partnership with Dreamworks! How did it not work?

The premise is great too — young Marian Kitt goes off to college and comes to terms with the fact that she has some supernatural abilities. She meets up with a group of people who also have varying powers. There’s an outside evil force that’s targeting them, and one of the ways its agents get you is to ask you what you want. Once you answer — they kind of have a window into your soul. It’s a compelling premise, and I wish the network had given it more of a chance. I mean, Supernatural and Medium were about to take off and Buffy was still going strong, as was  The X-Files . . . given the sheer amount of supernaturally themed TV shows out there these days, you’d have thought it was a shoe-in, but The Others just never found its audience. And while I’m not saying it’s the greatest show ever made, it’s still a shame: there’s something there. I just wish someone would reboot it, or continue it, because that final, thirteenth episode left a real cliffhanger.

For those of you interested, you can catch all the episodes on YouTube, but when you’re getting toward the end, be careful. I seem to recall that Eps 12 and 13 are in the wrong order. I think what’s listed as Episode 12 (“Life is for the Living”) is actually the finale. Because I watched it in the wrong order and was very cross.

Aha! Hurray for Wikipedia which states: “Note that the episodes were not always broadcast by NBC in the correct story order. For the correct story order for the episodes, refer to the order from the production codes.” Which they list in a handy chart! So useful. Well. I see now that, in fact, most of the episodes were not shown in their intended order! Which may explain the disconnect some people felt when watching. Hmm. Didn’t the much-much-lamented Firefly also have this problem? Wake up, Network TV Bigwigs! Don’t fuck with episode order!!

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Cocktail: Old Fashioned

Sandra: Because The Others is set in 1945, I felt like we needed something old-fashioned. So . . . why not an actual Old Fashioned? When we lived in Queens back in the ’70s and visited my great-aunt and great-uncle in Long Island on the weekends, they would have people over for dinner and cocktails. This was an era when people still smoked in the house — and you had a beautiful inlayed box to keep cigarettes in, that you offered to your guests, because of course you wouldn’t smoke your own ciggies when out to dinner. So gauche! My aunt and uncle’s friends — among them three widowed sisters who gave the most marvelous Easter baskets, and whom I always called “aunts” — often drank Old Fashioneds and Highballs. So I have great nostalgia for that time and for those kinds of drinks. Here’s one version:

• 2 oz Bourbon
• 1⁄2 tsp white sugar
• 3 dashes Angostura bitters
• 1 dash Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6
• 1⁄4 oz Cold water
• 1 Brown sugar cube
• Garnish: Lemon and Orange twists

Mix all the ingredients together and muddle a bit til the sugar breaks down. Fill with ice and stir. Strain into a short glass over ice. Garnish with slices of lemon and orange peel twisted over the drink to express the oil and plonk them in.

Now, this is the fancy version of an Old Fashioned. I believe my uncle made it by pouring a hefty shot of bourbon in a glass over ice, maybe adding a drop of water, and, possibly a drop of Angostura. Whatever works. (I use Bulleit bourbon — so tasty!)

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Book Recommendations

Gemma: I’m going to go pretty old-school here and stick with the sort of story The Others reminds me most of — big-G Gothic, with an extra side-order of focal shift. The absolutely king of this type of full-bore My-House-Is-Full-of-Ghosts-and-I’m-Losing-My-Mind freakout is, in my opinion, the criminally underrated H.R. Wakefield, whose stories “The Red Lodge” and “The Triumph of Death” are both creepy enough to make a corpse’s neck-hairs raise. More recently, however, the other person who’s scared my ass off while barely showing me anything is Kelly Link, whose collections Get in Trouble (a Pulitzer Prize nominee!), Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen all contain stories that play like Shirley Jackson run through a Jonathan Carroll filter, weird weird weird, full of mist and shifting ground. Nothing is as it seems in Link’s world, so hold on tight, because the twists are the least of it.

Sandra: I really can’t read Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat” without getting a serious, serious case of the heebie-jeebies. I agree with all the above and also want to suggest Andrew Pyper’s The Damned and its vestigial twin, Letitia Trent’s Almost Dark. Evil twins, dead siblings, haunted factories galore! Michael Rowe’s Wild Fell, which will make you want to reread the whole book the second you get to the end, and its secret is revealed.

Stephen King’s Bag of Bones (do not watch the TV series). Probably my favorite King novel. It’s lyrical, gorgeously written, haunting (literally and figuratively), and beyond heartbreaking.

And, in the brilliant and controversial “A Reader’s Manifesto” in The Atlantic, lo, nearly twenty years ago, B.R. Myers wrote this:

“The dualism of literary versus genre has all but routed the old trinity of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, which was always invoked tongue-in-cheek anyway. Writers who would once have been called middlebrow are now assigned, depending solely on their degree of verbal affectation, to either the literary or the genre camp. David Guterson is thus granted Serious Writer status for having buried a murder mystery under sonorous tautologies (Snow Falling on Cedars, 1994), while Stephen King, whose Bag of Bones (1998) is a more intellectual but less pretentious novel, is still considered to be just a very talented genre storyteller.”

Suck it, “literary” fiction!

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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.

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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).