by Jason Adams
Even though I've already admitted I can get pretty broad on defining movies as "Horror Movies" when other people might not consider them as such, I for some reason always hesitate when it comes to calling Bernard Rose's 1988 film Paperhouse a "horror film." The first two-thirds of the movie, yes, for sure. But -- without getting into spoilers because lord knows how many of you have had the luck to see this extraordinary film a first time yet -- the movie makes decisions, and comes to a point, that ultimately shows its intentions were not horror.
That said there's enough of a Horror Movie in there for me to justify directing you towards one of the most foundational films and performances of my life, which I've just today discovered is available for streaming on Amazon here in the US. Rose directed Paperhouse two years before Candyman (a film we've already touched upon in this series) and you can see some of the same fascinations -- a female entering a Freudian Netherworld where her darkest fascinations consume her... just think of Paperhouse as Candyman Jr, I guess...
Charlotte Burke plays Anna, an only child who lives with her mother (a deeply warm Glenne Headly) after her father has taken off. As a coping mechanism Anna starts losing herself in her drawings of a lonely house sitting high upon a hill -- she draws things and they start appearing in her day-dreams of the place, but they quickly start to feel out of her control.
I was around twelve-years-old when I first rented this movie from the library -- I would rent it many many times after that -- and in the exact same place as Anna in life: an only child with no friends and an absent father whose imagination often got the better of him... needless to say this film spoke to me.
And the non-professional Burke -- who only ever acted in this film -- captured so very much of what I was feeling then. Her anger was my anger, and her fear my own -- these sorts of performances, so tied up with our own personal experiences, can be impossible to be objective about. But this performance, and this film, were so important to moving me through a tremendously difficult time in life -- to showing me there are more drawings to be drawn, that there are further places we can wander to without having to get trapped in the same cycles of violence and abandonment, that I'll never really be able express my gratitude unless I keep shouting it every chance I get. This movie saved my life.
