Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?
There are any number of very different ways to craft an effectively scary or unnerving horror film. Where one film might lean on the intensity of actors’ performances, another might simply deliver enough transgressive, shocking images to get the point across … or hammer the ‘ole scare chords, if they can’t dream up any sights that can get past a modern audience’s inurement to horrors. In 2014’s The Canal, Irish director Ivan Kavanagh opts for something in between–a deftly acted and frequently quite grisly fusion of psychological crime story and supernatural thriller, but one where its lasting impression is conjured, more than anything else, by how carefully and beautifully Kavanagh sets his scenes and settings to evoke a mood and sense of place. It’s horror via mise-en-scène, if you will.
There’s a certain sense of unavoidable melancholy I associate with U.K. horror cinema of the last few decades, as if the legacy of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now or films like it has continued to reverberate and feed back into the creative pipeline, distilling and intensifying as it goes. That aura of palpable loss is present here, even before we have any particular reason to feel it for ourselves. As we watch husband and wife David (Rupert Evans) and Alice (Hannah Hoekstra) browsing and selecting a century old row house to begin their lives together as parents, it should be a joyous moment, permeated by the warmth of a loving relationship and the promise of a new life on the way. But instead it feels oddly cold and disjointed; hairline fractures spreading across the plaster and eroding the sanctity of both the house and the marriage before we can even confirm they’re there. Close to the water–the titular canal is just outside–it seems that you can’t keep the rot from seeping in.
Not that David is a stranger to unpleasant or upsetting imagery. By day, his work as a film archivist often has him spooling through old police footage, which means digesting a steady torrent of grisly old crime scene evidence reels, until, wait … is that his house as the site of a turn of the century massacre? You can probably guess the direction that The Canal begins heading from this point.
I have seen some contemporary assessment of this film that pegs it as a companion piece–or outright ripoff–of the likes of Sinister, thanks primarily to the use of antique film stock and disturbing sequences presented via celluloid. I think that’s underselling The Canal and the strength of its performances, particularly the tormented and increasingly paranoid work of Evans as he gets caught up in a seemingly supernatural vortex drawing him down to destruction. If anything, the film’s artistic sensibility seems more evocative of the aesthete horror experiments of Peter Strickland in films like Berberian Sound Studio, or the inscrutably dense early horror work of Oz Perkins. It has a patient, slow burn approach to its mounting tension, grounding itself in a world of disintegrating relationships, wistfulness and repressed anger, while playing with sound and unexpected editing transitions to wake the audience up with the occasional, effective jump scare.
But in terms of what you’re actually going to remember after viewing The Canal, it’s the singular images that will worm their way into your mind. Kavanagh and cinematographer Piers McGrail simply know how to compose an image, getting maximum impact out of some really great sets that just cement the film’s decrepit mood. In particular, there’s a sequence in a subway public bathroom that is just positively caked in grime, graffiti and flickering fluorescent lights, making it look like some kind of ethereal temple to urban decay. Kavanagh somehow captures the disgusting surroundings with the warmth and seeming love of a Renaissance painting master, and there’s something powerful about such beautiful composition being used to frame something so objectively ugly.
That attribute of getting the maximum value out of familiar settings is key to The Canal’s fusion of chilly Scandinavian crime mystery and American or Italian supernatural horror. It leans on elements familiar to U.K. horror geeks, including the quiet intensity of actor Steve Oram, who has been like a good luck charm in subtly disturbing horror films in this vein ever since Sightseers. But ultimately, it’s the disembodied images captured by Kavanagh that push The Canal over the finish line. A decade after its release it has largely been put out of mind by horror geeks, but those who appreciate the art of setting a scene will find themselves enjoyably swept up in its impending darkness.
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.
