This House Is Ours: The Others, Spiritualism, and Home Video

By B. Panther  |  October 24, 2023 | 2:30pm
Movies Features horror movies
This House Is Ours: The Others, Spiritualism, and Home Video

The Others was one of the first DVDs I ever bought. It came in a bulky brown case, housing two discs and a flimsy chapter menu. I brought it with me to parties and, when I went away to college, shared it until it was scratched and could play no more. By then, I could upgrade to the Blu-ray, which I’ve had in my possession until now, with Criterion’s release of a new 4K scan.

There’s something beautifully haunting about The Others, and about watching it in your house. It’s a film that stays with you, and at home, there’s an almost tangible residue of history to the experience. The ectoplasms of spiritualism and filmmaking appear as Pepper’s ghosts, seeming to waltz in place. These twin flames of 19th-century pursuits share a prehistory in the quest to illuminate the spirit and figures of the imagination. As elegantly laid out by Marina Warner in her book Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century, spiritualism—the search to know and experience the spirit—has always mutually adapted with technology.

The early magic lantern shows and their projected images of the afterlife gave way to spirit photography and parlor séances as ways to interact with the spirit. At the same time, cinema sought to capture and imagine the fantastic with its practical and photographic tricks—many used and inspired by spiritualists. Both wanted to engage their audience’s senses by transmitting emotional and psychic sensations through the ether. And they do so by containing the light.

Alejandro Amenábar conjures and participates in these histories to tell his ghost tale. The Others opens with Nicole Kidman’s disembodied voice lulling us into a storytime trance. Her words, over a flickering illustration of a heavenly glade, fade into a guided tour through line drawings of the old dark house that will be our Gothic setting, as well as sketched premonitions of scenes to come. We finally rest on an external portrait of the house that gently fades to film, appearing out of the fog like a fata morgana.

In just a few seconds, Amenábar glosses the spiritualist history of cinema from its prehistory in the magic lantern shows—which lit illustrations of Christian cosmology onto screen and smoke—through the invention of the film camera, which captured and animated reality. Though Amenábar sets the film in the mid-1940s, its house has no electricity, plunging it into Edwardian darkness and leaving it in its own limbo between eras. 

The lurking 19th-century past can only stay hidden under leaves for so long before it begins to make its startling apparition. After hearing mysterious noises, Grace (Kidman) starts to believe that maybe her daughter Anne (Alakina Mann) has been telling the truth about intruders in their home. After securing Anne and her brother Nicholas (James Bentley) in their room, Grace, along with the new housekeeper Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), the gardener (Eric Sykes) and the maid (Elaine Cassidy), turn the place over from the foyer to the attic. There, she uncovers a book of the dead left by the previous inhabitants. 

Though Grace may find these “macabre,” photographs of the deceased are part of an important transition in Western culture that engaged pre-modern thought with modern technology. With the development of the photograph, many were training their lens on the spiritual world. Some, particularly the spirit photographers, sought to use the camera’s eye to imagine beyond human perception. Others saw the camera’s potential as a profound documenting force and used it to try to contain some part of the soul “in the hopes that their souls might go on living through the portraits,” as Mrs. Mills explains. 

“[T]he death of a loved one can lead people to do the strangest things,” she adds in her calm Irish whisper. This includes trying to commune with the dead. Parlor séances were already beginning to wane by the ‘40s, with many of the exhibitors exposed as charlatans, but with the cosmos being electrified with new theories of energy, physics and astronomy, some remained open to the possibility that a medium could engage with a different plane or dimension. We get a spectrum of skepticism when Anne is spying on the séance happening with the Old Lady (Renée Asherson). But once Anne makes her presence known, everyone becomes a firm believer in ghosts, and the audience watching sees them for the first time.

The Others works not just because it dabbles in spiritualist history, but because it also effectively uses some spiritualist tricks to affect the audience with the same uncanny frisson. In a 2023 interview with film critic Pau Gómez for the Criterion release, Amenábar says that a childhood experience with a séance while visiting his aunt in Chile left him with “a fascination with the power of suggestion.” We can see that Amenábar has learned from this fascination and become a keen director of horror by deftly guiding and suggesting his audience toward terror and revelation. Through clever sound design—complete with creaking floorboards, mysterious rapping noises, practical table-tipping and levitating paper tricks—Amenábar gives his horror audience a sensation similar to those at a séance. We share the darkness and receive a tremulous message, a feeling from out of the ether.

The tools of spiritualism and cinema require control of the light. Magic lantern shows, phantasmagorias, séances, film sets and movie theaters demand that light be kept out, letting in only what is useful. Amenábar adds yet another layer to this connection by having the children of The Others be “photosensitive,” prone to developing bubbles and boils if exposed to too much light—not unlike film stock. Because of this condition, the light must be contained between rooms with the curtains closed whenever the children are near. We walk through the house in almost total darkness, allowing Amenábar and celebrated cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (he won the cinematography Goya for The Others) to play with light and shadow on physical and metaphorical levels. “The only thing that moves here is the light,” Grace warns Mrs. Mills. “But it changes everything.”

Aguirresarobe discusses his “less cinematic approach” to lighting in the original behind-the-scenes documentary included on the Blu-ray. “Light is deadly,” Amenábar told him. Rather than have fixed lighting, Grace is right; Aguirresarobe and his crew literally move the light with the actors, keeping everything in an intimate glow. Not only would too much light injure Anne and Nicholas, but it would also hurt the dreamy Gothic mood Amenábar tries to achieve. The light “only grows brighter as we get closer to the truth,” Amenábar says, for “between the light and the darkness is knowing and not knowing.”

The new restoration gives vibrancy to the light balance. The candlelight takes on an intent. The shadows cast more menacingly without sacrificing the exquisite detail of Benjamín Fernández’s production design. The light becomes a texture with this 4K scan, more of a character than ever before. And if you thought these kids were the whitest before, prepare your souls.

Cinema and spiritualism are siblings, twin 19th-century fantasies of electrified space and figures of light. The early lantern shows and phantasmagorias projected enchantment onto a so-called Enlightened society that sensed that something remained unshaken in the shadows. Cinema went indoors and took control of the light; spiritualism dissipated outdoors after the salon séances were exposed as interactive theater. And there they have remained.

But occasionally, “the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living,” just as they do with Amenábar’s The Others. It is a phantasmagorical film well-suited to home video because it conjures the mutual histories of cinema, spiritualism and parlor séances to create a sensationalist experience of bewilderment within the home. 

As early as the 17th century, people have been playing with projected images to tell stories of the observable and invisible forces at work in our world. Magic lantern slides illuminating a middle-class Victorian home have transformed into images on discs read by a laser. All home video is the continuation of this history. It would seem that this light projecting towards me on the couch would represent a total mastery over superstition, but voices from the past linger.

B.L. Panther is a culture writer, scholar and Pisces from Northern Illinois. B! writes for outlets such as Honey Literary Journal and The Spool. A champion hermit, they enjoy reading, the indoors, afternoon naps and doing nothing at all.

 
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