Marked by omnipotent shots, unsettling sound, and liminal landscapes that unseat us from ourselves, each of these films is a haunted house and each of us, our own ghost.
Enter The Void / The Shining
A natural pairing with Kubrick’s ongoing themes (how we happen to be here and how we’ll take ourselves out) and Noé’s themes (what to do with ourselves in the meantime). Both films are visual feasts and elaborate colour studies, cyclical and maddening, but also nativities of trauma and Freudian spectacles. I assumed The Shining was an acknowledged influence, but according to Gasper Noé, 2001: A Space Odyssey was the film at the forefront of his mind. This checks out with fetal themes and futuristic hues, but then there are the hotels. Noé’s Love Hotel is romantic, neon, but maze-like and piled with patterns; like The Overlook, it exists outside of time or as a model on a table. Boundaries dissolve as Noé’s guests are thrust into orgiastic throes of passion, while their genitals emit a pulsating glow.
Both narratives are poltergeists—distortions and disruptions—and laid with traps. While Enter The Void is modern and technicolor, there’s an underlying palette that Kubrick lifted from Dutch Renaissance painters; the story is told in moody hues, opaque and unsettling, in broad swathes of blood red, shadows and light. Audio is barely discernible and scenes are sporadically blurred; we’re voyeurs who view the characters through soaped windows. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) smokes DMT and walks the streets of Tokyo, both before and after his death at the 25-minute mark. We follow along but our view is obscured by the back of Oscar’s head, even during his childhood memories. (Oscar is always in the way of Oscar's life.)
House / Eraserhead
Two ‘70s era weirdos, inspired by advertisements, post-industrial propaganda, silent films, baby boom sitcoms, and expressionist soundscapes. Both films use dream-logic to explore fetal/sexual anxiety, embodiment, and aging which is expressed in hallucinatory body horror—and feature two very different “head pops off” scenes. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is dwarfed by his landscape, a setting that is vast but claustrophobic. When his girlfriend's parents inquire after his employment, he’s “on vacation”. Freedom fades with fatherhood. Cronus gobbled baby Zeus thousands of years ago but fathers are still worried they’ll produce malformed progeny who will strip them of their relevance. They’ll be erased by their offspring. Their pink heads will pop off and be carted to the eraser factory.
We get more head-popping action in House, with characters who are “on vacation”, but rather than fetal anxiety, House taps into the angst of burgeoning sexuality. When director Nobuhiko Obayashi turned to his young daughter for advice—“What would be as scary as Jaws?”—she responded that being a prepubescent child was terrifying. (Interesting factoid: poltergeist phenomena are said to happen in proximity to teenage girls as the manifestation of adolescent anxieties.) Obayshi’s daughter thought it would be scary if the mirror were to turn on her. Puberty is body horror and House explores that through a series of deaths and dismemberments—tricks of the camera, collage, animation—and each scene is more psychedelic than the last. While the characters are untethered against an eerie landscape, much like Eraserhead, grim in black and white, House is a colour-saturated acid trip.
A Ghost Story / Stranger Than Fiction
Ghost Story is shot in 1.33:1—like a square of paper, folded and hidden in a door jamb, and the abbreviated size of the screen makes us feel both the intimacy of love, the stranglehold of grief and the alienation of death. It begins with a simple premise: a man and woman are happy together. C and M (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) have just one point of contention. M wants a new house, while C is attached to their home, a mediocre structure that’s likely haunted. They have “history” here, but she wants a future, an impossible dream, because C dies just 12 minutes into the film. He’s the piano that bangs in the night, a forgotten thing that’s always been there, and can never leave.
His corpse is covered in a cotton bedsheet but he rises from the hospital gurney like a live-action cartoon and heads home. Gliding over a golf course at dawn, this bedsheet apparition is surprisingly gorgeous. (M is collapsed on the floor, listening to C’s music on earbuds, when she extends an arm, her fingers grazing C’s puddled folds of cotton.) A Ghost Story is a must-see—poetic and philosophical, this exploration of the cyclical nature of time is truly haunting.
In Stranger Than Fiction, Harold Crick runs to catch a bus with an apple clamped between his teeth. It’s an obvious nod to Magritte’s floating men, specifically his surrealist classic, the 1964 painting Son of Man. He’s an unlikely “main character”—anonymous, ordinary—until he gets a quirky love interest. This is no rom-com because Harold Crick is a hero in a tragedy. He can even hear the foreboding narrator. As Harold barrels toward certain death, he gets a guitar, falls in love, and comes alive. Stranger Than Fiction is a ghost story in reverse.
Marked by omnipotent shots, unsettling sound, and liminal landscapes that unseat us from ourselves, each of these films is a haunted house and each of us, our own ghost.
Enter The Void / The Shining
A natural pairing with Kubrick’s ongoing themes (how we happen to be here and how we’ll take ourselves out) and Noé’s themes (what to do with ourselves in the meantime). Both films are visual feasts and elaborate colour studies, cyclical and maddening, but also nativities of trauma and Freudian spectacles. I assumed The Shining was an acknowledged influence, but according to Gasper Noé, 2001: A Space Odyssey was the film at the forefront of his mind. This checks out with fetal themes and futuristic hues, but then there are the hotels. Noé’s Love Hotel is romantic, neon, but maze-like and piled with patterns; like The Overlook, it exists outside of time or as a model on a table. Boundaries dissolve as Noé’s guests are thrust into orgiastic throes of passion, while their genitals emit a pulsating glow.
Both narratives are poltergeists—distortions and disruptions—and laid with traps. While Enter The Void is modern and technicolor, there’s an underlying palette that Kubrick lifted from Dutch Renaissance painters; the story is told in moody hues, opaque and unsettling, in broad swathes of blood red, shadows and light. Audio is barely discernible and scenes are sporadically blurred; we’re voyeurs who view the characters through soaped windows. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) smokes DMT and walks the streets of Tokyo, both before and after his death at the 25-minute mark. We follow along but our view is obscured by the back of Oscar’s head, even during his childhood memories. (Oscar is always in the way of Oscar's life.)
House / Eraserhead
Two ‘70s era weirdos, inspired by advertisements, post-industrial propaganda, silent films, baby boom sitcoms, and expressionist soundscapes. Both films use dream-logic to explore fetal/sexual anxiety, embodiment, and aging which is expressed in hallucinatory body horror—and feature two very different “head pops off” scenes. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is dwarfed by his landscape, a setting that is vast but claustrophobic. When his girlfriend's parents inquire after his employment, he’s “on vacation”. Freedom fades with fatherhood. Cronus gobbled baby Zeus thousands of years ago but fathers are still worried they’ll produce malformed progeny who will strip them of their relevance. They’ll be erased by their offspring. Their pink heads will pop off and be carted to the eraser factory.
We get more head-popping action in House, with characters who are “on vacation”, but rather than fetal anxiety, House taps into the angst of burgeoning sexuality. When director Nobuhiko Obayashi turned to his young daughter for advice—“What would be as scary as Jaws?”—she responded that being a prepubescent child was terrifying. (Interesting factoid: poltergeist phenomena are said to happen in proximity to teenage girls as the manifestation of adolescent anxieties.) Obayshi’s daughter thought it would be scary if the mirror were to turn on her. Puberty is body horror and House explores that through a series of deaths and dismemberments—tricks of the camera, collage, animation—and each scene is more psychedelic than the last. While the characters are untethered against an eerie landscape, much like Eraserhead, grim in black and white, House is a colour-saturated acid trip.
A Ghost Story / Stranger Than Fiction
Ghost Story is shot in 1.33:1—like a square of paper, folded and hidden in a door jamb, and the abbreviated size of the screen makes us feel both the intimacy of love, the stranglehold of grief and the alienation of death. It begins with a simple premise: a man and woman are happy together. C and M (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) have just one point of contention. M wants a new house, while C is attached to their home, a mediocre structure that’s likely haunted. They have “history” here, but she wants a future, an impossible dream, because C dies just 12 minutes into the film. He’s the piano that bangs in the night, a forgotten thing that’s always been there, and can never leave.
His corpse is covered in a cotton bedsheet but he rises from the hospital gurney like a live-action cartoon and heads home. Gliding over a golf course at dawn, this bedsheet apparition is surprisingly gorgeous. (M is collapsed on the floor, listening to C’s music on earbuds, when she extends an arm, her fingers grazing C’s puddled folds of cotton.) A Ghost Story is a must-see—poetic and philosophical, this exploration of the cyclical nature of time is truly haunting.
In Stranger Than Fiction, Harold Crick runs to catch a bus with an apple clamped between his teeth. It’s an obvious nod to Magritte’s floating men, specifically his surrealist classic, the 1964 painting Son of Man. He’s an unlikely “main character”—anonymous, ordinary—until he gets a quirky love interest. This is no rom-com because Harold Crick is a hero in a tragedy. He can even hear the foreboding narrator. As Harold barrels toward certain death, he gets a guitar, falls in love, and comes alive. Stranger Than Fiction is a ghost story in reverse.