Anyone moving into an empty house, before the curtains are hung and the welcome mat slapped on the threshold, can attest that the old adage is true: A house is not a home. This is especially true, of course, when the house is possessed by evil spirits determined to drive the residents to insanity and murder, an all-too-frequent occurrence in the movie world.
When Boston director Brad Anderson came across such a bad-tempered looking house -- a former Victorian mental hospital near Danvers, Mass. -- it inspired him to come up with his new movie, Session 9.
Anderson, previously known for light-hearted comedies such as Next Stop, Wonderland,thought the asylum would make a great setting for a horror movie, and he used some of the original medical equipment for props in his film, which opened yesterday. As well, the asbestos hanging off the walls came with the house, as did the floors caving in, the collapsing ceilings and puddles.
There are a couple of sly, horror-buff in-jokes. David Caruso's character's last name is Cronenberg, a tribute to Canadian horror director David Cronenberg. Another character is called Hank Romero, after Night of the Living Dead's director, George Romero.
And the name of the hospital, Danvers Lunatic Asylum, is both the real name of the town and of Mrs. Danvers, a character in another scary house, in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca. But Anderson has lots of other film history to draw upon.
Probably the meanest and most persistent possessed house in movie history was the digs in Amityville, N.Y. Based on a non-fiction book about a poltergeist haunting on Long Island, the Amityville show started with a mediocre horror film in 1979 and seven sequels going through to the mid-nineties.
Supposedly based on a true story (later debunked) about a bad poltergeist, the original movie features Margot Kidder and James Brolin as the honeymooning couple who settle in for a rough ride. Numerous other stupid inhabitants made the same mistake, including a 3D version in 1983, and finally, the Amityville Dollhouse (1996) offered a teeny-weeny portal to the underworld.
Today, the Amityville movie is fondly remembered by people such as the one who maintain the web site, Braces in Movies (www.smoe.org/braces/in/movies/amityville--horr.html), who note the babysitter in the first film wore braces and headgear.
A much more direct antecedent of Anderson's movie is Stanley Kubrick's superior, The Shining. Anyone riding on one of Anderson's long, tracking shots down a corridor will have a sense they've been this way before.
The Shining,generally treated lukewarmly by critics on its release, is one of those Kubrick vintages that improves with age, to the point where it is now recognized as a masterpiece.
Jack Nicholson plays the novelist with writer's block who moves with his wife (Shelley Duvall) and son (Danny Doyle) to an abandoned hotel; he almost immediately starts seeing ghosts and going nuts.
Kubrick bent the form to his own design: Most of the horror takes place in bright daylight -- the atmosphere in the hotel is sterile rather than rotting and shadowy, and instead of screaming violins, he uses synthesized music.
Everyone knows what Duvall and Nicholson went on to do. Danny Lloyd, who played the boy, went on to play the young G. Gordon Liddy in the Will: The G. Gordon Liddy story, and then stopped acting.
Whether or not it's an influence, Anderson's crazy hospital has the fetid, macabre quality of another kind of mental home, the hospital in Lars Von Trier and Morten Arnfred's black comedy, in Danish and Swedish with English subtitles, The Kingdom (1994 and 1997).
Released in two parts of about 4½ hours each (consider it a five-day rental), this series is Von Trier at his most enjoyable, criss-crossing between David Lynch and E.R. with alarming results.
Often compared to Twin Peaks,it stars a vast collection of characters and a rotting hospital in Copenhagen known as the Kingdom.
The Kingdom is supposed to be the last word in technological sophistication, but its sinking into a swamp and various vapours and ghosts keep rising up through the building, fogging brains and keeping the hospital a disaster area.
Throughout, a pair of dishwashers with Down syndrome, maintain a commentary about the loss of spirituality.
Like Anderson's and Kubrick's films, Von Trier's is a mixture of corridors and high aerial shots, moving us from inside to outside the mad house. Pay particular attention to veteran German actor Udo Kier, who has the challenging role of playing both a baby with a man's head and the demon who sired him.
Kier, who first popped up as Baron Frankenstein in Andy Warhol's Frankenstein in 1974, and then again as a producer in Shadow of a Vampire,has done scary movies before. You might even say he's right at home in them.
Liam Lacey