When It Rains It Pours: Dark Water (2005)

From the opening shot of the 2005 ghost story, Dark Water, we know we are in for a wet ride - so wet that I wonder why the filmmakers didn’t just go ahead and set it in Seattle. But the Roosevelt Island setting is, in fact, one of the standout elements of this often reviled American remake of a Japanese horror film.

Both films are adapted from the same source material, a short story by Koji Suzuki who wrote the original novel The Ring. Japanese horror flicks became wildly popular among horror fans in the 2000s after the successful American remakes of The Ring and The Grudge… so much so that they coined the nickname of J Horror. Displaying an overwhelming sense of unoriginality over the past twenty years or so, Hollywood has a way of plundering anything and everything it can get its hands on, so that by the time Dark Water arrived in 2005, fans of original foreign films were ready to ipso facto hate anything that had an English language remake. Take a look at customer reviews of Fincher’s version of TheGirl with the Dragon Tattoo on Amazon if you don’t believe me.

Prejudice in favor of foreign originals aside, I think part of the reason Dark Water has a bad rep is that it isn’t horror movie – not in the contemporary sense of the word. It is a ghost story first and foremost, with all the traditional elements in tact… and beneath the surface story lies a superb example of the Psychological Gothic. For my money, ghost stories work best when these two elements walk hand in hand. The Haunting (of Hill House), The Woman in Black, The Changeling – each a brilliant ghost story with a strong psychological undercurrent. In these stories, the lonely and bereaved are highly susceptible to supernatural manifestations.

In Dark Water we have a young mother, Dahlia (played with utter conviction by Jennifer Connelly) trying to raise a seven-year-old girl on her own while suffering through a nasty custody battle and a borderline addiction to sedatives. Connelly’s performance shows us a woman with a battered soul, already hanging by a thin, psychological thread, so that during the first half of the movie we wonder how much is in Dahlia’s head and how much is “reality.”

While Dark Water does not feature the old Gothic house which plays a starring role in the films mentioned above, the setting of the low income, industrial housing complex on Roosevelt Island is as dreary and depressing as any crumbling manor house. It is this visual element of urban decay which gives Dark Water much of its strength – an urban dwelling has not been this menacing since Rosemary’s Baby.

Dark Water hits my buttons on many levels. It’s the sort of movie that makes me say, “I wish I wrote that.” Hopefully, with the passage of time, Dark Water will be considered less an offense to J Horror enthusiasts and given the respect it deserves as a beautifully wrought Gothic ghost story. 

Psychological Gothic: Blood Secrets

They just don’t write them like this anymore: horror with nothing supernatural in it; lean, mean literary prose that is never pretentious and never bogs down in “style”; a taut narrative that deceptively leads the reader down one terrifying path only to completely pull the rug out from under him in the final act and deliver something far more terrifying than at first would have been thought possible.

Rereading Craig Jones’ remarkable 1978 novel, Blood Secrets after more than thirty years was one of the highlights of my summer. Initially, I didn’t think it qualified for inclusion in The Midnight Room, but the story has stuck with me like a bad sunburned that itches for months afterwards. This is the sort of book that many current authors working in the field of psychological suspense would benefit from studying.

You never think this kind of thing really happens to people who’ve been to college. So begins the first person narrative of Irene Rutledge, an intelligent woman from an intelligent family working on her PhD. From the first page we know she has committed a crime. What follows is a compulsively readable tale as mesmerizing as a slow moving train wreck.

Irene is a beautiful red head, the sort of young woman who could have any man on her college campus. But much to the chagrin of her best friend, and the reader’s, she chooses a lanky, awkward weirdo named Frank Rutledge. Frank is at first resistant, and all along we keep telling Irene to leave him alone. He’s keeping you at bay for a reason. Nothing good will come of this. But Irene ignores our better judgment, marries the man, and the crazies start to come out of the woodwork. First, there is Frank’s sister, Vivian, who sets Irene’s mind reeling with implications of family relationships gone wrong. Then there is Frank and Irene’s daughter, Regina, who couldn’t be more pathologically sub human if she tried. Things only get worse from there.

No biographical information on Mr. Jones is forthcoming other than his name being the by-line for a movie tie-in of the film, Fatal Attraction. My paperback edition of Blood Secrets is a reprint of a Harper and Row hardback which suggests two things. The first is that Jones might be a pseudonym for an author who wanted his (or her) identity kept far removed from this sordid little shocker. The second is that the hardback may be readily available in the stacks at libraries across the country. If you’re lucky to find it in your town, grab it and read it. If not, keep an eye out for it at used book stores (I found mine for a dollar) and on eBay (there are plenty of copies to go around at affordable prices.”

At 229 pages, this is definitely one that you will stay up late reading. Blood Secrets has my highest recommendation.

In Search of the Psychological Gothic

Earlier this year when I started self-publishing my writing in eBook form, another writer encouraged me to come up with a moniker or other identity for myself and my writing. I landed on the term Psychological Gothic which seemed to fit what I try to accomplish in my stories. My four published and one forthcoming work are all stepped in Gothic atmosphere, all with an Old Dark House as a central character in the stories. In terms of structure and characters my stories are psychological thrillers.

I doubt that I'm the first person who put this combination of words together, so I have scoured the internet in hopes of finding some reference to the term. The only thing I have been able to find is a write-up on a low budget independent thriller from 2008 in which the reviewer stated the movie combined the psychological thriller with Gothic horror. That can apply to any number of books and movies. Why not come right out and use two words instead of four?

The obvious Psychological Gothics would be Turn of the Screw and a trio of Shirley Jackson novels, The Sundial, We Have Always Live in the Castle, and The Haunting of Hill House. Turn of the Screw and The Haunting at Hill House share a few things in common. They are each ghost / haunted house stories that have captivated the public’s imagination for years. They also have a deeply disturbed heroine and, film versions aside, the novels leave the story open for interpretation. Are Eleanor Vance and The Governess actually experiencing paranormal manifestations, or are they simply mad? This is no easy feat to pull off, which is another reason why these literary works have endured as long as they have.

Not being overtly horror novels, The Sundial and We Have Always Lived in the Castle are not as widely read and revered as The Haunting of Hill House, I would still suggest that all three are Psychological Gothics. The Sundial features a family of crazies holed up in a brooding old house waiting for the end of the world, while We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a mesmerizing portrait of a criminal mind told from that mind’s (as unreliable narrator) point of view. In all three of these books the reader encounters Jackson’s themes of agoraphobia, a psychological ailment which the author herself suffered.

I propose that a number of novels from the second half of the twentieth century which were labeled horror at the time of publication are really Psychological Gothics. Today we tend to refer to them as “quiet horror.” Thomas Tryon’s classic, The Other, and even Rosemary’s Baby with the Bramford standing in for the Old Dark House and Rosemary’s increasing sense of paranoia, are solid examples of Psychological Gothics. Even the classic romantic suspense novel, Rebecca, places more emphasis on the psychology of its characters than did the hundreds of Gothic Romance imitators which followed in its wake. One needs only to read any number of Daphne Du Maurier’s other novels to come to the conclusion that she was writing psychological thrillers.

Psychological Gothic is more proliferate in the movies: Session 9, Dark Water, The Others, even Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and the Hitchcock films Psycho and Vertigo fit neatly into this category.

Today, there are a few writers of crime/psychological thrillers who are edging into Gothic territory. The Irish writer, John Connolly, whose private eye, Charlie Parker, is haunted by ghosts and other supernatural manifestations in such relentlessly dark novels as Every Dead Thing, The Unquiet, and The Killing Kind is often compared to Stephen King, if for no other reasons than that parts of his series are set in the backwoods of Maine, and there are bona fide supernatural occurrences in the stories. Connolly writes in a typical American noir/hard boiled style and his ghosts are never exploitive, something which makes the events in his novels that much more chilling.

A few years before the movie came out I stumbled on Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island. Browsing the reviews on GoodReads, a number of readers panned it for its melodrama, “trick ending”, and “horror movie trappings.” What was clear to me and what many readers either can’t accept or just don’t want to stomach, was that this book is a richly layered Gothic thriller. That is what Lehane set out to write and he pulled it off brilliantly. Teddy Daniels steps into the Old Dark House (Ashcliffe asylum) in the midst of an over-the-top Gothic storm (the hurricane) in search of a monster (an escaped lunatic)… ultimately confronting his own demons. If this is not a Psychological Gothic, I don’t know what is.

Because I really enjoy this sort of thing, I’m still searching. The titles I’ve mentioned here are the obvious choices, but I know there are others. I’ll find them. If you have titles to add to the genre, drop me a line. We’ll make a list on Amazon or GoodReads. I’m always looking for unique titles in both fiction and film to review and promote here. And if you are surfing the interwebs and find reason to throw the term at someone, be my guest. I haven’t trademarked it yet.