“…Be afraid; be afraid, for Heaven’s sake!”
TCM just showed one of my favorite movies, which is The Uninvited, the great ghost movie from Paramount in 1944. At the close of the film, Ben Mankiewicz said the movie was originally going to have no visible ghosts, in the tradition of the Val Lewton school of not showing anything specific, assuming the power of suggestion is enough, but that Paramount executives thought people would feel disappointed if they didn’t get to see any ghosts. In any case, he said, luckily the appearance of the ghost was limited to only one scene. But there are, in fact, three separate scenes with the swirling, smoky apparition. And glad I am of that too, as the apparition in this movie is my absolute favorite ghost in all of ghost movies; and ghost movies (good ones, anyway) are my favorite movies of all*.
The first time we see the ghost, it appears at the end of the spirit board scene, just after the spirit of Carmel possesses Stella. It begins as wisps of swirling mist that coalesce into the vague, blurry form of a woman, freezing all in the room with terror (except for Stella, who has fainted post-possession). And when Stella’s grandfather smashes a pane in a French door to enter, the ghost disappears. (Seeing as how the guy smashing his way into the room was her father, maybe the ghost was afraid of getting a spanking or something.)
The second time we see the ghost, Stella has just returned to Windwood House (the cliff-side waterfront haunted house in the story) to find her grandfather in ill health waiting to warn her of the dangers of the house. Stella says she isn’t afraid, and he says: “Then be afraid; be afraid, for Heaven’s sake!” Then, after filling in some sketchy background story details, he notices the phantom forming in the doorway of the room, and he dies of his heart condition (and presumably, fear). Like the first time, it begins as a flowing fog, spontaneously conjured up out of nowhere, forming the shape of a woman in a flowing gown. This time, though, the face becomes a little clearer, and the presence more established. It approaches Stella, its form billowing like curtains in the wind; she screams, and…
The last time we see the ghost is just before the end of the movie. The threads of the twisted tale are finally unraveled, and we have closure, or so it seems. But just then, the malignancy appears, fading in and morphing out of misty wisps once again in a swirling phantasmagoria. Each time it appears, it becomes a little clearer that this is Mary Meredith’s ghost, and now we can recognize her from her portraits that appear in a few scenes in the film. And now we see her face clearly: the face of actress Elizabeth Russell, the great character actress from the two RKO Cat People movies. We see her icy glare and we feel her rage.
I’m not sure how the special effects people made this ghost: whether it’s cell animation using airbrush or blurry film of Elizabeth Russell in some diaphanous gown billowing in the wind of some industrial fan comped into the film using double exposure; but however they did it, I love it. The ghost is always luminous, lightly colored and somewhat transparent, looking a bit like curls of cigarette smoke at first, circulating and cascading around a central point, which then consolidates into the vague appearance of a woman in a flowing gown. And being lightly colored and with a billowing appearance, it is kind of reminiscent of a little kid wearing a sheet as a ghost costume, only this ghost looks like the real thing upon which that kind of sheet ghost costume might be based.
Many ghost movies just have regular people playing the ghosts with no special effects whatsoever, like the ghosts are solid, normal, everyday flesh and blood people. If it suits the story, it’s fine, but unless the ghosts are specifically intended to be as such for the plot to work correctly, I really feel like there should be at least a bit of subtle special effects applied to ghosts in movies (it can be just a camera lens, a bit of double exposure, a slight darkening, etc.; just don’t overdo it, please!), you know, just so we know they’re ghosts, and so that they will be all creepy and neato. The least any ghost movie could do is make their ghosts a bit translucent, at least maybe for part of their appearance; and in fact, that simple, see-through effect works plenty well in general, and better than most. Ghosts are usually way overdone as special effects (see: Poltergeist, 1982), or way underdone as actors just standing there with no special effects (see: Hasta El Viento Tiene Miedo, 1968), and neither way is particularly chilling (although those are both great movies). That’s why the subdued, elegant manner in which the appearance of ghost is presented here stands up so well after all this time: They really got it right in The Uninvited.
(In a side note, there’s a plot element in this movie where a dominant woman in a position of some authority victimizes the young, vulnerable heroine due to the woman’s great admiration for an elegant deceased female antagonist (and her resultant loathing and resentment of the heroine’s character), and I wonder if this part of the plot comes from Hitchcock’s 1940 film: Rebecca. In each case, the dominating woman wants the hapless heroine to jump to her death. Also in each case, the stories are set in mansions by the sea, one figuratively haunted by a dominant, malignant woman, and the other one literally haunted by the same type of character. Rebecca had been a smash hit, so it’s hard to think it didn’t influence this aspect of The Uninvited, made just four years later.)
I don’t know if the TCM hosts have actually seen all the movies they introduce, or if they just read whatever’s there in the teleprompter. Mostly I think they know them pretty well, but as I have mentioned here on this blog before, when it comes to the classic horror movies, the introductions almost always seem to include some sort of informational discrepancy or error that’s unfortunate. That’s why I think TCM should get a classic horror expert like Greg Mank to introduce, or perhaps write the introductions for, the classic horror films, just so that rabid fans of these movies like me will not be discouraged by these slight errors in the history we’re given at the beginning and end of the films.
(Maybe I’m being nit-picky here, but seeing as how TCM is actually making an effort to provide us with background information and a historical context for the films they present, I would think they would prefer that the information they provide is accurate, because for many people, this is the only place they will get any background information on such movies.)
* (In ghost movies, for me anyway, it’s nice to see the ghost, or at least, the effects of its presence on the environment, and not just on the emotional state of the characters (or in many cases, just one character), because then it’s not really a ghost movie, is it? Without an actual ghost or manifestations of a haunting, it’s a psychological story where the person my just be imagining it; and no matter how much that makes critics cream their jeans, it’s been done to death, and I find it a bit dull. There are a lot of mentally unstable people, and paranoia movies are a different genre that’s huge in and of itself. But for me, a person with delusions does not a ghost movie make, and it feels like a copout to me to have a haunted house with no hauntings, or a ghost story explained in the end as just someone’s psychosis. A ghost movie with no ghosts is like a zombie movie with no zombies, or a monster movie with no monster: what’s the point?)
