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Amanda M. Blake

~ Of fairy tales and tentacles

Amanda M. Blake

Tag Archives: ghosts

Cape May: An Introspective

02 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by amandamblake in Television

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Tags

blacklist, deep down, ghosts, inspiration, james spader, review

blacklistThere are a number of things that went into the creation of DEEP DOWN, the undeniably bleak horror novel that I finished last March and that should come out sometime next year. The main inspiration was my own depression, and that desire—I’m sure there’s a German word for it—to just stop one’s life and get off.

For me, I wanted to go into my closet, shut off the light, close the door, and never come out. For others, it might be to climb into bed, pull the sheets over your head, and never wake up. Sometimes, I want to just step out the door and start walking. Not to any place in particular, and with very few possessions. I’d be picked by crows in a week, I’m sure. The point is escape, but I’m not sure it’s escape with the intent to survive.

That was the premise of DEEP DOWN, the concept, but it didn’t really turn into an idea for a while. Not until the first time I saw an episode in Season 3 of THE BLACKLIST, “Cape May.”

Strangely, very little of “Cape May” actually relates to my novel at all. The flint spark comes, I think, not from the story but from James Spader’s performance in the episode. It gave me a rope to hold in the dark. From there, I went my own way, of course. But I recently resumed my effort to get through Season 3 of BLACKLIST by way of starting the whole series over again, so I was able to revisit “Cape May.”

I have trouble with serial dramas. It has to do with my emotional energy in the evenings, and the emotional requirements necessary to follow television drama. It’s why I generally don’t binge-watch shows; it’s why I prefer standard procedurals and one-off reality shows most evenings; and it’s why I sometimes get stuck in a viewing loop, because rewatches take much less energy than new viewings. I’ve yet to get through Season 2 of SUPERNATURAL, and not because I don’t like the show, whereas I’ve watched CSI:NY multiple times over. Similarly, I’ve had trouble getting past a certain point in BLACKLIST, despite my enchantment with Spader’s Raymond Reddington. It’s the two-part episodes that do it. That’s not just a 45-minute commitment. That’s a movie-length commitment, and I just can’t take the suspense.

I’m exaggerating–because this personal failing sometimes amuses me–but not by much.

I was looking forward to re-watching “Cape May” again, though, so I soldiered on to get there.

I love episodes like “Cape May.” You know the kind. The one that deviates from all other episodes of the series, one where the writers and the actors really get to stretch their legs in another direction. An experimental, genre-bending episode. All the other episodes are names of Red’s blacklisters, but “Cape May” is simply a place. It’s a moment out of time, out of sequence, and it has nothing to do with Red’s list or the task force’s actions. It has none of the carefully curated music that I’ve loved about BLACKLIST from the beginning, so much that I’ve made a playlist. It stands out in a series that is essentially an action-thriller conspiracy procedural, albeit with season-long story arcs to tie them all together.

We open to Reddington quite unlike the vibrant, larger-than-life figure who can anecdote his way through every encounter. His eyes have no life, his face shows his age, his uniform is rumpled. He is a man in pain, a man dead with grief that is not mere sadness.

In that grief, he leaves everything behind and breaks into an abandoned seaside hotel that’s fallen into disrepair. There’s not a soul to be seen except for the old man with a metal detector searching the sand, then the woman at the edge of the ocean who removes her coat, her necklace, then walks straight in.

For those familiar with the BLACKLIST background, the notes of this story immediately ring a bell, but here Redddington dives into the water and drags the woman from the sea, bringing her into the parlor to warm up by the fire, his arms around her. The woman is almost catatonic, murmuring about someone with whom she spoke harsh words before his implied death. Reddington has briefly been given a purpose, but she already looks dead.

What I love most about this episode is that it is, at its heart, a ghost story. The abandoned hotel is the perfect haunted house, American gothic to the driftwood; Red is a haunted man. And ghost stories, when done right, are about human hearts, human grief, not specters and spirits, which is part of what I loved so much about THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE Netflix series. Ghost stories are so difficult to do well, but I’ve always wanted to write a good haunting.

BLACKLIST is not a supernatural show. When it feels like it treads the line of supernatural, that’s just science reaching the level of science fiction, a sense of ‘this is the future now.’ But ghosts don’t have to be supernatural fixtures. Like I said, the hotel feels like a haunted house, but in the end, it’s Red who’s haunted, his heart and mind that creates the ghosts.

The entire episode’s dialogue is spare, as is the setting—more like a play than a television show. Red and the woman speak in parallels, the exact meaning intentionally vague—Are Red and the woman talking about Red and Elizabeth or about Red and the woman herself? The answer is always yes, because history repeats itself. History haunts. Red tells so many stories of the people and places he’s encountered, outlandish experiences, but it’s the stories he doesn’t want to tell that haunt him. He is a killer, a principled sociopath. The woman is a killer, even less scrupulous, but with enough room in her killer’s heart for a daughter. They speak as killers speak to each other, ships passing in the night, a nod to each other in their respective, unique pain—the only deaths that have caused this pain, when they themselves are reapers.

Even the episode’s action sequence plays very differently than the usual BLACKLIST operations. These are people who work best alone but who ally themselves for the moment. They aren’t self-righteously blustering and bombastic like the FBI, and Red is in no state for theatrics. It’s just Red and the woman, quiet killers, quiet reapers. There’s minimal dialogue in the sequence, no headsets and walkie-talkies, no music except in the survivalist set-up. Everyone moves in silence and shadows, as though the house and the killers themselves are ghosts haunting the encroaching mercenaries, a sense enhanced by all the white-sheet-covered furniture between which they stalk each other.

Was the woman ghost or grief? Just because something isn’t there doesn’t mean it isn’t real. There was no rescue, no fight, no woman. Red was alone, yet he experienced them; they were real enough. His internal haunting remains unresolved, but there is, ultimately, catharsis—an exorcism, in acknowledging what truths he spoke to himself in the darkness.

“Cape May,” like a good haunting, lingers, depending on James Spader’s charisma even when Red is at his least flashy and most human—a fallen Icarus, crushed by the weight of his failure. Red himself, in shedding his previous life and living a shiftless criminal life, is a kind of a ghost himself, for all that he seems so lifelike. It is when Red stops, when the plummeting of his restless momentum reaches its inevitable, abrupt end, that Spader’s performance transcends an already brilliant role. No tricks. No gimmicks. No slick talk or stories. Just a man who can’t wrap enough layers of charm, class, and ruthlessness to protect himself from his own fallibility.

In pulling “Cape May” out of the BLACKLIST formula, stripping it down to the grain, we get something that’s not just good but might actually be great.

And we get a hell of a good ghost story.

Dead Ends

29 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by amandamblake in Music, Poetry

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Tags

ghosts, gothic, hitchhiker, horror, lyrics, not a poet, poem, songwriting, urban legend

horror crime death psychopath

Photo by Tookapic on Pexels.com

I tried to write a hitchhiker ghost song a while back, but it didn’t really work, and I had to put the idea back in the box for a while.

Last month, I tried writing one again, and this time it came together into something coherent.

I’m fascinated by ghost stories, because they’re so difficult to do well. Ghost poetry’s a little different – all about atmosphere. It’s so delightfully creepy and sad and sexy all at the same time. The hitchhiker ghost urban legend is one that’s stuck visually in my mind, so it was a pleasure to find an outlet. I’m quite happy with it.

DEAD ENDS

Black leather jacket and long white dress
Silk flutters like wind through the mist
Don’t have no home, don’t have no address
Picking up the girl with a tear and a kiss.

Sparkling eyes and pale blue lips
Can’t help but tear your gaze from the road
A corsage goes dry on another girl’s wrist
But whispers remind you that you’ll soon grow old

I offer you a moment
I offer you a chance
I know it’s not allowed, sir
But would you like to have this dance?

Chorus:
I wander a long and lonely highway
Can’t stay in one place, can’t linger in one town
Hitching rides without a destination
Legs are tired but feet never touch the ground
You’ll see me in the rearview mirror
But I’m not there when you turn around.
Ride with you until the moon descends
And I’ll be wandering until the road dead-ends.

Never had my moment in the sun
Cold gray steel and headlights stained with blood
Silk dress still white as winter for so long
I touch your hand, just looking for some love

Back seat steams, my skin’s as cold as ice
Ghosts from your lips as you bring your heat inside
Steal your breath to remember my own life
That someone like you stole in a car like the one you ride

I offered you a moment
In the dark you heard my voice
You know it’s not allowed, sir
But remember, you made the choice.

Chorus:
I wander a long and lonely highway
Can’t stay in one place, can’t linger in one town
Hitching rides without a destination
Legs are tired but feet never touch the ground
You’ll see me in the rearview mirror
But I’m never there when you turn around.
Ride with you until the moon descends
And I’ll be wandering until the road dead-ends.

Bridge:
They find your body in the back seat
Of your wayward hitcher car
Don’t you know not to pick up strangers?
You never know who they are
Now you’re cold as your ghostly lover
Your journey ends, but mine’s still so far
I’m still cold, your ghostly lover
God, why does it have to be so far?

[whisper] I want to feel alive

I offer you a moment
Die a little more each night
I know it’s not allowed, sir
But I don’t want to do what’s right.

Chorus:
I wander a long and lonely highway
Can’t stay in one place, can’t linger in one town
Hitching rides without a destination
Legs are tired but feet never touch the ground
You’ll see me in the rearview mirror
But I’m never there when you turn around.
Ride with you until the moon descends
And I’ll be wandering until the road dead-ends.

House of Windows

22 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by amandamblake in Music, Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

ghosts, haunted house, haunting, horror, lyrics, not a poet, poem, songwriting

brown concrete castle

Photo by Jack Gittoes on Pexels.com

Because I’m between major writing projects (transcription isn’t a major project), I was finally able to start THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE on Netflix. No spoilers, please, but I think it’s amazing. Episodic horror doesn’t always deliver – I think it’s a pacing thing, and in the case of what I’ve seen on AHS and other Ryan Murphy shows, a matter of being too clever to be scary.

Anyway, it seems like a good time to share my haunted house song I wrote last month, which totally has a Shirley Jackson vibe to it.

HOUSE OF WINDOWS

It’s a whole wide world out there
A fine, varied, full-bodied thoroughfare
Hundreds of thousands breathe the same air
Footsteps thunder over same streets, same stairs.

The house is gated, silent, and still
Its statues, a marble gleam atop the shadowed hill
They peer from stone eyes, listen with stone ears
Let all with eyes see, let all with ears hear.

Chorus:
The house has many windows
Curtains trembling with ghosts
Moths have made away with all the clothes
The dead inside don’t sleep but doze
It’s a house with many windows
But the windows are closed.

Statues at the gate, statues in the rooms
Inhale stale air, filter in the gloom
Every creaking floorboard, memory of previous doom
A house of many windows, a house of many tombs.

Visitors come to view the walls in awe
Priceless paintings behind drapes only the dead get to draw
Guests all leave unsure how to say what they saw
Any moment a knock on the door, any moment a monkey’s paw.

Chorus

In the deep dark garden, the roses have died
Whatever the tenants tell you, the dead likely lie
From skylights come the gray of stormier skies
A house of many windows, a house of many eyes.

Let all who wish to join us enter in
Remember all your failures, remember all your sins
Death chills the halls, creeps under your skin
The house offers rest, yet restlessness within.

Bridge:
Is life just waiting for death? Is that how it goes?
Am I a house, or am I already a ghost?

Chorus

 

REVIEW: The Awakening

25 Saturday Aug 2018

Posted by amandamblake in Movie Reviews

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Tags

depression, ghosts, grief, horror, mental illness, movie, movie review, rebecca hall, the awakening

The Awakening

I think ghost stories are particularly difficult to make scary. They’re generally filed under the umbrella of horror monsters, but they’re more often tragic than frightening. That’s why there are so many ghost horror movies that depend on the jump scare—because that’s sometimes the only kinds of scares they offer. Let’s face it – the more you get to know them, the more lost spirits seem sad rather than scary (SIXTH SENSE kind of covers this phenomenon, and I’d consider SIXTH SENSE one of the better ghost horror movies). I think this is the reason a lot of movie hauntings have transitioned from the human spirits to the demonic. Ghost stories are extremely difficult to do well, especially when trying to find the right balance of tragedy and horror.

THE AWAKENING is one of my favorite ghost stories, but it is, without question, a better tragedy than it is a horror movie. I would say the closest comparison to the movie in tone, palette, and time period is THE OTHERS, which is also one of the better ghost horror movies. However, while THE AWAKENING has a few jump scares, it’s really shot as a drama rather than a horror movie most of the way through, which is good, because aside from some good tension here and there, it functions much better as a supernatural period drama.

I love the opening to THE AWAKENING. It begins with a quote from the main character’s book challenging the spiritualism movement prevalent at the beginning of the 20th by placing it in historical context. Between the Spanish flu and World War I, so many had lost people close to them under terrible circumstances. In the midst of survivor’s guilt, lack of closure, and an excess of grief. Florence Cathcart rightly points out, “This is a time for ghosts.”

The opening transitions into a classic seance, with the supernatural element rising higher and higher…only for Florence to interrupt the proceedings by exposing the spiritualist charlatans for what they are. Instead of being outraged at being taken advantage of, a woman who lost her young daughter – presumably to influenza – slaps Florence and asks whether she has any children. “No, of course you haven’t,” she replies with disdain, because a woman with children would know why a false dream was better than nothing. She questions whether Florence’s grief for the young soldier whose photograph she brought to the seance was even real. But as the mother leaves, we see Florence—played by the wonderful Rebecca Hall with arch strength and vulnerability—deflate. Her commanding, energetic presence dissipates. She appears weighed down, barely able to take another step.

In her own words, “This is a time for ghosts.” And it’s clear within the first fifteen minutes that, though Florence devotes herself to disproving hauntings and exposing frauds, she’s desperately seeking ghosts of her own. It gives her no pleasure at all to debunk the supernatural. Quite the contrary.

This entire movie offers some of the best depictions of depression and grief from a number of the characters that I think I’ve ever seen in a movie. The way it weighs you down and you sometimes don’t even want to move. The way it makes people lash out. The way you have to put on a mask, the way you lie to others and yourself, the way it takes over your life and cycles through your thoughts, the guilt, hopelessness, and self-destruction it can cause.

From the wonderful opening, AWAKENING moves into the main plot, with Robert Mallory—played by Dominic West as an attractive but caustic ex-soldier—an instructor from a boy’s boarding school, visiting Cathcart and requesting her help to put to rest rumors of a ghost boy haunting the school, after the death of one of the students. Usually the man would be the skeptic and the woman the believer, but like Mulder and Scully, AWAKENING switches that expectation on its head. Mallory believes in ghosts, but he’s also a firm realist, and he only wants the truth and to keep the kids safe, and the prim but earnest school matron, Maud, is a devotee of Cathcart’s work and recommended her.

At first, Cathcart is reluctant to engage in another investigation, weary as she is with her depression and needing a break, but Mallory throws her own words from her book back into her face, about how she was a fearful child and cannot abide children being made to live in fear – another point that resonates through the movie.

The boys’ school to which Mallory brings Florence is appropriately gothic, a looming, gray structure in the middle of nowhere, gloomy and forbidding, with energetic but somewhat melancholy students and a severe administration. With her, Florence brings the various accoutrements of her trade—a delightful look into the early twentieth century versions of our modern ghost-hunting gizmos, with all the scientific rigor of pre-WWII CSI. The dark manor at night provides some decent spookiness, but it’s pretty clear with the first tripped bell wire and footprints on the floor that the ghost boy traversing through the halls at that late hour is not so dead, and the tension dissipates…until something’s there that shouldn’t be.

And thus begins the slow unraveling of Ms. Cathcart. The most held-together characters of the movie lose their masks, exposing not ghosts but shells, broken survivors of any number of tragedies who must learn how to live with the ghosts of the people who passed on without them, and beyond the fear of mortality so keenly felt at a time that wrought the need for ghosts.

To be honest, the supernatural elements are sometimes the worst parts of the movie – the swirly face ghost is actually the worst effect, which is a shame, because that’s one of the few things you’re supposed to be afraid of.

The human elements – shattering perceptions and confronting fears – are by far the most interesting parts. I feel like I see something new every time I watch it. It’s a beautiful film and a beautiful, tragic story, and I do encourage you to give it a try on that merit rather than the horror.

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