Hello, everyone. I'm Arthur Norman and this is CEO Fanasis, the podcast for fans of everything. Welcome. Today I'm joined by Mark C.
To talk about the Innocence, the 1961 film. We dig in deep to the horror classic and have a great discussion. We talk about ambiguity, the many layer artistic choices in the film and its surprising similarities. Hellraiser.
A quick content warning. The film itself implies sexual abuse and we do talk about it. Skip this one if that is too much for you. On to the discussion.
Hello, everyone. I'm here once again. Actually, not once again. First timer club.
Mark. Mark, how you doing? Me? I'm all right.
You're only all right. Not great. Because you're not going to talk about your favorite horror movie. Yeah, let's do it.
We are discussing the Innocence, the film from 1961, which is Mark's favorite favorite horror movie. Well, clarify. I said I consider it the scariest movie I've ever seen. Okay.
Not the same as being my favorite. I thought you said my favorite. It is one of my favorite fairy favorite, but it's number one on my scariest movie I've ever seen list. Okay.
I think it's okay if we are not explicit about this is the best. This is the favoritest or most scariest or whatever is most movie. But we're talking about it. We're going to.
Hey, there's spoilers. I probably said this. Probably already said this once in the intro to this, but there's spoilers. So go see the movie before you listen to this.
If you. Yeah, yeah, pause right now and just go watch it and then come back and unpause. It's a good movie. You should watch it here.
There's my official recommendation. I'm glad you did, Robbie. Now I'm gonna address your. I don't know if I'm allowed to do this, but I'm gonna address your listener directly.
Robbie would not let us talk about it from the moment the movie ended. We watched it together. But then he put an embargo on us talking about it until we record this conversation right now. And it's something like what, two weeks later after we watched it.
So the listener is getting to hear this long gestating this. This my relief from conversational constipation that you post on me for two weeks. Verbal. Verbal diarrhea is what I always aim for with my podcasts.
Hey, you're into company. The Innocence. I will say quick synopsis, which is quick because the plot of this is really simple and I think that's A strength, honestly, of the film. It is based on Turn of the Screw, a novella by Henry James.
But the plot is there's two kids who, their parents are dead. They're looked up for after by their uncle, who does not give a shit about them, who's rich, doesn't want to raise kids, so he hires a governess to look after them. And then the governess thinks that the kids are possessed by ghosts of two people who used to take care of them. And that's the plot.
Yeah, I think you basically like, they're in his country estate and he wants to live in London. And basically it's sort of imply that he wants to be a bachelor and fuck everybody. So he doesn't want these kids to be kind of weighing him down. So she has to go out into the country to be with them or, excuse me, with them.
And it's just. It's a house and in a state that's very beautiful at first, that even seems kind of idyllic. Idyllic. And then more and more she gets a sense from the maid, predominantly, like the maid is really the only employee that gets much screen time or much dialogue.
And the governor starts to kind of realize more and more that there's all these secrets and kind of a dark history to the estate, including, you know, a past that the kids shared in that isn't being talked about. And so she's. She showed, even before the title sequence of the movie, before anything starts, she's portrayed as this very devout person who's in the middle of praying for like the souls of the children. It's almost like a flash forward kind of thing, a foreshadowing.
And you come to find out that a previous governess and the. What was he? The valet of the estate? Yeah, the valet.
He was in charge. Yeah. So like the two of them had this torrid affair that is hinted at being very like sadomasochistic and that they both enjoyed just humiliating the woman and that the maid talked about that they used every room in the house to basically, you know, I kind of like how things cloaked in that sort of Victorian prudish prudishness. But she said something like rooms during the day being treated as the darkest woods at night or whatever.
Basically kind of implying that they're screwing like animals in all different rooms. And that there are many occasions where the kids at least were there witnessing it, if not being sort of brought in to participate. But that's very much like very, very. Just left to the audience to infer it's not stated outright.
And the movie itself. We're going to talk a lot about ambiguity. We're going to address directly at some point. But yeah, I think that should be.
We're probably going to say a word. I'm going to say the word ambiguous and subtle a lot. And again, I think that strength is. It's a strength of the film.
I think it's a strength is the word ambiguous and ambiguity is used a lot in or, you know, the actual linguist words. Again, I. If you listen to most of my podcasts here, I'm pretty clear that I can't talk. I'm a really good podcaster.
It's a strength and it is used correctly. It is the ambiguity is used to. As it should be. I am.
Anyone listening to most of my podcast probably would. I'm kind of. I have gotten to the point where I hate a lot of modern, not even movies, art in general that has. That has an ambiguous ending that doesn't tell you exactly what's happening and then acts like that's intelligent.
Right. Like, oh, we didn't know what we. We don't know what the art we made means. So we don't try and tell you.
We just. Hopefully you don't realize that we don't know. It feels a lot of the time. Right.
Right. Yeah. It's laziness in terms of. Instead of having a focus, I'll just hide behind the pretense that my lack of focus was somehow intentional.
Right. And this film. I think I did say this after we watched the movie is it. It feels full of choices.
It doesn't feel like there was any of this left. And upon researching the making of the movie and a lot of the backs, the backstage stuff and listening interviews with some of the people who work on it. That is absolutely true. Like they've apparently they a lot.
It was the director. Director. His is Jack Layton, who apparently, like, was a perfectionist, especially the editing. But then the.
The cinematography by Freddie Francis, which we're gonna talk a lot about because I think it's amazing. Frickin amazing. Yeah, it's the best. I think it's the best thing about the movie, honestly.
And it's not. That's not necessarily a slight about everything else in the film, but I think it is such a strength. But it's all very. It's all very purposeful.
It is all full of choices about why did they do this and said that. Because they had. They knew in their mind why they knew why they chose to have the light this Way or that way. Right, right, exactly.
They chose to have an ending that you go, oh, what happened? Or they chose to not show you these things because they don't want you, but it doesn't mean that they didn't understand the meaning of not showing you those things. Right, right, right. Yeah.
You're bringing. For me, you're bringing up a lot of stuff from film school in terms of the intentionality of filmmaking that, you know, was very present all the way through the classical era. That seems to be absent from a lot of modern filmmaking, a lot of modern movies. And it could even be as simple as with the advent of video and then digital.
You know, film as a medium forces you to be really intentional. You have to measure the light and measure the focus and measure everything you're getting. And you won't know until half as soon as the next day when you get the film back in the lab and watch it, whether you got it right. And with video camcorders and camera phones, you can just kind of point in the general direction and film as much as you want and then cut it all down during the editing and.
And everyone on the set gathers around the video tap to watch what you're getting while you're filming it. And then that, too, can make the actors very self conscious, which is usually the opposite of what you want them to be feeling while they're acting a scene. And so it's just like the. You've done far more research about the making of the movie, and that's really interesting.
I'm looking forward to hearing more of what you've learned. For me, this was like this, I think maybe the sixth time I watched the movie when we watched it a couple weeks ago. And I suppose that some, you know, favorite movies of mine that, like, at some point, I see them enough times that it starts to kind of wear off. And instead, with the sixth viewing of the Innocence, I was finding more and more things about it, whether it was story or performance or, like you said, just the.
The directing, the choices that were made that were just, like, wowing me as far as the intentionality. And also, and I think I kind of pissed this to you when I suggested you watch it. One of the things that impresses me the most about it is that it's, like I said, I consider the. Probably the scariest film that I've ever seen.
And that's accomplished entirely through atmosphere and build. And then like a shocking moment that everything is kind of built toward, and then you sort of reel back from that and it Builds up toward another shocking moment. But all of these were absolutely zero dollar. Like, there are no.
Basically, there kind of no special effects in the movie. It's like just have the actor stand outside the window and suddenly it's so terrifying to see there because he wasn't there a second ago or whatever it might be. This sounds kind of lame, but it's really about, you know, using, oh, I'm going to sound so pretentious. It's like using cinema itself.
Like how. Where are you putting the camera? How are you editing it? The fact that suddenly all the sound drops out.
In this moment, she's outside, she's trimming the roses, and then suddenly all the sound drops out and she looks up and sees a specter up on the roof of the building. And they're like, just. The absence of the sound for that moment is far more chilling than it seems. Like lazy filmmaking is all about just piling more and more on.
I mean, it's to mediocre results versus being really intentional like that. Well, I mean, it's. It's interesting that we were recording this and talking about this right after Squir Scorsese had the comment about, you know, movies are theme park rides now. Right.
And I don't know. I'm not gonna. You know, I feel like that not all movies are theme park rides now. Some are, but I mean, it's also been.
It's not like that is a sudden thing. I think that it has been. It's certainly more pronounced now because it seems like there are two types of movies right now. There are ones that make, you know, that are incredibly small and cost a million dollars to make.
And then there are ones that cost $500 million to make. And everything else you get, everything that tries to be in the middle gets kind of pushed to one side or the other. And you have to be kind of in the like, oh, it costs a little money to make. It's okay because there's a chance it'll make its money back.
Or it's so big, it's too big to fail. If you spend so much money on it, we'll just market it. We'll spend as much money on the marketing as we do the actual marketing, actual movie. And everyone will see it because they sell commercials 400 times.
Right? And I think this movie does highlight, especially horror movies. I chirped, I harped upon this when I. In the Hereditary podcast, which I think was last, let's say, I released.
By the time you're hearing this, the people listening probably was two months ago. But hereditary is it's not. The movies themselves are tonally, are different from each other and thematically very different from each other, but it too is very sparse in how it tries to scare you. It is not.
It is not jump scares, largely. It is use of atmosphere and tension between characters in ambiguous language and creating just by small mannerisms from actors and knowing and not not hitting you over the head with it, frankly, by letting it kind of just fill the film and trusting the audience to pay attention. Right. And I think that's a part of it is that a lot of current modern cinema, especially big blockbuster superhero movies, fast and furious movies, stuff like that, is like, they want to hit such a broad audience.
They don't leave anything up to interpretation. They don't want any degree, subtly. They want to make sure you're getting every punch right in the face. They want you to feel.
They don't want you necessarily. Like, they. I'm sure they assume that some people are, like, staring at their phones while the movie's on. Right.
And I think this film is. The horror in it is very effective. And it's. And the fear and the tension is real.
And it is present. It feels present. Even, like, you mentioned the idyllic nature of the state. And then that's like.
And the kids, they're both first introduced. They're introduced as these idyllic things. And then gradually it's like, oh, this apple has a big rotten core in the middle of it, if you dig far enough. And yeah, the little girl about the quote about the spider and the butterfly.
Right. And like, yeah, little symbols like that. Yeah. Which I will also mention.
This film is written largely for my digging. It seems it's credited to a lot. Obviously, this is based on the story by Henry James, with credit to John Mortimer, who wrote the play that this was based on. Oh, but largely, it was trim Capote.
From what I can tell, most of it is actually like, trimming Capote even. Apparently that line, despite the spider butterfly line, was a late rewrite that was added in for the podcast listener who has disobeyed and not watched the movie before. Listening this far into the podcast, there's a moment where the little girl is out in the garden and she has come across a butterfly trapped in a spider's web. And the.
The. What she called the governess is kind of coming over and the girl is saying with delight, like, oh, look, a spider has caught a butterfly and he's eating her. And, like is very clearly rooting for the spider. And I think it's like, that's a pretty, like, symbolic.
Everyone loves butterflies and many, many people hate spiders. And so, like, if I saw a butterfly trapped in a spider's web, like, I understand its nature and et cetera, et cetera, I would probably try to get the butterfly out of the spider's web the way I wouldn't bother to do for the average, like, moth or beetle or whatever. And so they're definitely making tonal choices and saying something about her character under the surface of being a little girl, and that she's, like, gleefully watching this spider eat this. This convulsing butterfly, right?
And it's. It's, you know, it is naturally upsetting because you see the butterfly struggle, you see it trying to break free, and it's the same. She carries that turtle around, the tortoise. Actually, it's not a turtle, it's a tortoise.
And there's a time when she's holding it underwater, pulls it out, and she asks, can this swim? And the governess is like, no, no, it can't. She's like, that's my fault. It's like she's.
She's kneeling at the bank of the pond, and she asked the governess, can tortoises swim? And the government says, no, I don't think they can. And then she reaches down and plucks her tortoise out of. From under the water and says, yeah, I think you're right.
And the idea is that she put the tortoise under the water and while it's sitting there drowning, she's just considering whether it can swim and then pulls it out to safety. But she was the one that, like, put it in there in the first place. And then similarly, you have later in the scene in the film, the boy is keeping a dead pigeon under his pillow and doesn't seem to be aware that it's dead because he says, I'm keeping it warm. I found it.
It had fallen or whatever, and I'm keeping it warm. But it clearly has a broken neck. And it's kind of implied that he's the one that broke its neck, because it's not just going to get accidentally broken. It's like he wrung its neck, but now he's keeping it under his pillow.
And it's this weird kind of like. And this is. Maybe this is a tangent, but I feel like it's very close to the heart of what the film is about. This sort of tension between the innocence of these children.
That was what the fucking title of the movie is. And the fact that they. While the previous governess and the valet were alive, they sort of corrupted the children by, you know, the kids would just follow them around everywhere they went. And the valet and the governess would both tell them things that.
Again, it sort of implied that these are things you don't tell little kids. And yet they would happily tell these kids that. And then, like, showing them things, whether it's them having sex or, you know, not just sex, but, like, deeply degrading, you know, S and M kind of stuff. And then once these first of the Valley, like, is drunk and coming home at night and he slips on the ice and breaks his neck and dies.
And then the governess lasts for another, I don't know, a few weeks or months or something, and she's just so despondent about losing him that she eventually kills it herself. And so that's the big scandal that's not talked about. And the governess now comes to. Comes to put together that what's happening is that the ghost of the valet and the ghost of the previous governess are trying to get back together with each other through possessing the bodies of boy and the girl.
Right. So you've got these kids that are very much young. I mean, I think even though the brother who's older is still, what, like, not even 10? I mean, these are two young kids.
I don't know if they ever actually give them a number. But the boy actor is 12 in real life. I don't. Obviously, he could play younger than he's actually.
Yeah, yeah. So, like, maybe he's pubescent and then she's definitely pre pubescent. And it's like the combination of them being innocent children but sort of being influenced and, like, previously influenced and now potentially actually possessed by not just adults, but these sort of obsessed, deviant adults. And it creates this kind of dichotomy where the kids are both sort of corrupt and innocent of their own corruption simultaneously.
Like, she's drowning the turtle. She's watching the butterfly get eaten by the spider when she could just reach a finger out and lift it out of the web. And he kills a pigeon for some reason, but then is just water keeping it under his pillow. And I don't think.
I mean, throughout the film it's made clear that he's a very charismatic, charming, manipulative boy, that he's kind of taken after his uncle in that way and that he's real. Whereas the young girl is just kind of doing her thing and following her brother around. He's very much portrayed as, like, fucking with the governess's head on purpose. Yes.
But even that, I don't think, like, as contradictory as it sounds, I feel like he genuinely both murdered the pigeon and is sort of oblivious of the fact that the pigeon is actually dead simultaneously. And he's not just pretending not to get that it's dead to fuck with her. I think that that's one of the clearest portrayals of that divided experience that both of the kids are going through. The ambiguity is.
It's there again. It is. It is both of those. And I think that's the.
I think that is the actual. I think people misunderstand what ambiguity actually is. And the fact that it's. Because both of those things can be true and are equally.
And are equally true simultaneously. True. Like that. It's like Schrodinger's Cat in the Box or whatever.
Right. Kind of dead and alive at the same time. Quantum superposition is. That is the fact that both make sense.
Both, if you follow either path. Both are. Both are adequate to explain what's happening. Is it because, you know, either.
Either is equally correct. And frankly, both can be correct at the same time. Before we went down that rabbit hole, I was going to talk about the lighting because. And it starts right when they first get to.
When she first gets wife. It's her and the little girl. At first, they first get to the state, and it's so bright. Right.
The movie's in black and white and it's. But it's so bright. It's so. Yeah.
Bright daylight. Like, there's a few nighttime scenes, but for the most part, the film takes place during the bright daylight. And again, just as an aside, like, to me, that's part of what makes it the scariest movie ever seen. And it makes me want to, like, really respect and want to do things like, you know, vampire movie that takes place entirely during the day.
Because if, you know, 99% of scary stories are at night. And there's this feeling like if we just hold on, the sun will come up and we'll be rescued. But if the super scary is happening in broad daylight, then where are you gonna go? What are you gonna do?
Like, you have to just deal with it. And so, like, you're saying that's part of the choice of the film, that the estate, the country estate is so isolated in itself. And the. The sort of.
The corruption that it's experiencing. The estate is experiencing sort of as a haunted house. And then the Individual kids are kind of experiencing as individual possessed people that the corruption is so bad and the isolation is so complete that daylight isn't going to help anybody. Like we might as well have it happen in broad daylight.
And that's almost like the evil kind of like gloating in how, how thoroughly it's taken over the situation. It's like the. I remember reading some myth that there's. There's some subspecies of werewolf that's actually immune to silver.
And so often in their human form they will wear silver necklaces and jewelry to just kind of secretly gloat that that's something that doesn't have any power over them. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, I think that the, the light apparently to make the tree. To make everything.
They painted some of the leaves of the trees silver to shine even brighter in the daylight, to make it even brighter. And I didn't think really at this, at the time. I think, I think it is something that has come to me as I thought about it and as I thought about the film and I read it a little bit about it. There is a, like you said, corruption.
And I, like, there is a feeling of wrongness, right? Like a crime against nature. Yeah, there's like a feeling of that corruption, of that wrongness, of like, like, of something insidious. And you don't really.
The movie does. It's not a long movie, you know, it's 100 minutes. It's not that it's not like. It's like a two and a half hour long movie, but it's.
But it does think, take its time when it needs to. And even before you get to the stuff with the kids, you know, killing, watching animals die or being overtly manipulative, I still. There's still some weird tension that I was feeling as I was watching the early parts. And I'm feeling it and I think it really was.
It's not that it's. It's not even. It's more than. It's just because it's bright outside, it's.
Because it's so bright outside, it feels, it feels artificially bright. And like. And they say they painted the trees silver to make them brighter. And it feels the movie like when you're watching, like, wait, this feels weird.
This doesn't feel like, why is it so happy? Right? Why? This isn't right.
No one's like this. And this is. No one would be like this. And even if they were happy, they wouldn't be like this.
They wouldn't be. It's like they're over. Over Overcompensating. Right.
It's like a soulless creature doing a mimicry of what a happy human being would act like. Yeah. And the lighting in the environment itself kind of feels like that. And then you said there's only a couple.
There's not that much that happens in the dark. There is. There's a very. A very few moments that happen nighttime, but they really nail them.
They really go hard with those scenes when it's night. With that is when we first see the Valley. The Quint's ghost in the window. Right.
The valet. Yeah. Which is literally. That's a side note.
I would technically consider the Exorcist to be the most, like, disturbing or upsetting or even borderline traumatizing movie I've ever seen. But I disqualify it because it's basically relying on a lot of tricks that have nothing to do with good storytelling. It's just kind of assaulting the viewer with all these, like, borderline subliminal flashing imagery and just the over the top swearing and vomiting and stuff like that. Which is why I consider the Innocence to be the actual scariest movie ever seen as far as craftsmanship.
But there is a moment in the Exorcist where the little possessed Reagan girl is, like, in the midst of the battle with the priests, and she's now sitting on the floor in the corner with. With her, like, knees pulled up to her chest. And there's this shot, and they use it oftentimes in promos and stuff now, where she is either looking directly into the camera or just to the side of it. And she has this grin on her face like she's just relishing.
And I can't remember where it even takes place. It's. Maybe it's after the older priestess had a heart attack or something. But she is just this shot of this evil face with eyes and the grin right into the camera.
And I literally. I have to look away if I happen to be in the presence of a screen that that's on. And I say that to say that the Innocence also has a moment like that for me. And that's where she turns to look and his face is leering in through the window from the darkness of the night outside.
And it's interesting because at first I thought he was leering in directly at her, us. And when she, like, screams or whatever and he disappears and the maid shows up, she says kind of breathlessly that it's like he was hungrily looking past her into the house for the boy. And it's like he's not even looking at her. He's looking kind of for his prey or whatever.
But yes, when you talk about going hard like, that is a moment that literally I can't. I have to avert my eyes. And I think when we watched it together, I like covered my eyes or something, which maybe makes me a pussy, but it's just like. That was super affecting to me.
Like a very, very strong image of just the evil one in space. It's zero dollars. No fancy makeup that I can tell. No, like CG whirling spectral tendrils.
It's just this actor standing outside of the window looking heck of skeevy. But because, you know, he's supposed to be a ghost and he wasn't there a second ago. It's terrifying. I mean, at least to me.
No, I mean, it's a very effective energy because the film is so sparse with it. It is not. Right. It's not.
It's not desensitizing you at every moment with. With a lot of jump scares, a lot of just things jumping out of you, a lot of sudden noises. It's the opposite. It is deprived because the sound cuts away when, as you see the.
The face just slowly come closer until it's right up against the window and you are. You're robbed of your. Your senses. And that's, that's.
That's why it's. It's so effective. It's not because, oh, it's, it's. It's not bombarding you with like, hey, sudden noise and scary face.
It is just slowly appearing and coming up next to you and the sound just drops away to nothing. Right, right, right. And it's like in that sense, what you were saying, contrasting Scorsese and talking about modern roller coaster movies versus cinema, like, that's exactly. You know, horror roller coasters do the same thing.
It's like we're haunted house experiences at Halloween. It's like blood everywhere, gruesome stuff everywhere. People jumping out at you as you go by. Even just jets of air, super loud sounds like any sense that they can assault.
And that's what I think the Exorcist is really effective at. In that you just feel so bombarded, then it sort of wears down all your defenses. And like Stephen King talks about, and I might get these two twisted around, but he's like, try to go for horror. I can't remember if he says horror or terror verse, but it's like, try to go for horror.
If you can't get horror. Try to get terror. And if you can't get terror, go for the gross out. And it's.
Now, you see that in modern or even not super modern horror movies, where maybe the first thing you see is like a mutilated animal, even something that's completely not supernatural, like, oh, no, we ran over a squirrel. And you see the dead squirrel, or oh, no, you know, the fish died and you see the fish floating at the top of the tank. And it's these things to just start. I mean, if we start kind of going ew, like that's where it starts.
And then from there the film will just kind of tear down our defenses. And that makes us more vulnerable to the supposedly horror stuff that happens later on. But that's exactly what the innocence doesn't do, which I feel like is. I mean, yeah, they work, but they're kind of cheap tricks.
It's. It's much more the roller coaster effect of jerking you hither and yon versus the innocence is like build and build and build and take, step away and then build and build. And it's. That's why I think it's far more affecting.
But it's like it requires craft and that means you gotta know what you're doing. It almost seems like a lost art in at least modern, like most Hollywood films these days. I mean, it's just. It's difficult and it takes time.
And frankly there's. I mean, the largest, the largest part of Hollywood now is just like, we need to make a movie that makes money, but we don't need to. You know, it's not, hey, we have this director and we have this project and we'll let them do what they want for the most part. The only, I think the only intrusion on this in the studio is that they wanted him to use Cinescope.
Right. With the widescreen because Fox owned the process. So they wanted everyone to use it. Right, right.
Which he originally apparently didn't want to use. He wanted to use 4x3. Am I wrong? Was he a British director?
Yes, he was. He was. Okay, yeah. I don't remember the specifics, but I know there's this sense of like the academy ratio 4x3, the same one that pre HDTVs, like two TVs were all in that 4,3 ratio.
Like, for some reason it sticks in my head that there's something about British filmmaking that either use that or after America had gone to widescreen for longer or something that it makes sense that especially for something that's borderline a film stage play that he might want to operate in that more square shaped frame. But I love that the innocence is widescreen. I think it makes amazing use of that, that wide aspect ratio. So bully for him for adapting to it.
If that wasn't his original plan. Apparently it was kind of a. It was kind of like a compromise. Like he was.
He was kind of talking to it by his cinematographer, Freddie Francis. He who apparently went, you know what? At first I think Jack Clayton balked at it. And then Freddie Francis said, you know what?
I can do stuff with it. And he kind of thought of ways, you know, because of the way he lighted, he lit the surrounding environments and the way that they stage the actors. So sometimes they're at the far edges of screens and sometimes they're in the middle. Like they figure out a ways to use that widescreen.
And I think it ultimately satisfied both, you know, it satisfied his desire to like make the film the way he wanted. And the, you know, the Fox guys who just wanted him to use the process they had because they own the rights to it. So lighting. And the lighting in those dark scenes is terrific because of the contrast, because of the fact that most of the film is daylight and super bright.
And then the dark are suddenly robbed of those senses. Just like you are robbed of the sound. Whenever there's a ghost, the sound drops out. You're in the dark side.
You're robbed of these senses and you have the. The her wandering through the house with the candles. And I even mentioned it at the time when we were watching. I rewind it.
You're the one here. I watched the film for like the sixth time and you're the one that noticed that as she picks up a candle to go through the house to look for the kid. From literally from one shot to the next, the candle goes from being fresh to like almost burned all the way down and like covered in drippy wax. And literally six times in.
I had never noticed that. And you picked up on it right away that it's like a manipulation, that the light is running out. The candles are burning faster even than they kind of naturally should. Like her time is short and then the dark is going to overtake her or whatever.
And the way they made. They actually put extra wicks in all of those candles to make them burn faster. To make them burn brighter and faster. Oh, so that's so good.
That's why it's so bright. It's like. It is. It's extraordinarily.
There's extraordinary light Just from that one source, because that's all there is. There is actually. There's no other source of light in the shots. It's just candles.
And they put extra wicks in all the candles so that they were burning incredibly bright because of all the flame. Um, and it. That. That attention to the lighting and to the way that the shots are framed.
The cinematographer also, like, I noticed it almost immediately, like, the weird. Some. Some scenes have like this dark vignette around them on the outside of the frame. And it.
Right. And he. He purposely. He's like.
He has one of his kind of. One of his kind of eurekas was very much like, well, I'm gonna put lens on it and paint the lenses a little bit on the outside edges and kind of have this feeling of encroaching darkness. Even during the daylight. You feel the.
You feel the darkness kind of surrounding the characters, right? And being just on the edges, like, just on the edges of the frame so that, like, maybe the sunlight is just barely kind of holding them out to the edges, but they're ready to collapse in as soon as the sun goes down. Right? And it's.
There's a. There is a special feature that's a special feature on the DVD where they did a making of. And they shot. And they actually shot the making of in the same.
In the. On location at the house while they were staying in the movie. And. Well, they had the.
I think it was later on. I think it was like. I think it was anniversary for some, like a 40th anniversary or 50th anniversary or something like that. Oh, okay.
So wait, they came back to the same location, and they were standing in the place where the female ghost, Ms. Jessel, where she shows up in the reeds. Well, you talk about the face of the window, which I think is very effective and is very, like, kind of terrifying. But the thing that really got me was the distant Ms.
Jessel in a full black dress, right? Just standing in the reeds across the water, staring at the little girl. And Giddens. Giddiness.
Giddens. And that is the thing that really gets. That's the image that stuck with me. She's literally.
It's broad daylight. Like, birds are chirping. It's broad daylight outside, and the little girl has come out by herself to the little gazebo on the edge of the pond. And across the pond, where it's just all reads, is the figure of this woman in a very kind of Victorian sort of shroud, just standing there staring at her in the distance.
And I don't know if it's just because she's in the distance. I don't know if the filmmakers did anything to accentuate this effect, but for me, at least, it was almost like her face, the actress's face was kind of like smudged. Like, you couldn't dial in really sharply on her facial features. And it reminds me of those old.
Like, whenever you see black and white photos from, like, the old days of a family portrait or something. And it's because the film stock is so slow that they have to have a longer exposure time. Like, they have to keep the shutter open for a longer fraction of a second. And so people would often look a little blurry because it's just.
You're getting a little bit of their natural movement from the cameras, like, taking the picture. And here she is just standing there in the broad daylight. And it's weird because she's simultaneously just standing there out in the middle of everything clear to see, and yet somehow she's, like, ambiguous at the same time. Yeah, it's.
It's incredible. It really. And it is. It's.
It is like a. It gives that weird smudge blur of her. Gives just that small little detail of. Of alien ness, of being something out of this world, of being something that doesn't belong.
Of that wrongness I mentioned before. Right, right, right. And it's. Think about the risk, too, like, from a production standpoint, if you're a student who's making a student film, or if you're an indie filmmaker or I guess, I mean, even in today's, you know, day and age, let's say it's studio film, and you're like.
It says in the script that the girl looks across the pond and sees the ghost of Ms. What's her name? And so you're like, okay, it's broad daylight, so we're not going to do any, like, mist and shafts of light or anything. We're just gonna put the actress in a dress and have her go stand over there in the.
Reason she's just standing there motionless, staring in the direction of girl. The. I mean, what. When you show that shot, how do you not have the audience laugh that you're just showing a shot of an actor standing there in the reeds, looking over at the girl like, there's nothing about the production aspect of that to not just break the suspension of disbelief and that like, oh, look, be afraid, because this actor is standing in the bushes.
But maybe they're doing all kinds of stuff that I'm not even aware that they're doing, like you said, painting the trees, silver and stuff. But that shot of which I can see is like simultaneously my rational brain is going, that's just an actress standing in the reeds. But simultaneously it looks like the girl is having a vision of this dead woman that's specifically trying to possess her. And that's the thing.
Like the valet is going for the boy and this former governess is going for the girl. And so each kid has the scene with their sort of predator, you know, their assigned predator or whatever. And this is the little girls. And it's like, I'm really happy to hear that that was such a strong image for you.
It's like it's a freaky ass image. And I don't quite understand how they pull it off and how it doesn't just come off as an actor standing there in the bushes. But it's freaking amazing. I mean it's, I think it is, it is confidence in what they're doing.
I think that's part of it and that they are, they, they. They are confident that the film up to that point will shape your perspective and your perception on seeing. Suddenly that start black image. And like her eyes are like from the distance are black.
Right? It's. She's just basically got to kind of like a skull. It's like two just sort of hollows where I should be.
And I think that that is like a large part of it is the fact that because the rest of the film is so confident and so executed in its subtlety, it allows that moment to, to thrive, to flourish and be effective at. Suddenly you're like, whoa. I don't, it's. I don't know.
I think that you have it also like I said earlier, it expects you to pay attention. And I think that's a lot of large part of times is like people who don't like slow. Like I think the broad audience, that's why films have kind of gone towards that, you know, roller coaster kind of thing and is because it wants you to get out of all your distractions, watch the film, pay attention and let yourself become immersed. Immersed in it.
And then you're suddenly in its spell. You are. You much like the little kids are suddenly being watched in the same way by these oppressive ghosts and you are like transported into. You're like, wait a minute.
This is how, this is how they feel all the time. They feel like these things are watching them and sometimes they're right, they're outside the window relatively suddenly. You know, suddenly they just appear outside the window in the dark or the light. There's no escape in the light.
They are still there and they're not. They don't try to hide. I think that's another reason why it works so well, is the ghost is not hiding, is just standing there staring. Right.
There's. No, there isn't. I think effectively, a lot of times when you have things suddenly jump out at people in horror movies, it seems, in like, retrospect, it seems weird because why would it go hide? Right, right, right.
It doesn't need to. What is it afraid of? Well, and it's also kind of like that the isolation of the kids is so complete. They're in this country estate.
We know that there's other staff, but with like one or two brief exceptions, we almost never see them. And then the maid, who's kind of like the one. The housekeeper, who's like the one person running the estate that we have that gets a lot of screen time, she is, we kind of discover as the film goes on, she is actively choosing to be in denial about all that horrifying stuff that happened when those two were alive and how they were abusing kids and then the strange behaviors that the kids have been exhibiting since the death of those two. So in that sense, it's like, okay, we're far from the city, we're far from any crying eyes, and the only person that is here to supervise the kids until the governor shows up is willfully blind or nearsighted.
And so it's grown to the point it's almost like, you know, a child molester who can just be open about showing up to molest the kids because there's literally no one that they need to worry about hiding from. So in that sense, the way the ghosts show up is like a statement about how bad the kids situation has gotten. Her name is Mrs. Gross and like.
Oh, right, right, right. And it just feels like such a. You're like, right on the nose, like. Yep, that's.
She is. And she can't read. You know, she's illiterate. It feels like that's.
It's very purposeful, like ignorance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I guess that brings me back to something you said earlier when you were talking about, like, here's this lush estate.
But at first when it's presented, it seems very beautiful. There's birds chirping and meadows and ponds and woods. And then you finally get to the house. I think the.
When she first arrives, the governess chooses to get out of the carriage kind of at the boundary of the estate and walk to the house. And it's sort of implied that it takes her, like, half an hour or something to make the walk, like it's a huge property. But then as subtly and gradually as it goes, it gets to be what you were describing. And, like, okay, we're looking at all this lush nature, but something about it feels wrong.
And what comes to mind for me is that it's like the whole Gothic, or Southern Gothic, specifically, like, where it's like in a swamp or something or in a forest, but the forest is just dripping with moss and overgrown with mushrooms. It's like. It's a grotesque. It's like nature, but that has gone.
It's like overgrown and rotting at the same time. So it's not lush, like, oh, this is a healthy, beautiful, thriving scene. It's like you start to feel the rose bushes. I mean, there's that moment where she's turning the roses, and then she thinks she hears something, so she kind of moves some branches out of the way.
And there's this weird little statue of two dancing figures, but one figure has been broken away. And so it's just this one dancing figure holding onto the hands of his partner, but the hands are broken off at the wrists. And then, like, she looks and a bug crawls out of his mouth or something like that. And it's this weird idea that this statue that has apparently been here long enough that half of it broke was completely, you know, enshrouded in these bushes.
Like, everything's just overgrown and grotesque. And now that I'm saying it, makes me think that it's also. It's that whole idea of being untended to that. You plant an amazing, lavish garden, but if you don't tend to it, it just turns into vulgar, like, overgrowth.
Not healthy, overripe fruit. Yes. Yeah. That's just rhyming because it hasn't been picked in time.
And I mean, all that. It is all. It's all additive. It all combines.
And, like, the film itself, it's called the innocence. And it is. You know, it is about these children losing their innocence and that nature of entropy, of inevitability of these poor kids, of them being basically, like. And it's not.
We're going to. We're going to have probably. I've been putting it off, this discussion about the ambiguity of the story, but. Because I think it's a very big topic, and I think I'm really interested what you say about it.
But what I've read, frankly, is really curious because it kind of actually clashes with what I thought initially as well. But it is, you know, these two poor children, isolated, preyed upon, you know, literally and figuratively. And the fact that they are, by nature of them growing older, they lose their innocence. And we all do as we, you know, segue into adulthood.
But the very fact that the film is laying it on the feet of everyone, and the very fact that Ms. Giddens herself, this governess who is trying to protect the children, you know, at least in her own mind, she's certainly trying to protect the children. Right. She ends up hurting the children, sort of.
Maybe, you know, it's not clear. You know, it's part of the. But it's one of those things like. Like, okay, this is a clumsy analogy, but, like, if you've got a tick and it is burrowed so far into your flesh that the only way to get the tick out is you have to dig into the flesh.
And, like, you have to. It's one of those wounds or one of those illnesses that in the curing of it or in the expelling of it, the patient is going to get more wounded, at least at first. But it's sort of like it's better. It's like chemotherapy.
You know, that's not too dark a topic. It's like we have to hurt the person because it'll hurt the cancer worse. Right. And so she has to be bold enough and, well, that, yes, this goes to the same acute.
And I will hold off on touching on that until you bring it around, but. Absolutely. I was gonna. I think we can.
I. I will. We can. We can approach it.
Do you hear my first question? And it wasn't one that really struck my mind until I read a lot of criticism. So you're saying it didn't come up for you when you first watched the film, but then reading. Okay, and it's not necessarily wrong.
I think that's the beauty of the film, is that it can be read multiple ways. A lot of great art, I think, is able to be, you know, explored. And you can read meaning in a lot of different ways, depending on how you want to read it. And there was a lot of criticism that wasn't just like.
I think I. I think I may be somewhat critical of Ms. Giddens at times, but not all the time. I think.
I think her behavior is understandable, given what we think she sees. And I don't. Ultimately, I side on the fact that I think the ghosts are real. That the kids are being possessed.