Guillermo del Toro is probably my top horror director—if not the top, he’s definitely in my horror trinity. One of the things I like best about del Toro is how generous he is with other artists. He saw this short by Spanish filmmaker Andres Muschietti in 2008 and helped the artist develop it into the full movie Mama, which will be released January 18.
The short is terrifying, as is the trailer for the movie that will be coming out in three weeks.
I’m excited and plan on seeing the movie opening weekend to show my support. The last time Guillermo del Toro helped out a Spanish filmmaker, I was introduced to The Orphanage, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. Hopefully, Mama will hold me until del Toro’s own feature, Pacific Rim, comes out on my dad’s birthday, July 12. Maybe I’ll go visit my dad in Iowa to see that one.
I like to look at the book ads on the subway, and every once in a while I’m rewarded with the marketing campaign of one of the books I worked on. I can sit on the subway bench basking in pride, thinking, I worked on that; I helped make that book. Other times I’ll see a book advertised that I feel like I have to check out. That was the case this summer, when I was enjoying the air-conditioned breeze of a subway car, and my eye wandered to the subway ad for Chase Novak’s horror novel Breed, with this blurb from Stephen King: “The best horror novel I’ve read since Peter Straub’s Ghost Story.” Now, I trust Stephen King’s recommendations; through him I’ve been introduced to Shane Stevens and Peter Abrahams, and he also has a healthy appreciation for my lady Joyce Carol Oates.
Breed’s a beautifully designed book. The cover is all black with a simple red squiggle that at first glance seems to be an abstract design, but as I read the story, the more it revealed itself to be a line drawing of a pregnant woman, the subject matter that the novel deals with. On the surface, Breed is a very simple story, a Grimm’s fairy tale almost. What gives this story its heft is how it’s translated into modern-day Manhattan.
The Twisdens really do have the perfect life. Alex is the last living heir of an old-money New York family, like the Astors. He has a family manor near Central Park filled with antiques and oil portraits of blubbery-faced Twisdens of yore. He married Leslie, a youngish editor, who he met outside his mansion as she admired it. The two have been together for a few years with beautiful evenings out, the right entertainment and gifts to mark occasions, but they are childless and can’t get pregnant despite all their money. Leslie is ready to adopt, but Alex wants a genetic Twisden to inherit his estate. They have started going to couples’ infertility meetings because Alex believes that is where they will first hear about cutting-edge treatments that might not quite be legal. And then one day they run into one of those infertile couples who are now hugely pregnant and smug with their secret.
Alex trades favors with the father to be, and he and Leslie end up on a trip to Eastern Europe to see Dr. Kis, a researcher who uses unorthodox treatments but has phenomenal success rates. After a series of painful injections that both Leslie and Alex have to endure, they share a weird but passionate night, surprised by the animal-like lust that came out of them. The day after on the plane ride home, Leslie knows she’s pregnant—she just feels it. Leslie and Alex now find themselves prisoners of their bodies—some of it is good, like the confirmed pregnancy and twins at that, but they find they are very different from what they once were.
“Before the visit to Dr. Kis, most, if not all, of his emotions were mixed. Even the blackest sorrow had somewhere within it dark blue shimmers of hope; even the greatest joys held within them consciousness of joy’s inevitable ebbing. His emotions were like hot-air balloons, and each of them carried the ballast of memory and knowledge. But now the ballast is gone and everything he feels is total, and practically overwhelming. He is not ever merely hungry—he is ravenous. He is not annoyed—he is in a seething rage. He is not feeling romantic—he is overcome with lust.”
Chase Novak, pseudonym of the novelist Scott Spencer.
Fast-forward ten years and we are introduced to Alex and Leslie’s twins Alice and Adam, who are crippled with the terrifying secret of their parents. The mansion has fallen into ruin with most of the antiques sold to finance the family now that Alex and Leslie can no longer hold down jobs because of their more animal-like natures. The twins are locked in their bedrooms each evening with no way to escape; even their windows have elaborate locking mechanisms, fire codes be damned. But the twins sense that this is more to keep them safe from their parents than anything else. With each year, Alice and Adam’s parents are becoming more and more forgetful about things like keys, and one night, the twins plan a great escape. The rest of the book ends up being a long chase sequence set mostly in Manhattan, with long, extended scenes set in the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park, gentrified areas of the city where you don’t expect to see kids running in terror from their rich parents.
The second part of the book has a few scenes and descriptions that border on grand guignol, but I found them compelling too. There’s one death scene that is quite grisly, but at the same time, it’s beautiful and redemptive. Lots of tantalizing details pushed me to keep turning the pages—wolflike teenagers who are older versions of Alice and Adam, warning of a change during puberty, and parents who are restrained by these children in unusual ways. But then these details are left behind and the ending is roomy and wide-open…for another book in the series.
I wish I’d known that this was a series book before I began it. I suppose this tendency toward series is just the evolution of literature. I’m rereading Frankenstein right now, and it seems so old-fashioned with an introduction to the material via letters from a third party who’s completely outside of book’s main story. Maybe stand-alone novels are going the way of the epistolary form.
Manic depression runs in my family, so I was curious to see Silver Linings Playbook, which has a bipolar protagonist. For a long time people didn’t know what manic depression/bipolar disorder was—my mom says they just always called it “the family illness” when she was a kid. But now mental health professionals do and there are a lot more civilized treatments for it—drug therapies that really work—rather than institutions, shock treatments, and lobotomies. Bipolars can be the most fun, charismatic people that you will ever meet, but if they are going through one of their manic/depressive phases, the other people around them can feel like they’ve been hit by a train, even starting to question their own sanity—Am I going crazy, or…?
Watching the first part of the movie Silver Linings Playbook, I was very uncomfortable because it follows the main character Pat going through a manic phase, and I guess it just hit too close to home. The movie opens with Pat (Bradley Cooper) repeating his mantra to himself, “Excelsior!” He’s locked up in a mental institution after experiencing a psychotic break. Eight months earlier, Pat had come home from his teaching job to find his wife exchanging sexual favors in the shower with another teacher, who Pat then proceeded to beat the shit out of, almost killing him. The courts gave him two choices: psych unit or jail.
Pat’s mother decides to spring him for the holidays, without consulting anybody else, and once Pat is home, it’s easy to see where the bipolar gene comes from. His dad, also named Pat (Robert De Niro), has to be dancing on the edge of the illness. He’s obsessed with the Philadelphia Eagles and has little rituals associated with the team such as holding onto an Eagles handkerchief and assigning “lucky” people to hold the remote control while a game is playing. He’s also convinced that Pat Jr. has serious magic and is constantly trying to get his son to watch games with him, assured that if he is there, his team will win.
Pat is trying to get his life together while back home with his parents, but his unmedicated mania keeps getting the cops called to the house. His wife has a restraining order against him, but Pat has made her into his holy grail. His obsessions all turn toward winning her back, which is a bit difficult when he has to always maintain a distance of five hundred feet. Leave it to a manic depressive to find a way, though.
In his quest to get his wife back, Pat sets up a dinner date with an old friend and his wife Veronica, where he’s introduced to Veronica’s sister Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), who has her own issues. They immediately bond over the meds they’ve been on and their side effects, and it’s hilarious watching this play out over the dinner table, where the normals are the ones left feeling weird and left out while the loonies laugh it up.
This dinner scene also marks the turning point in the movie—shortly after, Pat starts taking his meds. He’s been resisting for so long because he says the drugs make him foggy and not sharp. But he can’t be arrested again if he wants to get back together with his wife. Also, Tiffany had offered to help reunite them if Pat will do one little favor for her, and he takes the bait. The relationship between these two not-quite-right people, Tiffany and Pat, make up the rest of the movie, and that’s what makes it shine.
Cooper does fine as Pat, and I think he gives a realistic portrayal of a bipolar, based on the many I have known. I could feel my teeth grinding as he went on some of his rants in his early unmedicated state, but then rooted for him when he tried to restrain his unsavory impulses. The movie gets a little tense at times, but fellow mental patient Danny (Chris Tucker) makes well-timed appearances throughout, moving the story forward and bringing good comedy.
The real heart of the movie is Jennifer Lawrence as Tiffany. When she comes on, the scenes just have a more realistic, authentic dimension to them—she has a Streepish quality to her acting and presents a character with so many facets to her personality, showing vulnerability, sexiness, a tendency toward self-destruction, and great comedic instincts. There’s one scene—probably the one that an audience at the Cannes Film Festival rose and gave a spontaneous ovation to—where she interrupts Pat’s family arguing during what looks to be their downfall. The outcome looks bleak, but by the time Tiffany is done, she gets what she wants, as well as taking a crazy scheme and making it even more bizarre, all while making the family love her. And the audience too. That’s some pretty genius acting and somewhat bipolar, I think.
In AndWhen She Was Good, Laura Lippman gives us Helen/Heloise. Helen comes from an unhappy home where her father was emotionally and sometimes physically abusive and her mother always sided with him, leaving Helen to fend for herself. As a teenager, Helen ends up in a bad relationship, and in dealing with it and trying to extricate herself, she falls into prostitution. Though she’s under the control of a wrathful pimp, whom she also loves, Helen finds she’s got quite a talent in the industry. Most girls burn out quickly, but Helen manages to stay afloat and even thrive. She’s on a quest to better herself and sneaks books to read, going to impressive lengths in order to get herself a library card.
Then she finds out that she’s pregnant and that changes everything. It’s incredibly difficult and expensive to raise a kid in today’s world, and in Helen’s case, it’s even harder as she has no education or real work skills to fall back on. And of course, she wants her son to have the best of what she never had. Once her pimp is in jail and Helen has him safely off her back, she sets up a business under his guidance, where she provides an upscale escort service to Washington DC and Baltimore’s elite.
It’s illegal, but Helen has done this before and carefully assembles this business to make a new life for herself. She changes her name to Heloise, selects a beautiful house in the suburbs to live in, and engages in the compartmentalization that seems so necessary for sex workers—a Sandy in real life but Starr onstage and when in the club, with different personalities to match. This is the part that I find so interesting, because though we live in a world where, theoretically, everyone is equal and should be able to earn equal pay for the same skills, a woman can almost always make more money using her body rather than her mind. It’s an equalizer, I guess, if a woman is blessed with looks and at ease with her body, but even that power has been taken away from her since prostitution is only legal in Nevada and there is such a taint to the world’s oldest profession.
According to Heloise, prostitution is one of those crimes that are incredibly hard to prove, perhaps because so much of the supposed crime is based on nuance. It all depends on how you say it and if you name the act, which the smart madams and their employees never do. Where madams have been busted before is in filing their taxes. Lippman’s character Heloise is obsessive about her taxes, receipts, and records, and the process of how Heloise deals with the financial side of her business is described in loving detail. I hate taxes and anything to do with finances, so an author that can actually write about this in a profound way and use it as an important plot point is pretty impressive. The amount of information given almost seems like a good how-to for madams-to-be who want to get into the business.
I really wanted to like this book wholeheartedly and there are parts of it I adore. In the end, though, I found that the subplot of a murdered madam and former sex worker muddied what was an exceptional character study. Maybe some of my disappointment is because there is no easy solution or answer for sex workers and so their stories will always feel incomplete and unfair. Reading And When She Was Good, I couldn’t help but get het up about issues that the book raised: Why is prostitution illegal but what semi-celebrities have done by dropping sex tapes to secure their fame and fortune is not? And what is a happily ever ending for a sex worker? The only stories I know end badly—Heidi Fleiss ends up in prison, then addicted to drugs and on Celebrity Rehab. There’s Boogie Nights, where everybody’s screwed up by the end. And I don’t feel like I can count Pretty Woman as a contender for a real-life story about a prostitute. So though the ending of And When She Was Good doesn’t ring true for me, I still think it’s an important book about women, women’s issues, and prostitution.
There’s a Friends episode where the characters Rachel and Joey exchange their favorite books to show each other how great their choice is. Joey’s favorite book is Stephen King’s The Shining while Rachel’s is Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Both end up enjoying the other’s pick, but there’s a funny scene where Rachel has to put The Shining in her freezer because it’s so scary. That’s what Scott Smith’s book The Ruins always reminds me of—a freezer book—because it is just that scary. The first time I read that novel, I would have to close the book at times and physically put it away from me to keep me from reading more. It wasn’t because the book was bad or the plot was lagging; it was because the story was so scary that I would need a little recovery time.
I’ve avoided watching the movie version of The Ruins for a while. Smith’s first book A Simple Plan was made into a devastating movie of the same name that was directed by Sam Raimi, one of my favorite moviemakers. Both of those works have the power to depress me for days after reading or seeing it, and I think that shows how well Smith is able to tap into the human psyche and show the darkness that exists within. Maybe I was afraid the same would happen with The Ruins, but that instead of depression, I would just experience pure adrenaline from fear for days on end. Or maybe I was just frightened that the movie wouldn’t live up to the book.
In The Ruins, a pair of American boyfriends and girlfriends (the girlfriends are best friends) are on vacation in Mexico, after graduating from college. It’s their last hurrah before settling down to jobs or graduate school and the serious task of being a grown-up. While on vacation, they meet people of different nationalities but similar age and become a loose-knit group that parties together. The German among them has lost track of his brother, with whom he came on vacation. They had a fight, and his brother chased after a female archaeologist that he became infatuated with and followed her to a dig site at some ancient Mayan ruins. He wants to go find his brother. The Americans decide to help their German friend find his brother, along with another who they simply call the Greek in the movie (real Greek, not fraternity Greek), and they think maybe they’ll have a little adventure along the way.
What makes the book work so well is the idea of a stranger in a strange land and what can happen when the strange land doesn’t play by the same rules as the strangers. When the Europeans and Americans go to the Mayan ruins, which are looked over by bloodthirsty plant life, they lose their usual tools—cell phones and other technology—and the plant life actually ends up using those against them. They also come across ancient rites and rituals that they don’t understand and fall subject to without knowing about them. In the movie version of the book, this concept is muddy and comes out wrong. Rather than the group coming across as naïve innocents who stumble into becoming a sacrifice, they’re portrayed as—well, spoiled Americans. At one point in the movie version of The Ruins, one of the characters says with righteous indignation, “Four Americans on vacation don’t just disappear,” and immediately I didn’t want to root for these people.
Another big flaw in the film, I think, is trying to physically portray the evil plant life, a vine with poppy-like flowers that creeps and uses mimicry to play the characters off one another, dividing and conquering. The special effects don’t come off as very terrifying—instead, the vines end up looking silly, like they were taken from a scene in the 1970s’ version of the TV series Land of the Lost. This is too bad because the plant is horrific in the book version; it’s what made the book so scary and eerie.
When I was in fourth grade, our class was given a test to let us know what types of careers we were geared toward based on how we answered some multiple-choice questions. I wasn’t surprised by many of the career options that were recommended for me—artist, writer, teacher—but one I found completely mind-boggling: pest exterminator. How in the hell did that come up?
I was a nerdy kid who liked to spell, read the dictionary, and handwrite chapters out of my textbooks for “fun.” I didn’t see how that translated into killing bugs and rodents. Well, apparently, there is a small germ for this deep down in my soul, because this year with our cockroach problem, I’ve found the pest exterminator that exists inside of me. We’ve had them bad this year—an apoca-cockaroach-alypse—but after exploring several methods of pest control, I think we’ve finally got a handle on the problem. Pest exterminator in the making. See the killer gleam in my eyes?
We used a fogger when the cockroach problem was definitely more than a few stray ones making their way up the pipes. I had heard that for every cockroach you see, there are ten more hiding, and I wanted them all dead. Now. It turns out, though, that using a fogger is a real pain in the ass. We had to move everything out of our kitchen cabinets and into our living room. Then after we were done fogging, we had to move everything back in and clean all the kitchen surfaces to make sure that we didn’t poison ourselves or our cats. This ended up being an all-day affair, and we found out later that we were supposed to repeat this in twenty-eight day intervals to get rid of new hatching populations. After our first fogger attempt, we just didn’t have the heart to repeat the process. Too much work. Grade: C+
I really, really liked the idea of Pest Offense and wanted it to work, but I was dubious. Pest Offense is a tannish box that looks like a garage opener from days of yore. You’re supposed to plug it into an outlet, and the device will then use electrical current to scramble a cockroach’s senses, creating a force field that shields a person’s home or apartment from pests. It sounded a little too Star Wars for the world I live in, but I was desperate. I read the reviews online for Pest Offense, and they seemed equally divided between “works like a charm” and “what a piece of crap.” I’m afraid our experience fell in the latter category. When I first plugged the device in, I did notice a cockroach that stood rooted on the wall near it. It’s working, I thought. It’s scrambling its brains. Alas, that was not the case. The cockroaches frolicked, more concerned with finding food and water than being alarmed by the pretty blinking light on the box. Grade: F
Our first line of defense, and always one of the most effective, is boric acid. We’ve been carrying around a large squeeze bottle of the stuff since we had our apartment in Bushwick (and it only cost $1.99—the sticker is still on the bottle). You have to make a boric acid barrier in the cracks and crannies where the cockroaches like to go. When we had problems before, we would squeeze a few lines under the sink, and presto, the roaches started dying off. This gets very messy, though, when you’re cleaning or trying to make food. Water mixes with the boric acid and makes a paste like mud. Also, it’s a little hard to explain when company comes over.
“What’s all that yellow powder on your counter?”
You just don’t want to say, “Well, we have a little cockroach problem right now.”
Never pretty.
Boric acid is also somewhat toxic. It’s all right when you just need to do a little upkeep underneath your sink, but it made me nervous to have it on the floor or around the counters where my cats might step in it or possibly eat it. Grade: B+
We have a professional exterminator that comes to our building monthly and sprays down any apartment that’s having trouble. All you have to do is put your name on the sign-up sheet in the lobby. I saw that my direct downstairs neighbors had signed up and was terrified of inheriting their roaches once they’d been sprayed. The night before the exterminator was due to come, I crept downstairs and added my name to the sheet, wanting to avoid as much social stigma as possible. The guy came the next day with his canister of bug juice and squirted poison with a nozzle as I anxiously followed behind him, wringing my hands. I told him we’d never had such a problem, but this year it was just terrible.
“Yeah, we been getting a lot of that,” he said. “It’s because we had no winter last year. Cold kills ’em.”
I really didn’t notice much of a difference the two times the exterminator came and sprayed, but I appreciated hearing a reason for this problem and being reassured that it wasn’t because my neighbors were filthy or our apartment. Grade: C
We had a bad week back in early October, spotting two or more roaches on the counter when we woke up in the morning and flicked the lights on in the kitchen, and to top things off, we had a houseguest coming to stay for a week. I sure didn’t want her to wake up to that. I had read a few reviews about Combat Source Kill Max that said it worked well. I was shopping for other things in the Duane Reade when I came across this little box, and feeling dispirited and sure that my problem would never be solved, I went ahead and purchased it.
The Combat Source Kill Max directions said to put drops in the cracks and crevices of cupboards, counters, anywhere the roaches would go. The substance comes in something that looks like a glue gun, and you apply tiny drops that are smaller than the size of a pencil eraser. The stuff works as both bait and poison. It attracts the roaches and they carry the substance back to their lairs, where even more roaches are killed.
I applied drops as directed, and not even an hour later, I saw some big fatties heading along the wall to the poison. They were so anxious for the bait that they didn’t even try and hide. And then suddenly, the carcasses started piling up. This stuff is the shit!
I get a little smug sometimes and want to pat myself on the back, convinced that the roaches are gone and I’m an ace pest exterminator. But every once in a while, one pops out, keeping me humble. It takes maintenance. You have to reapply the bait to keep new roaches from appearing—all part of that life cycle I’ve read so much about. Grade: A+++
One of my young life regrets is that I never got to see Ozzy Osbourne in concert, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I remember having tickets to his concerts twice, but both times they were canceled and I was left feeling bitterly disappointed. This was in the late eighties when Ozzy was struggling with addiction (actually, when has he not?), and I believe both of those times he was shipped directly to rehab. Then I read I Am Ozzy and found out that the infamous bat head incident happened in Iowa, where I ended up doing time in high school.
This happened before I moved there, and Ozzy was doing a show in Des Moines (which he remembers how to pronounce to this day). His concerts had become known as free-for-alls where members of the audience would bring various things from home—a pig’s head, snakes, and in this case, a live bat—and throw them onstage while he performed. During this show, Ozzy caught the bat, and he thought it was one of those rubber jobs you can buy at a toy store or 99-cent store. So he did what any self-respecting rock star would do and bit its head off. The noxious taste let him know his mistake immediately, and afterward, he had to get a full course of rabies shots while on the road touring. The public will never let him forget this, and after that I don’t think Ozzy has pleasant associations with Iowa, so I guess I forgive him for canceling those shows.
In I Am Ozzy, Ozzy digs deep, going back to his early childhood in England where he played in bombed-out ruins and lived in a house with an outhouse in the yard and one bedroom that the next-oldest sibling would graduate to after the eldest flew the coop (he was one of six children). Ozzy had terrible learning disabilities that were overlooked in school, and he was just told that he was stupid. He was also bullied by his headmaster, but there Ozzy learned a trick that’s served him well to this day. He would pull crazy stunts and tricks to make people laugh, especially those that he admired or who were big bullies. Once he got that laugh, he knew he was in and then their attributes and protection would rain down on him.
Where he grew up, Ozzy saw the men go into work every day and toil away at the most boring industrial jobs (not calling in was a point of pride), and then once these men retired, they didn’t know what to do with themselves. Many of them died shortly after they retired, including his father. As a teen, Ozzy did a stint testing car horns and working in a slaughterhouse (he says he has bad animal karma from this time in his life and that’s why his family has so many pets now), but he knew this wasn’t what he was meant for. He just couldn’t do it, and so he found another way—what some people would think the least likely way—and became a rock star.
Ozzy credits his early success to his father who for some unknown reason lent his son money to buy an amp. An amp was a luxury in those days, and anybody who had one, whether they were a musician or not—well, that made them immediately in the band. With his amp, Ozzy advertised himself as a singer and that’s how he landed in the band that became Black Sabbath. It’s amazing when he recounts how the band cranked out some of their classic albums with only a few hours’ worth of studio time. When you have limited time and a budget, you do what you have to, to get things done. Black Sabbath caught on pretty quickly, but there were a few hiccups along the way, like the time they were booked because club owners thought they were an all-black band. I would love to have been present at that club date!
With success and money, Ozzy’s appetite for booze and drugs grew. Where before he could only drink until he ran out of money, now he had a limitless supply, so he would go to the pub and be gone for literally days. During this time Ozzy was in his first marriage, but he was in full addict mode and did things like shoot all the chickens that his wife bought for him to take care of and almost killed the town vicar by accidentally feeding him cake laced with a potent dose of hash.
His first marriage failed, and he was kicked out of Black Sabbath, because while everybody was drinking and drugging, they felt Ozzy’s was too out of control and interfering with the band. That’s when Sharon came into the picture and became Ozzy’s manager. She was determined to turn him into a solo act, and with a few unplanned stunts by Ozzy, his career took off brilliantly. They also became something more, the match made in heaven that we all know now, and started a family on the road.
Some people complain that they can’t understand Ozzy when he talks, like in this infamous interview where he scrambles some eggs in his leopard-print bathrobe:
But when he sings, all of Ozzy’s lyrics are comprehensible, and if you really try, you can understand him. If you don’t want to try, his voice and humor come through loud and clear in I Am Ozzy. A lot of his stories are laugh-out-loud-funny, and I get the feeling that Ozzy is much more clever than he lets on. I think part of his appeal is that he plays the part of the fuckup, the ne’er-do-well, but by doing that he gets what he wants. My grandpa used to do the same thing by pretending to be deaf. Eventually people would get so frustrated with him that they would give him whatever he wanted just to get rid of him. It’s fun to think of my grandpa having a little bit of Ozzy in him.
With Hurricane Sandy, we were housebound for a couple days, but my sister and I were two of the lucky ones. During and after the storm, we kept our power, Internet, and water. The most major inconvenience we experienced was not having direct subway service for a week, but on Monday the glorious Q started working between most parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan. With Internet and power, we were able to entertain ourselves with streaming Netflix, and I finally got to watch the horror movie Insidious, which has been haunting my queue for a while.
I’m glad my sister was home when I decided to watch it because the first half was so scary that I jumped a few times and maybe even yipped a little at one point. In Insidious, a family of five moves into a large house—mom and dad, two young sons, and an infant daughter. Patrick Wilson plays Josh, the father of the family, who is mysteriously absent for the first part of the story. He’s a schoolteacher and claims he is suddenly busy grading papers and tests. Knowing what a teacher’s salary is, I don’t see how this family can afford their living situation. Renai, his wife (Rose Byrne), is a stay-at-home mom and once-in-a-while music composer, yet they live in a house like this:
While Dad is teaching and grading papers, Renai gets to set up the household and take care of the kids. After getting her two boys off to school and her fussy baby down for a nap, she’s finally able to take a break and sit down at her piano for some R & R with her trusty baby monitor…and that’s when she hears mysterious, threatening voices over its speaker. I feel like I’ve seen this plot device used before in a movie, but for the life of me I can’t remember which one. It worked fabulously in Insidious, though—that’s the moment when Renai is aware that there’s something not quite right in her house.
Besides living in a haunted house, things start to get so much worse when one of her sons, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), falls into a mysterious coma. He’s whisked away to a hospital where doctors and specialists are unable to say what’s caused this condition, but they give the family hope that he may just wake up. When Dalton comes home (still in his comatose state), the haunting kicks into serious gear and various ghosts pop up, menacing Renai and her children but generally leaving her husband alone. This is the seriously scary part of the movie, where the entities appear for a flicker of a moment, like in The Sixth Sense or The Orphanage, and you never know where they’re going to be.
Renai finally comes to believe that it’s not her house that’s haunted but her comatose son. I have heard of this happening before, where for some reason ghosts attach themselves to a living person because of their warmth or some other quality. I’m not sure if I buy it. Once I had a dentist who liked to practice her New Age skills on me after cleaning my teeth or drilling and filling. She would do reiki treatments or something else where she would ring bells and wave tuning forks around my head. I didn’t mind that as long as it was free. But then she started telling me about how she could see spirits attached to me, one older, nasty woman in particular. She told me her daughter could get rid of her in a session and that she would set me up with an appointment if I wanted. I declined nicely and never went back to that dentist again. It just got a little too weird.
Rather than going this route, the movie ends up taking a Shirley MacLaine turn that was unexpected for me. But I found that once the monsters’ motives were revealed, they just didn’t seem that nefarious. After that, they end up getting a lot more screen time, but I liked it better when the monsters were mostly hidden in this movie. When they did come out, the scares were gone and they just weren’t that interesting anymore. Instead, I found myself more curious about this family’s source of income. Renai must have penned an incredible film score or something that kept them afloat since the family brought Dalton home in his comatose state—plugged into various machines with home health aides dropping by every once in a while. Either that or teachers get some killer health insurance.
