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Paperhouse
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| Year: |
1988
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Director: |
Bernard Rose
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| Stars: |
Charlotte Burke, Ben Cross, Glenne Headly, Elliott Spiers, Gemma Jones, Jane Bertish, Sarah Newbold, Samantha Cahill, Steven O'Donnell, Gary Bleasdale, Karen Gledhill, Barbara Keogh
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| Genre: |
Horror |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 2 votes) |
| Review: |
Eleven-year-old Anna (Charlotte Burke) is killing time in school by doodling the image of a house onto her school exercise book, but she is noticed by the class sneak who tells on her, so Anna pulls away the desk she was leaning on and makes her fall. For this, Anna is sent out of the room to stand in the corridor but while she is there she begins to feel woozy and asks the teacher if she can see the nurse. Her request is refused until she passes out, waking to find people standing over her and she is sent home... but while she was unconscious, she saw a house in a field... the same house as her sketch.
Paperhouse was adapted by Matthew Jacobs (the same man who brought us the failed nineties Doctor Who TV movie) from the novel by Catherine Storr, and for a generation from the eighties it was to them what the television serial made from the material in the seventies - 1974's Escape Into Night - was to the previous generation. That is, something strange and hard to shake in its intensity, the idea that you can affect your dreams by seemingly mundane means in real life proving oddly potent and, for many quite frightening.
But that is not the whole story as this film is a horror for only the first hour: the last third is something quite different, a conscious decision to make a poignant ending out of what had previously been nightmarish. For this reason, it could have easily been made for children, as it sees things from a child's viewpoint after all, it's just that in director Bernard Rose's hands the unsettling qualities that can easily bring about bad dreams are very much to the fore, and not only for Anna, but for the viewers as well. This is what the film's cult revolves around.
After visiting the house of the title in her dreams, Anna sets about making it more interesting and draws in a boy's face in one of the windows, so that the next time she falls asleep, she meets the child she has drawn - but she is not skilled with a pencil and he turns out to be as miserable as he looks on paper. He cannot walk either, and Anna thinks this is because she didn't draw in his legs, but he disputes the fact that he is her fiction and he may actually be the spirit of a boy Anna's doctor is seeing, a boy who is ailing badly. As if that were not enough, when she draws her absent father (Ben Cross) into the picture, she accidentally makes him look angry, as if he were still the scary drunk she remembers from her younger years.
The notion that children can enter the worlds they have created has been one returned to again and again, with books including Andrew Davies' classic Conrad's War or the charming cartoon Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings just two examples. Here, the dreams are a reflection of reality, as is so often the case in horror, and Anna's fears of her father, who when we finally see him is not abusive, fuel the nightmare incarnation who carries a hammer and has been blinded by a frustrated scribble. In truth, the film never really gets over its first hour, and takes a too-sweet sentimental turn to wrap things up, but this is not as damaging as you might expect, with the bedridden Anna recovering and realising that the adult world does not have to be as frightening as she thinks. Paperhouse, then, is a qualified success, not perfect, but its imagery endures in the mind long after you've seen it. Music by Stanley Myers and Hans Zimmer.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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