Ghost Story (1981)

               Here we have our second Peter Straub adaptation, this time of his fifth novel, Ghost Story. Based on this movie I was going to take back the nice things I wrote about him in discussing ‘Full Circle,’ ascribing to his novel the better parts of the backstory and characters motivations, but then I read a synopsis of the book and realized that this is a very loose adaptation indeed. They straight up change the nature of the antagonist, for one thing. I should state that the plot of the book doesn’t sound that great either, but a lot depends on how it’s written so I’m officially agnostic on it. I have a lot of unkind things to say about this movie, both from a screenplay and a directorial perspective, and I guess it’s nice that Straub isn’t going to be hit by much of the shrapnel.

               The book was a best-seller in 1978 so Universal Pictures snapped up the rights. They chose British director John Irvin to helm the picture based on his work on ‘Haunted: The Ferryman,’ an ITV short film from 1974. He’s done some movies people might recognize, including the 1986 Schwarzenegger vehicle ‘Raw Deal’ and the 1987 war movie ‘Hamburger Hill.’ I actively disliked a lot of his directing choices in this, so I’m not going to rush out to see those. The screenplay was somehow wrenched from the book by Lawrence D. Cohen, who was probably hired for his work on the DePalma adaptation of ‘Carrie’ from 1976. He also did the 2013 ‘Carrie’ adaptation. And the 1988 Broadway version. And the 1990 ‘IT’ tv miniseries. And the 1993 ‘Tommyknockers’ tv miniseries. Almost his entire career has been adapting either King or Straub. I’ve seen most of these adaptations and aside from the original ‘Carrie’ none of them are very good.

              The lead character of Don Wanderley is played by Craig Wasson, who most people will likely recognize from either DePalma’s ‘Body Double’ or ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.’ Guy had a decent 80’s. The antagonist (and victim, we’ll get back to that) is played by Alice Krige, who’s been in tons of stuff but is probably best known as the Borg Queen in ‘Star Trek: First Contact.’ The movie involves a lot of flashbacks, so about half the cast has both old and young versions of themselves. Of all the actors playing the young versions of these characters, about the only one who went on to have some kind of career is Ken Olin, who was a cast member of ‘thirtysomething’ before becoming a very prolific tv director and producer.

              The rest of the cast is insane. A core conceit of the movie is that there’s this group of four elderly men who call themselves The Chowder Society. They’re lifelong friends who meet once a month to tell each other scary stories. It’s revealed by the end of the movie that they have a dark secret which comes back to haunt them. This includes Fred Astaire as Ricky Hawthorne, Melvyn Douglas as Dr. John Jaffrey, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as Edward Wanderley, and John Houseman as Sears James. This was the final film for all of them except Houseman. In addition Ricky Hawthorne’s wife, Stella, is played by Patricia Neal, who was in ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,’ ‘A Face in the Crowd,’ and won an Oscar for ‘Hud.’ The movie isn’t very good, but it’s nice seeing these actors get sizeable parts again.

              The movie is very lumpy in structure. It has two extended flashbacks and the first fifteen minutes or so are mostly just confusing. I’m presented here with two options: describe the movie in the order in which the events occur in the film, thus mimicking the same tortured structure I had to sit through, or run through events chronologically in an effort to see if the time-bending nature of the screenplay helps or hurts the telling. I think I’ll do a little bit of both and jump around. If you’re worried about plot details that aren’t clear or character motivations getting mangled, I don’t think either of those things are particular strengths of the movie, I’m not going to do any worse than it did.

              According to a commentary track, director Irvin conceptualized the story as being about “men's fear of women, and at some point, hatred.” Which is odd, because while I agree with him I’m not sure the movie does. I just watched this film and it really does fear and hate women. If he intended for the movie to come across as sympathetic to its female antagonist and her quest for revenge, he really fucked up. When I take notes while watching I tend to write directions to myself in the margins, arrows to note important plot points, stars next to thoughts I want to follow up on, various random things I scritch down to remind myself. There are only three in the margins of my notes for this film, and they are ‘this is badly directed’ right at the top from around fifteen minutes in, ‘the sexual politics alone’ which I scribbled during the big death reveal during the second extended flashback, and then a huge, all caps “FUCK YOU” with a big arrow to this line dropped by Don about halfway through: “I think this is a ghost story.”

Rich, old white men being the cause of a problem? Ludicrous!

              At its base this is a story about a woman who was murdered in around 1930 and her ghost’s quest for revenge fifty years later. You could quibble with the term ‘murder,’ certainly the murderers in the movie would try to argue that it was an accident, but fuck those guys. To sum it up, this rather free-spirited woman named Eva turns up in a small New England town. Four of the local young men take a shine to her and start following her around in a group. She eventually hooks up with one of them, but he isn’t able to perform sexually. A few nights later he and his friends get drunk and he lies about it. They then drunkenly turn up at Eva’s house and kind of force their way inside. She humors them by dancing with a couple of them before one of the other guys gets jealous and starts tossing accusations around. She gets justifiably angry at how they’re treating her, demanding affection and coming very close to calling her easy, and after learning that the guy she’d had the aborted hookup with lied about having sex with her she angrily starts to tell them to truth. Which of course means he has to shut her up, shoving her and causing her to hit her head against a marble fireplace. The guys, in a drunken panic, think she’s dead and decide to hide the evidence. They pack her into the back of a car and roll it into a pond. As it’s sinking they see through the back window that she’s moving. They all convince themselves they didn’t see anything and go on with their lives.

              Because we meet these murderers when they’re all elderly and played by beloved actors the movie just assumes we’re going to be on their side and feel bad when the ghost starts killing them back. I will say that the key moment of the flashback, with all the drunk men towering over Eva in her own home and the four of them stewing in a mix of aggression, embarrassment, and horniness, is pretty tense. She’s clearly angry at them for how they’ve been treating her and for what they think of her and after learning how they’ve been spreading lies starts to get aggressive back. Her death is played as a tragedy and clearly the men’s fault, but the entire rest of the movie spends its time passively absolving these men of their crime. Two of them have loving spouses, they’re all respectable men in the community, and although only one of them survives to the end (by finally having the police dredge up the car to reveal Eva’s body) the movie ends before we can find out if there’s going to be any kind of repercussions for the murder he now admits to. Couple that with the way ghost Eva is portrayed in the movie, alternating between evil gloating in the shadows or appearing as an ambulatory rotting corpse, and it’s not exactly a feminist manifesto. If the director really was intent on making this movie some kind of referendum on how men’s fear of women can curdle into hate maybe he shouldn’t have had the vengeful spirit who’s clearly in the right be a cackling villain.

              Who’s sexually aggressive and rapacious, by the way. The main flashback is the leadup to Eva’s murder, the other one details Don’s experience with another woman named Alma who gasp! turns out to be Eva in another form. Don is the son of one of the members of The Chowder Society (I’m not going to specify which one, it doesn’t matter) and comes to town at his father’s request after the death of his twin brother David, right before all the ghost business really picks up. Turns out a few months ago he fell madly in love with this woman calling herself Alma Mosbey. She doesn’t like to talk about herself that much but is super interested in Don, his family, and his hometown. She’s also into lots of public sex, for some reason. The Eva in the past is no blushing virgin, she’s willing to sleep with a guy she’s into, but that’s as far as it goes. This Alma person basically forces Don to start openly fingering her in the middle of a restaurant and demands he bang her in the bathroom of a church despite a staff member rapping on the door. This is another reason I don’t believe the director about his conception of the film. By making the ghost not just sexually available but seductive and attention-seeking to the point where it starts to interfere with Don’s life is another thing. He wasn’t involved in her death or even aware of it but she ruins his life anyway. He stops going to work, starts drinking too much, and when he finally breaks things off after stuff gets too weird she instantly drops him and goes after his brother, which ended up killing him.

              Clearly Eva wants revenge for her death, and rightfully so, but I’m completely confused about the way she chooses to go about it. One of the reasons the opening is so confusing is the manner in which she kills Don’s brother David. The movie opens on this scene with no context. A guy in a towel has this seemingly random conversation with a naked woman lying facedown on a bed. Then she spooks him into falling out of a penthouse window by suddenly appearing to him as a naked corpse. This is just confusing at the time, but it’s even worse in retrospect, because if she was seducing Don in order to get him to take her back to his hometown for their wedding, and presumably that’s why she went after his brother after he broke things off, why then does she randomly kill David when by all accounts her plan was working just fine? After Don arrives back home she kills his dad by appearing to him as his dead son and leading him outside to tumble off a bridge to his death. Did she have to wait for Don to physically travel to the town for his brother’s funeral to do that? She kills another member of the Society by giving him such a bad dream he has a heart attack, and when his wife goes looking for his heart medication she can’t find it. She wonders what could have happened, and then she remembers the strange woman she’d glimpsed earlier downstairs. The ghost killed him by hiding his heart medication. She offs the last member by suddenly appearing in the middle of the road and causing him to swerve off into a snowbank, and then her minion in the backseat just jumps out and stabs him, thus rendering all that appearing and swerving business pointless.

But everyone looked so happy back then!

              Did I not mention the random minions? There’s a scene where Fred Astaire wanders over to the old, abandoned house where Eva used to live (it was fifty years ago, no reason for it to still be abandoned, never mind) and runs into a disheveled young man and a teenage boy. It’s eventually explained that they’re literally escaped mental patients and that Eva has promised them eternal life if they do her bidding. The kid that jumps out of the back seat to stab an old man just vanishes after that scene, he seems to have gotten away scot-free, the other one tries to take out Fred Astaire but gets shivved for his trouble, so at least that actor got to put on his resume that he was a scene partner with one of the greatest film dancers who ever lived.

              But if Eva has all these mind powers and can physically steal heart medication, why does she need to have minions at all? The actual answer is because they appeared in the original novel so they need to be in the movie, despite that having a very different plot and a completely different threat. Not to get too far into it because it does sound stupid but in the book there aren’t any ghosts at all. Eva / Alma is actually a member of a race of immortal shape changers that have wandered the Earth since before history. In the original she didn’t die when they rolled the car into the pond, she shape-changed into a cat or something and just randomly decided to wait several decades for her revenge. There are some other members of her race wandering around, and she kills and resurrects some people to serve under her, and in the end Don defeats this ancient evil by waiting until she turns into a wasp and smooshing her.

              I’m aware that this write-up is all over the place and that’s mostly because I don’t think I care enough about the movie to put in a whole lot of effort. The film ends with Don stuck on the bottom floor of the abandoned house with a broken leg, waiting for rescue. Eva / Alma appears at the top of the stairs in a wedding dress because why not and slowly starts to walk downstairs, taunting him all the while. While she’s descending one flight of stairs Fred Astaire survives a car flipping over multiple times, waits for an emergency response team to arrive, persuades them to dredge the pond containing the car and Eva’s dead body because of course it happens to be nearby, watches as they winch up the car, and then opens it just as the ghost / specter / whatever reaches the bottom of the stairs. As soon as the car door opens and the corpse plops out Eva / Alma basically screams “Curses, you have foiled me!” and vanishes, cut to credits. I have a general rule that if a movie ends when the plot ends it isn’t worth much. This is a “Supernatural” ending, and not from one of the good seasons. If the movie’s going to put itself together this badly then I feel free to do the same with this write up. I’ve watched worse movies recently but none of them have annoyed me like this one.