‘There is a room after all…’
Kier-La Janisse is a big name in horror movie circles. She runs the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, a volunteer run endeavour that celebrates horror history and culture, she has made numerous documentaries about the genre, most notably Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, a visual history of the folk horror subgenre, but she is perhaps best known for her lauded treatise on female madness in the horror genre, House of Psychotic Women. Part rumination on the depiction of women in horror films and part confessional autobiography, House of Psychotic Women is rightly seen as a key text in the dissection of the horror genre. At this year’s excellent Celluloid Screams film festival at Sheffield’s Showroom Cinema, I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Janisse’s first foray into narrative fiction, The Occupant of the Room. Needless to say, it’s excellent…
Adapted from Algernon Blackwood’s short story of the same name, The Occupant of the Room is the tale of a hotel room on a dark and stormy night. Minturn (Don McKellar) is our hapless protagonist, arriving at a remote hotel on the Swiss Alps in the middle of a snowstorm, only to be told that there are no vacancies. Just as he begins to trudge back out into the inclement weather, the manageress (Delphine Roussel) informs him that there is a room after all. Minturn soon learns that the room’s previous occupant went hiking in the snow two days before and hasn’t returned.
As Janisse is so highly respected in the world of horror, she was able to call in favours from celebrated Canadian cinematographer Karim Hussain. As a result, the film looks absolutely spectacular. Hussain drains all the colour out of the thing to the point where it’s almost monochrome. This, of course, means that when there are splashes of colour, those moments really sing. McKellar, an actor I know nothing about, anchors the film, delivering a performance that is rich in pathos, bewilderment and black comedy. Janisse has listed the BBC’s beloved Ghost Stories for Christmas series as an inspiration, and while you can certainly see the connection, the film’s trippy conclusion places it firmly in the modern era. A word too for Anju Singh’s utterly captivating and terrifying score. The deliberately discordant use of strings is both jarring and startlingly effective. It was still ringing in my ears for a long time after the film had ended.
I’m not sure if Janisse has ambitions to continue down this road, perhaps with a feature film, but based on this short she would have a bright future if she did choose to continue with narrative fiction. The Occupant of the Room feels both contemporary and timeless – a heady mix of post-Victorian gothic horror, and the more prestigious horror films that have taken the box office by storm in recent years. I loved it.
