By Maria Lewis
Life is full of horror: whether that’s people inflicting horror on each other, horror on a mass scale as global disasters strike, or the intimate, personal horror of grief. Rarely do horror movies focus on these in terms of subject, but there are those that straddle the line between horror and fantasy – using both as a powerful tool for escapism. A Monster Calls is just the latest in a long line of movies to do this, with Pan’s Labyrinth and The Company Of Wolves some of the best pre-existing examples. Yet whether fantastical horror is used as a means to escape the savagery of the Spanish Civil War or to teach a young boy how to let go of his dying mother, the results tend to be variations of the same. That is to say, rather breathtaking.
There’s a specific structure to films of this type, with three of the essential elements being a) stories told within stories, b) OTT horror of the fantastical variety and c) a lesson learnt by the conclusion. The protagonists mightn’t always survive to receive this properly, but their death or life is almost inconsequential. After all, it’s really the audience to whom the lesson is being taught. In 1984, Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Angela Carter’s short story collection became one of the first movies to do this at any scale even close to mainstream. The Company of Wolves was weird, surreal and high concept enough that many were confused by it. On the flipside, others embraced its repurposing of Little Red Riding Hood to tell a modern feminist tale. A young girl, Rosaleen, goes to stay with her grandmother (played by Angela Lansbury) after her younger sister is killed by wolves (why not?). As her parents grieve, Rosaleen is told four tales by her grandmother – each of them relating back to her present situation in some way. From the scene of a wedding party horrifically turning into wolves while surrounded by pastels and white lace, to a young man mutating under the watchful eye of the devil, The Company Of Wolves sprinted as far from realistic horror as it could go.
Similarly, Pan’s Labyrinth utilised the juxtaposition of one grim reality alongside a horrifically magical one some 22 years later. It followed Ofelia, a young girl desperate to escape the very real horror of the Spanish Civil War and her mother’s new marriage to a malicious army general. She manages this with the help of a mystical faun-like creature who introduces her to a secret world of magic and monsters – of which he says she is the rightful princess. Written, directed and produced by Guillermo del Toro, he has said that Pan’s Labyrinth was deeply influenced by fairy tales and the structures inherent within them. While this is also true of The Company Of Wolves, recent release A Monster Calls uses this idea perhaps better than any of the previously mentioned titles. Directed by J.A. Bayona (who coincidentally once worked with del Toro on The Orphanage), it follows a young boy – Conor – who is living with his terminally ill mother. As the nature of her cancer begins to worsen, he gets a visit each night at 12.07am from a terrifying monster (voiced by Liam Neeson, as all terrifying monsters should be). Every evening the creature – which resembles the love child of a tree ent and a volcano – comes to tell Conor one of three stories, with the fourth story expected to be a truth from the kid himself.
Adapted from the award-winning novel by Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls is based on the original concept by Siobhan Dowd who – like one of the central characters in the story – suffered from a terminal illness, eventually passing away at just 47 from breast cancer. The film straddles that unique line between horror and fantasy, just like its predecessors, yet introduces the added element of animation to tell the fairy tales narrated by the monster. The unreal moments are heightened by the bleak realism of the boy’s everyday life, as he desperately tries to deal with impending doom and the devastating havoc grief can cause. Entirely heartbreaking and magical at the same time, horror is used like a mechanism to increase the story’s emotional impact on the audience – which is already profound. Fantastical horror is hard to perceive as a concept and even harder to execute, with Pan’s Labyrinth and The Company Of Wolves being some of the rare few that have managed it. Thankfully, A Monster Calls can not only join their ranks, but surge towards the front of them as both a gorgeous entry to the genre and a raw ode to the ones we love and the ones we lose.
Maria Lewis is a journalist and author previously seen on SBS Viceland’s The Feed. She hosts Cleverfan 9pm, Thursday nights on ABC Indigenous. She’s the presenter and producer of the Eff Yeah Film & Feminism podcast. Her debut novel Who’s Afraid? was released in 2016 with the sequel – Who’s Afraid Too? – out now. You can find her on Twitter @MovieMazz
