Horror Reviews, Part II

The second part of my Masters of Horror odyssey was adapted from a Clive Barker short story. In general, I find Clive Barker interesting: movies based on his work (with the possible exception of Rawhead Rex) are consistently smart, gory and frightening, and yet he tends to be engagingly fun in interviews. One gets the impression that you should never go to a slumber party at Clive Barker's house, but if invited you might think about it for a second.

This is why, despite some lukewarm reviews, I had high hopes for Valerie on the Stairs and its promising haunted-house setup: struggling writer Rob Hanisey moves into a boarding-house for unpublished authors and begins to be dogged by visions of a beautiful young woman being held captive by a demon (Tony "Candyman" Todd). When he asks his fellow authors for information, they're strangely cagey for people who want to share their words with the world, and then the demon begins to kill them with an ungodly degree of mess. The end is a twist, but not much of one, and is simultaneously an exploration of authors' relationship to their work and a massive disappointment.

Spoilers ahead...



It turns out, of course, that Rob is himself a fictional character made flesh in a grand collaboration among three of the house's authors, as are Valerie and her demon captor. The episode ends with Rob literally (...sigh) turning into paper and blowing away in the cleansing winds of reality.

...Look. The writer-writing-a-writer-character trope is by now a staple of the horror genre, and you'd think either Barker or director Mick Gariss could do something innovative with it: instead the ending, while visually pretty, is for want of a better word masturbatory. I've been tempted to see when the original story was written, on the theory that it's one of Barker's early works; that's the only explanation I can conceive for why the man who gave the world Cenobites (and occasionally vice versa, heh heh) couldn't see that the plot of "Valerie on the Stairs" was a neat idea probably doomed to poor execution. It's a romantic notion, not a story, and no amount of ripping people's spines out through their throats and sensuous nude females can make it a story.