The road to Halloween is paved with good films. Wherein we countdown to the spirited season with a hundred doses of horror. 53 days to go.
It’s hard to think of a more dynamic and emotive opener than the one launching Don’t Look Now. A child in a red coat is playing by a pond. Her ball falls into the water. There is a sense of rising tension. Inside the house, the girl’s mother and father are chatting and looking at slides. One of their pictures appears to melt, a red shape spreading and oozing out into the frame like blood. These different actions are cut together with increasing rapidity until the father is fishing the girl’s limp body from the weeds. He shrieks, burying his face in her dripping, red coat, sobbing uncontrollably.
The best horror films tap into our deep-seated, universal fears. Before The Babadook (2014) and Hereditary (2018), director Nicholas Roeg used grief as the gut-wrenching vehicle for the weird happenings and psychic visions that consume his best film, Don’t Look Now. The anguish is palpable: this is horror in a very real sense.
Based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, Roeg’s film is also populated by classic horror tropes: a series of unsolved murders and a mysterious child-like figure lurking in the shadows. The parents, John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura (Julie Christie), travel to Venice where John is restoring churches. Here they meet two elderly sisters. One of them is blind but has the gift of second sight. John believes the women are con-artists. Laura is their willing victim.
It is a mark of the film’s peculiar atmosphere that Laura is not troubled but comforted by the woman’s vision: little Christine as a ghostly apparition sitting between her parents. The idea revives Laura and she begins to reconnect with her husband.
Roeg’s adaptation shudders with melodrama. The strange sisters laugh maniacally and Julie Christie collapses in an earth shattering swoon. But the film’s emotional power emerges from the chemistry between its leads. Today, as critics lament the decline of sex in cinema, the Sutherland-Christie love scene appears particularly audacious. The camera lingers on their nakedness, bodies intertwined. Intercut with images of the couple getting dressed afterwards and going out for dinner, their love-making is couched in married life. For this reason, it topped Peter Bradshaw’s list of the best sex scenes in cinema history. Its intimacy and abandon perfectly reflect the release of two grieving people as described in du Maurier’s story:
He turned on both taps in the bathroom, the water gushing into the bath, the steam rising. ‘Now’ he thought afterwards, ‘now at last is the moment to make love,’ and he went back into the bedroom, and she understood, and opened her arms and smiled. Such blessed relief after all those weeks of restraint.
As a cinematographer, Roeg had already worked with Christie three times (on Fahrenheit 451, Dr Zhivago and John Schlesinger’s Far From The Madding Crowd). Indeed, it was during Madding Crowd that Roeg demonstrated, most clearly, his potential as a director. Schlesinger sent him away with Christie and her co-star Terrence Stamp to record the film’s now iconic seduction scene. Stamp’s Sergeant Troy mesmerises the heroine in bright red uniform with a dashing display of swordsmanship. It’s the most vivid and daring scene in the entire production.
Set in relief against the green rolling hills, Troy’s red jacket is a symbol of lust, violence and danger. Roeg would go on to use this blood-red hue to a similar effect in Don’t Look Now. Associated with both love and violence, red is arguably the most loaded colour in the cinematic arsenal. Roeg carries it over from the dead child’s coat into Christie’s red boots and the stripes in Sutherland’s scarf: a constant visual reminder of their tragic loss.
Moreover, the peculiar figure appearing in the darkened Venetian alleys torments John precisely because it is dressed in the dead girl’s red coat. The film’s disturbing atmosphere arises from this pressing tension: is the figure a physical manifestation of John’s grief; or something more sinister?
In Roeg’s hands, colour is made to work within the frame as a narrative device. Likewise, the small details changed from du Maurier’s original become visual motifs that reconnect the story cinematically. Screenwriters Allan Scott and Chris Bryant turn John into a conservationist. His line of work echoes du Maurier’s own suggestion that what is gone can be copied but never replaced:
How [to] replace the life of a loved lost child with a dream? He knew Laura too well. Another child, another girl, would have her own qualities, a separate identity, she might even cause hostility because of this very fact. A usurper in the cradle, in the cot that had been Christine’s. A chubby flaxen little replica… not the little waxen dark haired-sprite that had gone.
Then there’s Venice itself. Without roads or cars, only water and boats, it is already strange and unfamiliar. The film’s cinematographer, Tony Richmond, has described the film as “a little bit odd and off-key,” saying, “it’s a by-product of that strange environment.” Filmed in winter, often in the near darkness of narrow alleys off the beaten track, Roeg’s Venice is inherently unnerving. By having the child die from drowning (rather than the illness written by du Maurier), Scott and Bryant increase this sense of foreboding in the floating city. Roeg draws our attention to rats swimming in the water and dead bodies exhumed from the canal. This image returns us to the first: Sutherland pulling the dead child from the pond.
It is, perhaps, a consequence of this dense atmosphere that the big reveal is ultimately disappointing both on the page and the screen. But Roeg’s visual images have the advantage over du Maurier here. In the final moments, images from the entire film are intercut. Here, editor Graeme Clifford creates a heavy sense of circularity, of a vortex sucking us down into the darkness. Everything we have witnessed becomes connected in a complex pattern of fate. Contrary to its title, Roeg’s Don’t Look Now demands we hit rewind and watch again.
