Masters of Horror: Episode 21 Valerie on the Stairs

Clive Barker is both my favorite writer and my favorite director. I'm quite disappointed that he hasn't returned to the director's chair since Lord of Illusions, but Mick Garris does well with this adaptation. It's a bit strange as adaptations go, because while the episode is credited as based on a short-story by Barker, his website says he actually wrote a 45-page treatment specifically for Masters of Horror, which Garris adapted. If you're going to write 45 pages I'm not sure why you wouldn't just write the script, but I'm not Clive Barker.

Barker has a thematic connection to Lovecraft, but in many ways is the opposite side of the same coin. They both deal in cosmic horror, but to Lovecraft the human perception of the universe is unimportant to anyone except the human perceiving it. To Barker, however, human experiences are often the only things that matter, and it's those very experiences that can be so dangerous to us. While in lesser hands this could be like saying “clap your hands if you believe,” Barker has a way of giving ideas and concepts a visceral quality. These are creations of the most primal parts of our brains, not simply phantoms we can wish away.

A writer named Rob Hanisey (Tyron Leitso) moves into Highberger House, a boarding house established in the 1930s by a rich, frustrated would-be writer. The House provides room and board to unpublished authors until they become published. In practice this means that the house provides an indefinite home for a bunch of hacks. Some of them, like Rob, continue to have delusions of grandeur. Others, like Everett Neely (Christopher Lloyd), have long given up hope, and only continue writing at all because it allows him to avoid homelessness.

Hanisey begins to encounter a woman named Valerie (Clare Grant), running around the boarding house nude. She asks for help in trying to escape from a monster played by Tony Todd. The creature has an intentionally pretentious name, but is credited simply as “The Beast.” Rob becomes determined to save Valerie, even as the other tenants tell him he's clearly hallucinating.

Both Valerie and the Beast, as it turns out, are creations of the house. The fallen dreams of the house took shape in the form of the only really decent work of fiction produced by the residents: A collaboration between the jaded Neely, the friendly but predatory Bruce Sweetland (Jonathan Watton), and sexually frustrated lesbian ex-nun Patricia Dunbar (Suki Kaiser). Neely provided the creature from an earlier novel he wrote in his youth, Patricia created Valerie out of her anger and lust, and Bruce interviewed vagrants to provide the story with plenty of victims and appropriate deaths.

The Beast begins picking off his own authors, hoping to free himself by preventing them from writing an ending. Valerie's relation to the Beast is fascinating: while she runs from him, she often seems extremely cooperative, resisting only as the story calls for it. She willingly joins him when he kills Bruce, and offers Patricia a kiss before she dies. She recognizes her existence as tied to her role as a victim, and so she plays that role. Beneath it all, though, she's on The Beast's team.

This is an episode that tells you the twist in advance: After Bruce's death, Neely suggested that Rob might have been an aspect of the story that Bruce had been working on. Tipping their hand like this in advance actually makes the ending fairly surprising. Reverse psychology wins it all!

Rob destroys the Beast, but Valerie disintegrates when she leaves the House, and Rob's entire body turns to pages in the novel. The Beast failed. He was destroyed by the noble hero, and once rescued Valerie and her rescuer no longer had a reason to be.

The episode ends with me completely unsure of what did or did not just happen. Valerie says “they finished it,” so are the authors not dead? Was Rob just their hallucination? Or are there some other writers entirely guiding the story? Did Bruce write his own death?

Garris has made his career on Stephen King adaptations that stay reasonably faithful to the source material. That same style works here, where every scene is exactly as I imagine Barker would have written it. Garris has a talent for understanding other people's material. I'm glad this episode offered so few answers.