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 The House provides room and board to unpublished authors until they become published.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.

Masters of Horror: Episode 5 Chocolate

Chocolate is directed by show-runner Mick Garris, the guy behind most of the Stephen King mini-series. If you told me that this was written by Stephen King, I wouldn't be surprised, but Garris himself is credited as the sole writer here. Presumably, he learned a thing or two from King.

The episode is told in flashback by a man named Jamie (Henry Thomas), who just committed a murder. He's explaining the events leading up to the murder to the police. I suspect the notion of an unreliable narrator was intentional here, as the story he tells sounds like something a stalker would come up with to justify his actions.

Jamie was living an unfulfilled life, surrounded by fulfillment. In his job he developed artificial flavors for snack foods, but he was on a diet. He was also sexually and artistically unfulfilled following his divorce, while his friend and co-worker Wally (the always magnificent Matt Frewer) indulged in all the pleasures he could ever want.

Jamie's tedium is interrupted, though, when he begins empathically experiencing the life of a female artist named Catherine (Lucie Laurier). It begins with the simple taste of chocolate in his mouth before the experiences expand to encompass episodes in which he experiences all five senses.

I suppose since none of this is Jamie's intention, we can't really criticize his morality at experiencing her life without her knowledge. For a time, at least, this seems beneficial to Jamie. Experiencing her life drives him to experience his own more fully, and he's able to get laid and indulge in junk food again without the guilt he experienced before.

However, these episodes also become dangerous. He experiences her sight while driving, and nearly dies because he can't see the road. His ex-wife and child also walk in on him with another woman in his bedroom because he's experiencing Catherine's sex with her boyfriend at the time, and can't intercept them before they enter (why they walk away from him when he appears to be having a seizure I don't claim to understand).

Then, Catherine's boyfriend turns abusive, and Jamie experiences Catherine murdering him. This incident convinces Jamie that he has to track her down. As with Jenifer I find myself uncertain how I should feel about the protagonist at this point, and I suspect the framing narrative was intended to leave us questioning that. The fact that Catherine is willing to hear the full story from a man who shows up unannounced at her apartment, and uses phrases like “sometimes I'm inside of you,” is just downright bizarre. She then gives the impression of falling for him before turning violent, and in his words “makes him” kill her.

I'm not sure what the episode is trying to say, exactly. Perhaps that jealousy and desire should drive us to fulfill our own lives, but we should separate those feelings from the people who we feel them for. Or maybe it's just a really creepy idea for a scary story. Either interpretation works.

The best part of the episode is unquestionably Wally. Frewer creates a beautiful portrayal of a man determined to enjoy every second of his life. He eats whatever he wants without gaining weight. He also plays in a rock band, despite being old enough to know he'll never make it big, just because it's fun. He's attained complete personal fulfillment without the need for outside input.

The idea of empathically experiencing the emotions of others in this way is kind of creepy. Even if everything we're told is true we can still see where Catherine would want to stop a complete stranger from experiencing her life by any means necessary. Overall, though, I'd say the episode works best if we just assume that Jamie is crazy and killed Catherine when she rejected him. It leaves some questions open, like what really happened to her boyfriend, and why he drove so far to find an object of obsession, but I think these questions play very well in our imaginations. This episode should be included in any viewing of Masters of Horror.