Stamp, Toy, & Photograph

Terence Stamp passed away last month, and this week we’re beginning with one of his signature roles, his third film, released the year after his Oscar-nominated performance in Billy Budd, and the source of the cover art for The Smiths' single “What Difference Does It Make” (non-Morrissey variant). William Wyler’s John Fowles adaptation The Collector is a thriller first, but it’s horror enough for our purposes . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

Samantha Eggar told David Cronenberg that "The Brood was the strangest and most repulsive film I've ever done." It’s a high bar for repulsiveness, given her performance in The Collector, a claustrophobic, white-knuckle affair that sees Stamp’s malevolent butterfly collector Freddie kidnap the art student he’s taken a fancy to (Eggar’s Miranda) and keep her imprisoned in his country home. It’s a set-up that focuses our attention on villains, how they’re portrayed, and how they frighten us.

1. If you knew the bare facts of the situation—Freddie has stalked Miranda, followed her in his van, chloroformed her, and locked her up—you might expect a different man from the one Stamp portrays. His movement can be halting. He’s soft-spoken and shy, sometimes weathering embarrassing moments with a bowed head. He can erupt in gawky exuberance—dancing about in the rain to celebrate a successful kidnapping. He can betray a smugness about his neat, little transgressive world. And he can defend himself with an animated petulance. The overall portrait—triple-underlined by the time we watch him proudly showing Miranda his butterfly collection—is of a man who’s really a child. A man who’s stunted. It’s the thing that makes him less frightening a captor initially, but terrifying the more the picture comes into focus. He’s stunted entirely. He has no talent for empathy. The world for him is his own little sandbox. He claims to love Miranda, but she is, to him, a thing he’s taken possession of. Not her own person—his person.
2. Particularly early in her captivity, we see Eggar’s Miranda search, search Freddie’s face, trying to understand why he’s taken her. He’s not, again, the stereotypical violent predator. He isn’t a cold, all-business kidnapper seeking ransom money. It’s his strangeness that makes his promise to release her after four weeks believable (or, at least, believable enough). There’s a crushing sense of hope in her performance, and flashes of despair as she senses how—even if he’s sensitive, child-like—he’s also impenetrable. This dynamic drives the film, the strangeness of her captor injecting a terrible sense of uncertainty into her life-or-death circumstances.
3. Vans are the iconic vehicle of the criminal. There are of course lots of good real world reasons to own a van, but many of us still aren’t parking next to that white van in the parking lot. The Collector adds an extra feature to the sinister van: Venetian blinds. In the first shot we see of Miranda, the van's blinds open and there she is coming out of her art school. The kidnapping sequence that follows has Freddie following her through London in the van, although he knows her route already—leaving her at the tube and finding her again at her stop, then driving ahead to grab her on a particularly narrow stretch of street. This sequence has us mostly with Freddie, stalking Miranda through the city streets. The views through the van’s blinds add a special sense of unease. They foreground an experience of discrete voyeurism, of hidden menace. We’re there watching and Miranda doesn’t have a clue or a chance. They function as a low-tech version of Buffalo Bill’s night vision goggles—a sinister watcher’s unfair advantage.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

4. Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey is best at its most surreal—a visual territory new for the director (his work until now marked more by the quiet reveal and the sinister outline, though perhaps turning in this new direction with Longlegs). Not every surreal flourish stands out—some of it unconvincingly rendered CGI—but others are images we’ll remember: real blood spilling from a stuffed toy, a giant simian hand grabbing a sleeping man from his bed, the man falling Vertigo-style through kaleidoscopic space, a stripper with the head of a monkey. It’s a surrealism stemming, I must imagine, from the constraints of the project. True, it's a $10 million Stephen King adaptation distributed by Neon, but the constraints I’m concerned with are conceptual. This is a movie about a cursed object—a toy, mechanical monkey. It doesn’t run around and crack wise like Chucky. It may have great power, but it retains its toyness. Aside from the deaths, how’s a filmmaker to impart visually the monkey’s menace? It’s an invitation to new, creative spaces.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

5. I loved Lena Valencia’s 2024 story collection Mystery Lights: literary fiction with an interest in the weirder, horror- and sci-fi-adjacent margins of popular culture—from UFOs, to underground mutants, to spirits—and, relatedly, extreme environments, especially in the American west. “Vermilion” follows an older couple’s hiking trip to southern Utah, where we uncover ghostly images in vacation photos, Don’t Look Now-evoking sightings of a lost daughter, and—a personal interest of mine—the eerie properties in stone. In certain ways it's more grounded in the real than some of the other stories in the collection, but it settles into the uncanny reaches of the psyche with a hazy potency.

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday. This week, the vice president claimed that a majority of political violence came from the left. In fact, the opposite is true. The time to resist fascism is now.