There are a lot of words that go well with Halloween. Isolation. Desolation. Secrecy. It's a holiday which I feel is a lot about mood; it's one of the most primally emotional days of the year. As the barriers between worlds shrink and thin, they expose us to sensations from beyond. Chills up our spine. The rush of leaves in a midnight wind. Perhaps even the chattering of skeletons. Don't Look in the Basement is a movie which also all about mood. I found myself slightly bored while rewatching it for our Spookyween celebrations, but I realized that was because little was happening in terms of plot--in terms of feeling, however, great advancements were happening, and that was what kept me watching. A truly captivating film, Don't Look in the Basement manages to bring me new surprises with every new watching, and I'm sure it'll become an October staple for me.
At a rural mental hospital run by Dr. Stevens, a nurse named Jane is planning to leave. She's become too perturbed by the behavior of the patients to continue treating them, especially after one of them, Harriet, assaults her. However, as she's leaving, one of the patients, a former judge named Oliver Cameron, kills Dr. Stevens by apparent accident. Before Jane can leave, an unseen person steals the baby doll which Harriet believes to be her living child and places it in Jane's room; this leads to Harriet killing the nurse. Fortunately--perhaps--a replacement arrives in the form of Charlotte Beale, former head of the mental health ward at a big-name hospital. She was invited by Dr. Stevens to come out and assist him. In the face of his death, his replacement, Dr. Geraldine Masters, is hesitant to take Charlotte on, but eventually relents. Slowly, the delicate structure of the hospital begins to cave in itself, facilitated by that unseen weirdo, who's now running around snipping phone wires. Plus, more people are turning up dead. Charlotte begins to feel more and more like a patient herself, until at last she learns the truth. The woman she's been working for isn't a doctor. Masters is a patient, and her illness is that she has to believe she's a doctor. Now that word is getting out that this is all just one woman's fantasy, Masters suddenly realizes she has a lobotomy to schedule...
I know that this movie resembles many I've seen before. There's just something about '70s horror movies that just feels '70s, whether it's the style, the dialogue, the film quality, hell, even the shapes of people's faces sometimes. I kept thinking of Criminally Insane while watching this, and the reason is obvious enough from that later film's title alone. Don't Look is considerably more professional than Criminally Insane, seeming, at points, to be (gasp) a real movie. In fact, overall, the acting is really good, as is the cinematography, though the lighting fails at points. It is undeniable that the film is actually creepy. There's enough of a mystery about everything to keep it all going, and even if the patients aren't scary the house they live in certainly is. I always love rural horror movies because I am a spoiled suburbanite and I do sincerely believe that if you go far enough from the cities you can find some dark secrets. (But I also acknowledge the dark secrets my suburban home holds as well.)
I tried thinking about how ableism applies to this movie, and if I'm being honest, I wasn't offended by any of it as a mentally ill person. This is the sort of fantasy mental illness which is just sort of silly if you're in the mood for goofy Corpse Vanishes-style shenanigans. That having been said, this movie is surprisingly sympathetic to the mentally ill. The hospital isn't cruel towards its patients, though admittedly it seems from what we see of him that Dr. Stevens wasn't quite the most stable person himself. The patients are treated as human and accepted for who they are, and they aren't punished for a lack of progress. And characters talk about the patients sympathetically. Now, it may be an intended subversion of this kindness that much of it comes from someone who turns out to be a mental patient herself, and a murderer, at that. But it's hard to say. Dr. Masters was a doctor once, and she's been trying to rebuild herself here steadily. She shows expertise in her field and there seems to be hope for her. It's sort of empowering to view these statements, predating her final mental collapse, as a person with mental illness speaking for themselves. But then she turns out to be crazy and gets killed.
I could be more serious about this, but I want to move on by saying that there's a lot of cheese to balance out the seriousness and make it a genuinely fun ride. For example, when Allyson, the token nymphomaniac, is trying to seduce Judge Cameron, she says, "Do you like strawberries? I taste like strawberries!" And there's also a scene where a character announces that someone has had their tongue cut out, to help explain why the filmmakers couldn't afford an effect that conveyed this outside of filling the actress's mouth with fake blood. It reminded me of the movies I'd make with my friends when I was a kid, where someone's arm would be cut off, to the sound of a dubbed voice shouting, "Your arm is being cut off!!!"
Finally, a good cast is worth remembering. (Almost) all the patients are memorable in some sense: there's Sam, who has become child-like as a result of a violence-curbing lobotomy; the Sergeant, a war vet who can't get over losing his platoon; Harriet, who, again, thinks her plastic doll is her baby; Danny, who's illness appears to be severe Little Shit Syndrome (and whose name I initially misheard as "Denny"); Judge Cameron, who has a lot of other violent obsessions besides justice; Allyson, who has lost so many men in her life that she'll kill for love; and Mrs. Callingham, who just rants about nonsense. Those who don't have at least one likable trait are harmless, except maybe for
Brave the boredom, and great Spookyween fun shall be yours. I want to know what you think of it, so give it a shot!
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