Everything I'm about to say is ostensibly a spoiler, but in the sense that having the flavor of a beautiful macaron described to you can spoil the experience of actually eating the macaron. So as I kind of alluded to, this is not an old favorite. This is a film I only discovered during the pandemic, 2020, but in the intervening time, l've seen it probably four or five times. I thought this would be a great match for this team, having seen their incredible work. And I would say that the most recent viewing of Livid for me for this conversation has been my favorite viewing of the film.
This is a Halloween story that takes place on Halloween. I love those films. And it opens with this sort of sinister, ominous, sonorous music and the image of what appears to be a human head decomposing on a beach, right? And I think that it sort of aesthetically hearkens to those sapphic vampire films of Jean Rollin, which, you know, there was always a beach. And to things like Valerie and her Week of Wonders from 1970. And this opening really effectively sets us up for a story about decay and death. You know, we see lilting boats in the harbor, we see tilting gravestones, we see missing children's faces plastered on plexiglas bus stop shelters. And this is the kind of film which makes no secret of its inspirations. And it takes them kind of wholesale and celebrates them and slices and dices and juliennes them. And through that, it creates something totally new and unusual and it thereby kind of delights its viewers by letting them untangle this rat king of sources. You know, the name of the pub that's owned by William's mother, where he and Lucie go and where his brother Ben works, is The Slaughtered Lamb. And the trade sign that's hanging outside shows a howling wolf in front of a full moon. And it is the same name of the country pub from an American werewolf in London. When we encounter the three children standing outside of Ben's car, they wear masks from Halloween III: Season of the Witch, The Jack-o-lantern, the skull and the witch.
When William sees them, he even sings the silver shamrock commercial jingle from that film. And when he scares them away and they drop their lanterns on the ground, the light kind of consumes itself and becomes darkness. Around 42 minutes in, I want to say, the score of Livid takes on the characteristic John Carpenter tone. We sort of hear the opening piano notes that are so reminiscent of the theme from Halloween. I think there's something very much like let the right one in about the idea that there is a human minder that the vampire has in the character of Ms. Wilson. And Ms. Wilson is kind of like an analog to the Childcatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. You know, she's driving her car through the countryside and taking these children whose faces appear on those bus stop posters. And of course, Ms. Jessel is named for the dead governess in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. You know, that young and beautiful and infamous governess who had an inappropriate affair with a servant who was below her station and whose similarly black clad ghost is described as miserable, pale and dreadful.
And watching it, I wonder, is that Chekhov's key around Ms. Jessel's “don't wake the sleeping giant's” neck? And it's also kind of a replication of a moment the most tense moment from Walt Disney's Return to Oz? Or are those Chekhov's grape shears that are tossed onto the table? And while that table is sort of barren of cake and rats, it's kind of otherwise Miss Havishammy. And there are shades of Dead Silence: Judith Roberts' Mary Shaw and her flooded theater in the woods filled with ventriloquist dummies. And of Grandpa Alvin's trick house in Dan Aykroyd's Nothing But Trouble. But again, in this case, I think originality is not the art of concealing our sources, but of kind of weaving them into a tapestry of scares and celebrating.
As with Lewis Carroll, we go through a looking glass in this film, but not of our own volition. And like everything in this film, once that key is turned, the machine cannot be stopped. A light in that secret kitchen laboratory becomes a kind of surgical zoetrope. And the curiosity is that, it's not displayed on vitrines like it is early in the film, but on these kind of mean wooden racks. And those things that we're seeing become progressively more sinister until that room is filled with children, like in the film The Children, or in the children from Village of the Damned, or Children of the Corn, or There's Something Wrong with the Children children. And vampire children like these, they're kind of like the young helpers in Let the Right One In, who grow up to be like Ms. Wilson helpers. They're this like demonic, corps ballet who come armed with scalpels and they are ready for evisceration and satiation, you know? And back to those grape shears, you know, there are hints of Del Toro when one of the characters becomes like an aesthetic analog to Simone in the Del Toro-produced The Orphanage, you know, with a sack with eye holes over his head, only here it's kind of covered in fresh blood. And also allusions to things like Pan's Labyrinth. And I would also suggest that an astute viewer of this film will notice that Ms. Jessel has a certificate, you know, in the moment where William is kind of trying to futilely escape. It's caught in the beam of Lucie's flashlight just briefly, but it shows the viewer that Ms. Jessel was a student at the Tanz Academy in Freiburg, which of course everyone will know from Dario Argento’s excellent Suspiria. And suddenly, having seen that, isn't there something a bit like Susie Bannion about Lucie? Isn't Ms. Jessel all of a sudden a bit more like Helena Markos? And you know, when Lucie sits down at that miniature table for tea, having discovered that Ms. Jessel has appeared across from her, Jessel opens her hands to Lucie like she's Count Orlok in Nosferatu or like Gary Oldman showing us his hairy palms making the same gesture in Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula.
And I think that there's also something kind of inescapably Angela Carter-like about this film and this story. And I would not be shocked to hear that Maury & Bustillo drew from her sort of narrative and visual style and vocabulary in the creation of Livid.
And, you know, of course, all of this is transpiring in a honey of a house. It is like the gingerbread house of a storybook, which, you know, we're in France, but this enormous chateau is kind of tricked out like a Tudor mansion that's collided with some kind of you know, hermetic seal of a Brooklyn liquor store. You know, it has things in common with mommy and daddy's house from the people under the stairs. And the interior is designed to capture those exactly like Lucie, those who are curious, because every object inside has been carefully selected like it's for a wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities. And it's also like a crime caper by way of the Brothers Grimm. It's kind of suffused with legend. You know, it's like Alibaba or like Bluebeard. The promise of a fabulous horde just inside this you know, you're kind of in a cave of strange treasures. And I think most of them kind of suggest something sinister has or is about to happen in this space. And the house is a real fantasy. You know, we've all been in places like this, real or imagined, you know? And I know it's the haunted house of my dreams. This house, as designed, as populated with dolls missing eyes and antique French toys. And again, like in Bluebeard, Lucie, because it's forbidden for her to enter this house, she wants to enter it that much more. And Lucie becomes an amalgam of every sort of girl child in every fairy tale ever written, you know, from Pierrot to Grimm to Angela Carter. And I sort of wonder what Lapine and Sondheim would say about Livid. But, you know, I think more than simple morality tales for children, it becomes this kind of beautiful story of the forbidden, you know, of having that which one wants but which one is denied. Aspiration and conflict and bifurcation and the eternal. And this is kind of established when we meet Lucie for the first time and underscored as she waits for William on the docks in Brittany. She's just come from Ms. Jessel's grand house for the first time. And there is this conflict between the life she has and the life that she wants. There's this desire for something better, which eventually becomes the motor of this story. And I think much like Lucie's heterochromic eyes, we see the conflict between high and low, and we experience the haves and the have-nots, and this division is made all that much clearer through the presence of visual metaphor in the very face of the film's central character.
And these characters are kind of torn between their dirty jobs and the grind of their quotidian lives and this desire to improve their lot. And much like our beloved witches in the Three Mothers trilogy, it becomes a story about lineage and about the transmitting of knowledge in kind of an unbroken chain of succession changing or reversing maybe the bad habits that are ingrained in us by the people who raise us and may not know any better. And I think in this house where the unknown becomes knowable and where a character's sort of innermost desires become broadcast or externalized and readable by supernatural means.
You know, like in a fairy tale, given every opportunity to turn back or to leave or to save themselves, they just don't. They just don't. They go through the forbidden door and they find that one man's trash is another woman's carefully preserved automaton vampire daughter. And that, you know they say par la nuit, the house exists in its own realm, kind of unmoored from the earth and anything that lives on it in a separate place in the truest sense. And I think that in that moment in this film, we kind of learn that in order to soar, one kind of has to fall. And in order for one to be free, one has to cast off the trappings of the physical world in the life they had before. And in the end, Lucie or the form of Lucie gets what she wants. She's gonna live in the chateau. She's gonna have the riches that Ms. Jessel has that she wants in that first moment that she encounters her. But what's the cost? And I must say, you know, here in probably the fourth or fifth time that l've seen this film. I've come to see the end of the film, not as a flaw that undoes everything that comes before it, but sort of as a beautiful conclusion to this Halloween story that's just been told to us.
To listen to our episode on Livid, click here.
Bradford Louryk