Little White Lies September - October 2015

Vol. 61 Single, Number, TORO AND ROBBINS, PUBLISHERS, No. 71A LEONARD STREET SHOREDITCH. LONDON. Price, Tenpence, No. 1 At the climax of Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, the director conducts a prolonged fight scene atop a system of giant golden cogs. He is fascinated by cogs. And machinery. He says so in interviews. So, from this we can infer an attraction to the rational, a guy who is becalmed by mechanical logic. And yet, his movies are packed full of monsters, ghouls, apparitions and creatures of unspecified origin. From this we can also infer an attraction to the irrational, a man who sees a world that exists beyond the physical realm. This ideological conflict is what earns del Toro his status as one of the greats. His…

Vol. 61 Single, Number, TORO AND ROBBINS, PUBLISHERS, No. 71A LEONARD STREET SHOREDITCH. LONDON. Price, Tenpence, No. 2 IN PRAISE OF THIS ELUSIVE AUSTRALIAN ACTRESS, BEGUILING STAR OF GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S CRIMSON PEAK "I can see in you the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage, a vivid, restless, captive; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high." JANE EYRE If you want to see Mia Wasikowska clearly, it helps to look at her through a window. The uncommonly opaque actress from Canberra, Australia whose pale moon face looms large over Crimson Peak, has been accused of disappearing into the background – New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, in her review of 2014’s Tracks, wrote that Wasikowska, “Tends to be a recessive screen presence.”…

When did haunted house movies become so… haunted? Perhaps a strange question – cinematic haunted houses now include terrifying locations such as the Overlook Hotel, 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, and the Cabin in the Woods. But for the first quarter of cinema’s history, haunted houses were more often the set of comedies, carrying more laughs than scares. Pinned by critic James Agee as “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” the slapstick comics produced some of the most creative haunted house movies. Edward Cline’s 1921 The Haunted House with Buster Keaton might be the genre’s gold standard. After a farcical opening, Keaton’s Stone Face tracks down a series of stolen bank notes to a supposedly haunted house, and only this clueless rebel is foolish enough to enter the mansion, where he encounters a…

THE HAUNTING 1963 (UK) Per the film, the setting for Robert Wise’s classic horror film, Hill House is supposed to be in, ‘the most remote part of New England’, but is actually located about five miles southeast of Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire. The neo-Gothic estate is touted playing the host to many ghouls, including those of the Shirley family who owned the estate for centuries. Now a luxury hotel, it has become known as the most haunted house in Britain. THE SHINING 1980 (UK/USA) A great place for seclusion and scenic beauty. Even though Stanley Kubrick’s mind-frazzling masterpiece was shot at Elstree Studios in England, the exterior of the iconic Overlook Hotel is the Timberline Lodge, located in the Hood River Area of northern Oregon. Forty five miles east of Portland,…

#2 Two films inspired by Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is outspoken when it comes to the classic movies that have directly inspired his artistic process. And when he does namedrop a Hitchcock here or a James Whale there, its generally quite easy to see how this inspiration has taken seed with his own rich and singular oeuvre. We have selected two films of which he regularly professes a great love: Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast from 1946 and Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face from 1960. This pair of romantic horror movies are to be viewed as a double bill, the former screening on MUBI for 30 days, the latter receiving a one-off event presentation at LWLies’ 71a gallery on Thursday 15 October…

Dear Clarisse, It’s going to be surreal being in touch with you on a daily basis. My communication style tends to go ’burst of something’ ’silence’ ’burst of something’ ’silence’. People, in all their wilfulness and complexity, exhaust me and I’m jealous of everyone who finds it such a breeze to be social all the time. A confession! And nothing to do with ghost stories either. I will need to switch up my reading in order to be on message. At the moment I am reading a book about the colour blue. At a stretch it could be called a ghost story because, insofar as it’s about anything other than the colour blue, it’s about the ghost of a relationship. It proceeds via numbered points. I opened it on a…