A lonely and rebellious eleven year-old Anna (Charlotte Burke), angry with her oft-absent father, finds herself increasingly called into her feverish dreams towards the image she drew in her sketchbook – a sole foreboding house in the vast English countryside with a single occupant – a melancholy boy unable to walk. None of the adults believe her as she comes to realize the violently terrifying figure she senses approaching the imaginary house might affect the real world as well.

With its assured (and unsettlingly frightening) dream- and nightmare-like imagery (accompanied by an impressive score by Hans Zimmer), a story centered around a lonely female that no one believes (and the appearance of a dangerous shadowy figure and the dawning fear that he can enter the real world), it makes complete sense how director Rose would soon be chosen to direct Candyman, an adaption of one of English horror author Clive Barker’s massively influential 6-volume “Books of Blood” short stories, “The Forbidden”, with its screenplay following a somewhat similar narrative trajectory (and that Rose also imbued with stunning imagery and an evocative score, in that case using Phillip Glass).

From the first scene, with the schoolgirl getting kicked out of class then defiantly standing in the doorway, only to suddenly faint (and have her first dream visit to the stone house she drew), I was taken by the young Burke in the film. I’ve read others say she’s not good in the role, with some justifying this position in that she was never heard from cinematically again, yet I find her lack of expression entirely appropriate to many a pre-adolescent; emotions are swirling, yet an ability to understand or catalogue not yet developed (hence, the perfect age to get them to draw and create art as there will never be a time more free of self-awareness and censorship). I found her dough-faced quasi-androgynous quality added intrigue as well (at first glance I thought she was a boy… yes, that’s right, I dared instinctively attach gender to a human… I know, I know, how awful of me to consider whether the biped presented before me had a penis or a vagina).

I’m sure Barker, consciously or otherwise, must have connected to the obvious coming of age sexual connections between Paperhouse and his own smashing cinematic debut, 1987’s Hellraiser (his own adaption of his novella “The Hellbound Heart”) with their shared thematic underpinnings dealing with the societal necessity for a sexually burgeoning female (Anna in Paperhouse, the older yet still clearly innocent Kirsty in Hellraiser) to reject her initial adolescent infatuation of ‘first love’ with her father (with the dangerously emerging ‘sexual’ version that each girl has to literally murder, be it Anna’s terrifying vision swinging his ‘hammer’ — played by the same actor, Ben Cross, who also plays her father — in her nightmare-scape in Paperhouse, or the lecherous Uncle Frank who takes over Kirsty’s father’s body and says ‘Come to daddy’ in the most pervy kinda way in Hellraiser) and to embrace more acceptable sexual interests (the boy Anna not so coincidentally initially drew without agency – i.e., the use of his legs – in Paperhouse and the bland Steve in Hellraiser, who we early on see sleeping in a separate bed from Kirsty in that film, with Kirsty much more focused on speaking with her father on the phone). It’s dark stuff, fuelled by fairy-tales (with Hellraiser wearing the mantle – ironically, considering the openly gay-status of its writer/director Barker — of being ultimately far more conservatively minded of the two films) and a fascinating link between them.

Paperhouse is a small, yet beautifully evocative film, capturing images of both loneliness and terror; a tumultuous literalization into an angry adolescent girl’s mind as she anxiously stands between disappearing naivety and emerging sexuality (and what better way to do that then in a horror film!). While its nightmarish imagery never attempts the gore-strewn levels that the aforementioned Clive Barker’s genre work usually did (which perhaps speaks to why this film is so unfairly under-appreciated), Rose more than manages some impressively dark and unsettling sights. I only wish I’d taken my own 13 year-old daughter to see this one.

Buck A Review