Bloody Perfect: Wicked Game
Isaura Barbé-Brown brings us the next post in her new monthly column, Bloody Perfect.
Working in a cinema comes with certain perks; free tickets; free popcorn; naps in the back of screens etc. But when I worked in one, there was an extra special perk. On Thursday nights when new releases were delivered, and if the cool manager was working, we’d grab a few tinnies, and have a private (read as secret) view of a new film in our favourite screen.
One such Thursday, The Conjuring (2013) was the new release, the cool manager was in, and tinnies in screen two was on.
More recent horror films don’t always hit that “I’m so scared I might die” spot that older films do, so I went into this particular horror full of hubris. It would take more than haunted house scares to put me off my gin and tonic in a can. But as they say, pride comes just before you absolutely shit yourself.
Carolyn (Lili Taylor) and Roger (Ron Livingston) move into an old farmhouse with their five daughters. However, the first sign that something is wrong is that their dog, Sadie, refuses to enter the house. Some of the other signs are the creepy boarded up basement, creepy sleepwalking, creepy door squeaking, and, the worst thing, Sadie being found dead outside. Despite all of this, the Perrons do not move out immediately, and chalk the odd occurrences up to the quirks of moving somewhere new. The girls play a game called hide and clap, where the blindfolded seeker gets the hiders to clap three times, following the sounds to try and catch them. The littlest Perron, April (Kyla Deaver) is often left out of the game, so when her siblings head off to school, she sees an opportunity and begs Carolyn to play the game with her and, of course, Carolyn gives in.
I can see why the game would be fun, I can despite all the potential death traps for the seeker like stairs and sharp corners.In this instance, it stops being fun almost instantly, and not because of serious bodily harm. Carolyn blindly searches for April and follows the first two claps to one of the bedrooms, where the large wardrobe slowly creeks open. Carolyn, thinking she’s discovered April, asks for the third clap and then... it happens. Two hands reach from behind the clothes and clap. Carolyn thinks it’s April, but on reaching the wardrobe, hearing breathing, and reaching into the clothes, Carolyn is left empty handed. She tears off her blindfold and searches again, but there is no one. April is in an entirely different room.
It is hard to put into words the silence that fell over us in the screen that night, at that moment, as we collectively realised how creepy an empty cinema was. It’s the first big scare of the film. The first time we know that something really is wrong. The beauty, I think, is in its simplicity; a misplaced hand clap during a children’s game that means something sinister. Carolyn brushes it off, but surely she must have thought about it every day from then on? She knows she heard the wardrobe open, that clap, that breathing…It would be enough for me to pack a bag and leave forever, but for the Perrons it’s only the start. In their first few days the dog has died, something unknown is clapping and these are the very least of their problems.
I’m a firm believer in simple scares in horror films; a glimpse of something here, a sound over there, things you can’t fully define, things that could happen to you… Never fully knowing what’s haunting you is where true terror lies. As much as I admire the Perrons for sticking it out, I for one know that if anything goes bump in the night or clap in the closet, I will be gone before you can say “Ginny in a tinny”.
Isaura Barbé-Brown is a Hackney born and based actress. She studied at AADA in New York and BADA in Oxford. She has written for The BFI, Black Ballad UK as well as The Final Girls/Bloody Women and been a guest on The Final Girls podcast and the Evolution of Horror podcast. She has done talks at the BFI for their Squad Goals event and during their Love season with the Bechdel Test Fest on race in romantic films. Isaura has also been on panels for BFI Future Film, The Watersprite Film Festival and The Norwich Film Festival. Her acting work covers theatre, film, tv and voiceover. She has also written for short film, TV and theatre as well as short stories and poetry. You can find Isaura on Twitter and Instagram.
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