It’s the holiday season – and Severin Films has released a new episode of The Haunted Season entitled The Occupant of the Room (an adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s 1909 story of the same name), now streaming on Shudder.[1] It’s a wonderful film, a perfect eerie ghost story – better, to be honest, than most of the recent fare in BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series. My review, below, includes a brief interview with director and writer, Kier-La Janisse.
Algernon Blackwood’s “The Occupant of the Room” is about a school teacher who arrives late at night at an inn in the Alps, the “Dent de Midi,” only to find there are no rooms available.[2] He is eventually offered a room that is not quite unoccupied – that is to say, it is possibly occupied. The porter tells the teacher that “the real occupant of the room” is an English woman who had insisted on venturing out alone into the Alps two days ago. She hadn’t returned (yet), but may do so at any moment. She may be the “real” occupant of the room, but she’s not the actual occupant of the room – hence its uncertain status as part occupied, part unoccupied. That the room is a liminal space defines the story, which takes place only within its confines, as one occupant, the school teacher, deals with the lingering presence of the other, his possible predecessor but also possibly successor. As Blackwood writes, in a crucial sentence, “One moment the atmosphere seemed subtly charged with a ‘just left’ feeling – the next it was a queer awareness of ‘still here’ that made him turn cold and look hurriedly behind him.”
Check out the trailer for The Occupant of the Room:
With this statement capturing its uncanny core, Blackwood’s story signals that it’s in the realm of the hauntological, as Mark Fisher has described it – the realm of the “no longer” and the “not yet.” Fisher elaborates on these two directions of hauntology:
“The first refers to that which is (in actuality is) no longer, but which is still effective as a virtuality (the traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat,’ a structure that repeats, a fatal pattern). The second refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behavior).”[3]
The school teacher of “The Occupant of the Room” is suspended between the potential ‘no longer’ of the school teacher – the “’just left’ feeling” – and the imminent prospect of her (re)arrival – the “not yet” or “still here.” Kier-La Janisse’s brilliant film adaptation of The Occupant of the Room, stays – just like its source – firmly in this hauntological terrain.
Like Blackwood’s story, Janisse’s The Occupant of the Room is literally confined to a hotel room, but it also extends out as the influence of the former occupant seizes the current occupant, Minturn (Don McKellar)– as he imagines her lying frozen out in the moonlit mountains and at the same time feels her presence everywhere in his room. The teacher is profoundly affected by the fact that the English woman is ‘no longer’ – to such an extent that he, in Fisher’s words, seems to fall into what Fisher described as that “traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat,’ a structure that repeats, a fatal pattern.” And at the same time, he anticipates her return, her anticipated presence. And therein lies the palpable dread of the film.
While Janisse’s film is an adaptation of Blackwood’s story, it is also deeply influenced by M.R. James. Janisse herself writes that
“The Ghost Story for Christmas adaptations of James’ work are a key influence on this whole series, and The Stalls of Barchester in particular was an influence on the lighting and tone for my film . . . although I think the academic arriving alone to a hotel is something we see in some of the other James adaptations – Whistle and I’ll Come to You and A Warning to the Curious etc.”
For me, M. R. James was perhaps best evoked by the use of the material objects in the room, which are infused with dread – just as, in so many of M. R. James’s stories, objects are infused with uncanny potential (including the wooden figures cut in the misericords in The Stalls of Barchester). At one point, the teacher imagines (or dreams) waking up in the closet, fighting the suffocating clothes hanging around him – a scene that evokes the ending of James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (and the BBC’s adaptation), in which another teacher in another room is terrified by suffocating bedsheets, by what he describes later as a “horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen.”[4]
The magic lantern projects catastrophic images
Janisse’s The Occupant in the Room is very true to Blackwood’s story, but it also effectively introduces art objects into the film, which serve to amplify the dread and the hauntological state of the room, suspended between absence and (imminent) presence, between ‘just left’ and ‘still here,’ ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet.’ For instance, the teacher finds a magic lantern with images of catastrophe in the mountains – a possible past (or future) future for the former occupant.
There is also a painting hanging in the room, which at first contains a woman in the foreground but then – later – does not, a clear reference to James’s “The Mezzotint” (1904) and its 2021 adaptation by Mark Gatiss for BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas. In that story, dread centers on an engraving which at first contains no figure but then contains a “grotesque” figure creeping toward a house – harbinger of a terrible secret that will later be disclosed to the central character. The painting in The Occupant in the Room suggests the same kind of narrative – and dread – and (with its present and then absent figure) heightens the story’s creation of a hauntological state between absence and presence, between “just left” and “still here.”
The empty painting in The Occupant of the Room (left) and in The Mezzotint (right)
There is an incredible animated sequence near the end of Janisse’s The Occupant of the Room, one that amplifies the use of art objects to both create and express dread. Janisse explains that it was done by Ukrainian animator Anna Malina Zemlianski (she just goes by Annaxmalina on instagram).
“I knew I wanted a sequence that would be very different from the rest of the film, that would kind of take you out of the film for a bit – I always love those scenes in films where everything gets a bit crazy and when it settles back into the previously established narrative and aesthetic, it feels like you’ve been on a trip somewhere. I’m thinking of things like the “Heaven is a lovely life” commercial in CRIMES OF PASSION, or the Frankie Goes to Hollywood music video in BODY DOUBLE or the mushroom sequence in A FIELD IN ENGLAND… things like that. I decided that animation could work if I could find the right animator, because I wanted something black and white, and I wanted a collage style so that the paper could be violently manipulated. So I had a very specific look in mind and I just tried to find someone who was already creating work in that style, although she definitely expanded on what I was originally thinking by also incorporating brushwork.”
From the animated sequence created by Annaxmalina
This animated sequence externalizes what’s in Minturn’s head – and expresses the palpable ways he feels the presence (and the absence) of the English woman, how she is, for Minturn, “still effective as a virtuality (the traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat,’ a structure that repeats, a fatal pattern.” It’s a brilliant scene, a brilliant strategy – and Minturn almost loses himself in it.
Severin Films’ THE HAUNTED SEASON: THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM is streaming on Shudder now. I highly recommend you watch.
[1] The first episode, from December 2024, To Fire You Come at Last, is also streaming on Shudder.
[2] With its plot about a man who, relatively spontaneously, journey into the French mountains, “The Occupant of the Room” is not unlike a later story of Blackwood’s, one more famous, perhaps, in its film adaptation: “Ancient Sorceries” (1927), adapted as Cat People by Jacques Tourneur in 1942. Unlike the film, Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries” follows a man who travels to a small isolated village in the French mountains and gets drawn into the ancient lore and rituals of the villagers.
[3] Mark Fisher, “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, 66.1 (Fall 2012), pp. 16-24 (p. 19).
[4] “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” in M. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 76-93 (p. 92).
