Down a Dark Hall is directed by Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Cortés who directed the critically-acclaimed Buried (2010). The screenplay is written by Michael Goldbach and Chris Sparling and based on the 1974 novel by the young adult author Lois Duncan (who also wrote, among others, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Killing Mr. Griffin).
In a plot reminiscent of The Craft (1996) or American Horror Story’s third season, “Coven” (2013-14), Down a Dark Hall centers on five girls with troubled pasts who arrive at Blackwood Boarding School, sent their by their parents as a kind of last resort. They are the only five students in a vast isolated mansion presided over by the mysterious Madame Duret (Uma Thurman), who soon makes it clear that the girls have special abilities that she intends to foster. And, indeed, the girls soon display talents they didn’t know they had. Protagonist Kit (AnnaSophia Robb) blossoms into a master piano player; Ashley (Taylor Russell) starts writing brilliant poetry; Sierra (Rosie Day) paints captivating landscapes; and Izzy (Isabelle Fuhrman) transforms into a math genius. Their new abilities come with a price, however, as the girls get sicker and strange figures start haunting the long dark halls of Blackwood.
Check out the trailer:
Down a Dark Hall is a decent film. Blackwood is a suitably creepy house, the actors deliver solid performances, and Cortés’s directing definitely exploits the gothic potential of the setting. The pace of the film feels a bit rushed, though, and as a result the plot becomes confused as the end races along; we’re thrown information about the school’s past and the source of what haunts it. Also, the girls themselves are never fully developed and it’s difficult to feel a sense of connection to them: who they are starts eroding, as they become “possessed,” before we’ve even got a clear sense of who they are—and that’s a problem given what I think is the political message of the film. We need a clearer sense of who these girls are.
Lois Duncan’s novel is available in a slightly updated edition (i.e., there are cell phones) and is definitely worth a read:
The most interesting thing about the film is its message—what it’s saying about gender in 2018. It’s not insignificant that Down a Dark Hall seems a new incarnation of the “female gothic,” a literary tradition that stretches back to late eighteenth-century British writer Anne Radcliffe and that has always served as a commentary on gender and power.
AnnaSophia Robb as Kit
Alison Milbank has defined the female gothic in ways that very much resonate with Down a Dark Hall: “the male transgressor becomes the villain whose authoritative reach as patriarch, abbot or despot seeks to entrap the heroine, usurps the great house, and threatens death or rape.” The male “villains” in Down a Dark Hall happen to all be dead, which doesn’t lessen their power over the girls they’ve entrapped at Blackwood. Tellingly, Madame Duret serves these powerful dead men—making it clear that patriarchal power isn’t only wielded by men. Madame Duret believes that the girls at Blackwood should feel honored to be the “vessels” and “instruments” of brilliant, dead male artists. (I couldn’t help being reminded of Darren Aronofsky’s mother! with its exploration of creativity, gender, and power.) Kit and Veronica (Victoria Morales) feel differently, however, and violently reject being anyone’s “vessel”: their lives may be flawed, but they believe they should be their own.
Taylor Russell and Ashley and AnnaSophia Robb as Kit
The trajectory of the film, and it’s fiery climax, serve as a powerful rejection of patriarchal power, even when it comes in the guise of granting immortality to dead genius.
In 2010, Hanna Rosin declared in a watershed article in The Atlantic (and later in her book of the same name), that we seemed to be witnessing “The End of Men.” Not only were three-quarters of the eight million jobs lost in the Great Recession lost by men, but, in early 2010, “for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs.” The new dominance of women in the workplace joined the ongoing majority of women in higher education, which had, Rosin notes, been feeling “like a crisis to some people” as early as the mid-2000s (2010). Both long-term trends in the modern postindustrial economy, then, as well as the shorter-term cataclysm of recession, seemed bent indeed on ushering in “The End of Men.”
Uma Thurman as Madame Duret, instrument of patriarchal power
Rosin’s title is obviously meant to be provocative, but Down a Dark Hall is centrally structured around a new generation of young girls (and only girls seem to attend Blackwood) who emphatically deny the power of men, dead and alive. Like the ending of Daphne du Maurier’s classic gothic novel, Rebecca (1938), the past is violently burned away—and in Down a Dark Hall the past that is consumed is the past ruled over by the patriarch. Madame Duret proclaims that “This is about giving back to the world the genius [ie., male genius] physical death has stolen.” Kit and Veronica say no.
Grade: B
You can stream Down a Dark Hall on Amazon:
Related post: Down a Dark Hall is the latest entry in what Bernice Murphy has called the “Girl Trouble” subgenre of horror film.
Alison Milbank’s “Female Gothic” can be found in The Handbook of the Gothic, 2nd. edition, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts (New York University Press, 2009), pp. 120-24.
Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men; And the Rise of Women (Riverhead Books, 2013)
