- Moms should not have access to shotguns
- At one point a very scared Nicholas asks Anne to say something, anything, and she says, "My name is Anna and I'm walking. I'm walking and my name is Anna." This is a reference to director Alejandro Amenábar's first movie Tesis in which Angela asks the same thing of Chema, getting a similar answer.
- The Others: Movie [VHS]
- The Others: Movie [DVD]
- The Others: Soundtrack [CD]
- Mutant Trading Post
- Official Miramax Site
- The Shining
- The Sixth Sense
- The Haunting
Summary Capsule
Woman pits her strangeness against a wacky haunted house
DnaError's Rating: Boo.
DnaError's Review: It's no secret that I love horror. Well, if it was, it's not anymore. I love being scared, creeped out, shocked and given all manners of the heebee
geebees. Recent horror flicks just don't do it for me. Cause they almost all, without failure, disobey the simplest and more important rule of all good horror: what you can't see is scarier then what you can.
Thankfully, writer/director Alejandro Amenábar (Say that 5 times fast)'s "The Others" is a model of how to make a great ghost story. The story is about as archetypical as you can get. Big English house, nervous woman, a few kids and the undead. The God-awful 1999 CGI-porn "The Haunting" used a similar idea. Yet "The Others" is more like the original 1956 "The Haunting." a slow burn supernatural tale that pulls you down into it. Creeping and crawling, the movie layers it's story and fright like a terrifying onion. I knew the movie was really working when all the normal annoying sounds of the theater crowd, munching, muttering, vanished in front of the brooding English manor.
Never dull or slow, for all it's tense plotting and careful restricting, the movie keeps the terror coming at you. Small at first, but growing with every incident. The plot twists and turns, throwing you a curvball every now and again and keep you on your toes. The script is sharp and creative, mixing classic fright with new ideas.
The cast is excellent all around, Nicole Kidman's Grace is a serve and austere woman, right down to her big buttons. The kids arem't cutesty or cloying, but act like realistic siblings. And Ms. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan) has a presence that is both warm and otherworldly.
Haunting, brooding, clever and definitely scary, "The Others" is an old story given a fresh look by a masterful hand.
Justin's Rating: Yeah, well, you never hear about haunted condos.
Justin's Review: If haunted houses start treating you badly, I say you give them a bit of their own medicine back. Scorch a few walls. Show them you mean business. Stop up the toilet, see how it likes THAT doodoo! Paint one room in bright pastels, to give the ghosts splitting headaches. Invite a large group of ravers over to throw an all-night techno bash... that way, the scary stuff would just be positive atmosphere. Or -- and this is my best suggestion -- hire out the house to MTV's The Real World. No matter what happens then, it's a win-win situation.
The Others manages to create a haunted house that takes all the standard clichés -- dark shadows, slamming doors, eerie voices, endless rooms -- and turns them upside down on their spectoral heads. Nicole "Now you GOTTA love me because I was dumped by Tom Cruise" Kidman resides in the penthouse of spook central: a gloomy mansion on the foggy British Isle of Jersey. She's the poster-child for the anally rententive, and kind of one of those insane people who keep insisting -- with bug eyes and a frothing mouth -- that they're perfectly normal. One of the early twists of this film is that the spooky house is given much of it's eerie atmosphere through her direct actions.
You see, poor mom has two blimey kids -- meek and shy Nicholas, and smart-alec Anne -- who are allergic to the light. Photosensative or something. Presumably, they swell up like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man if hit by sunlight, and then start oozing with all sorts of colorful sores. So mom, in her infinite wisdom, decides that the only way to make them safe in this 50-plus room mansion is to draw every curtain and lock every door behind her. In the dim, candle-lit corridors and through the muffled walls, her children are well on their way to becoming full-fledged Goth vampires. Why doesn't she just think of putting the kids in just one room, and keeping them there... or maybe giving the tykes sunglasses and garbage bags to wear? Or how about big, tinted hamster bubbles that they could roll around the house in? But noooooo... we gotta live in a place that, even if it wasn't haunted, would foster naughty fears in the bravest of us.
The family of three slum it in the darkness, playing Scrabble and invoking the name of the Dark Prince of Dark Stuff to keep busy. Since misery and bratty kids love company, Kidman takes on a housekeeping staff from the Mary Poppins agency. She does this mostly because she just likes making wild accusations and bossing people around. In fact, she practically dares them to put arsenic in her soup every night with her ranting. I know that when I'm in a big scary house, the first thing that I want to do is piss off the people that would come to my theoretical aid. After that, I'd go and make out with the creepy dead lady in the bathtub, because you know she's hard up for dates.
At least there's none of this modern movie self-conciousness you see in every horror movie these days. Nobody in The Others start spouting off the rules to survive haunted house situations ("number one: Put some doorstoppers to keep them doors from slamming shut"). And that is quite refreshing, because it allows us to get slowly creeped out by the atmosphere instead of rudely jerking us out of make-believe land.
Instead of making you jump a lot, this film makes you WANT to jump a lot. You spend so much time while watching it wishing that the big scare would come already, just so that you'd have a proper excuse for the ever-widening stain on the front of your pants. But alas, you're just going to have to settle for poor nerves as The Others winds up to an awe-inducing climax that's less scary -- but very fun in its own right -- than the rest of the movie.
For the record, I am NOT a wuss when it comes to watching horror films. I believe the proper term is "yellow-bellied little girl."
 2001 Rated R Suspense/Horror Director
Starring
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Intermission! [some sources: IMDb]
The disease the children have is an actual disease known as xeroderma pigmentosum. It is very rare with roughly a thousand people in the world that have it.
Official and Not-So-Official Websites
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Nicholas: I'm scared.
Anne: Well, you shouldn't have come then.
Nicholas: Say something.
Anne: What shall I say?
Nicholas: Anything.
Anne: My name is Anne, and I'm walking. I'm walking and my name is Anne...
Mrs. Mills: Sometimes the world of the living gets mixed up with the world of the dead.
Anne: I don't believe that the Holy Spirit is a dove.
Nicholas: I don't believe that either.
Anne: Doves are anything but holy.
Nicholas: They poo on the window.
Grace: Where's my daughter? What have you done with my daughter?
Anne: Are you mad? I am your daughter.
Grace: This house is ours, this house is ours.
Grace: So you say you know this house well?
Mrs. Mills: Like the back of my hand, that is assuming the walls haven't sprouted legs and moved in the meantime.
Grace: The only thing that moves here is the light, but it changes everything.
Mrs. Mills: Death of a loved one can lead people to do the strangest things.
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