31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 13 (Rose Red)

Reach out and touch me.

Okay. Now that we ran from ghosts and knights and stuff in slapstick cartoons, let's get back to that cliffhanger I left off on the other day. Stephen King, the man who wrote about the elegance of the opening to The Haunting Of Hill House, and what he took from it. What he ended up taking from it (and the 1963 Robert Wise adaptation of the book, says Wikipedia, though I've not seen that so none of it will inform the following analysis) ended up going into this. A three-part miniseries that isn't based on an existing book of his, Rose Red. Gosh, the Netflix era sort of did away with the whole idea of the miniseries, huh? Off the top of my head there's one more King-based one that came after this (Bag Of Bones, starring Pierce Brosnan, and it's shit)but this is all to distract from the matter of hand. What does King take from the ambiguous nightmare halls of Hill House? There's quite a bit at play here, so let's see what we can delve at.



Well, the stones. He's got an autistic child with massive psychokinetic abilities who rains stones on her neighbors' house. That's a thing that happened (supposedly) to Eleanor in Hill House. You might think, then, that Annie Wheaton is our Eleanor equivalent for this story, a neuroatypical person with psychic potential stuck in a possibly haunted house. That doesn't track, but there are equivalents in the story. The most stunning of them, surprisingly, is the titular house itself. Rose Red looks fine on the outside, but inside it is a nightmare of disorientating design. It also is unambiguously haunted, alive in a fashion. This place isn't just built to be confusing, it actively changes its inner passages as it grows in strength. You know, the same kind of unreliability and darkness hidden by a kind outer shell as... Eleanor. This eventually is revealed to be the undying will of its maiden, Ellen Rimbauer (holy shit, Ellen and Eleanor. HOLY SHIT I JUST COPPED THAT WHILE WRITING, EVERYONE), who was promised life everlasting so long as the house was never finished; ergo, if the work continues forever then she and her determination will live on. I don't know how I feel about that; I liked the idea of the house itself accruing so much power that it itself had gained sentience and an appetite to fuel itself. There's a lot of Stephen King which shows up in here, and I don't just mean his cameo as the pizza guy. You've got psychic individuals, surreal imagery, overbearing mothers, the token asshole... yeah, you sure as hell are watching a Stephen King thing in Rose Red.


Beyond that, the most fascinating character for me is actually our Dr. Montague equivalent, Dr. Joyce Reardon. Joyce is quite obsessed with proving the truth of Rose Red, and proving to her college psychology department that all this stuff is for real. Picture the stuffy dean in the original Ghostbusters turning up his nose at the boys, and you have a general idea of Joyce's motivations... or so it seems. King's taken that mirroring idea he spoke of in Danse Macabre and ran with it. Rose Red and Ellen Rimbauer mirror Eleanor, in one way... but Joyce actually turns out to be more like how Eleanor must have sounded, in one version of reality, to everyone around her. Rose Red has a hold on her, an obsession that won't quit even as everything around her is going pear-shaped. On some level she encourages Annie to let the house sap her massive stores of psychokinetic energy, so as to keep them there and ensure she has proof. Other characters are quick to call her on her bullshit, yes, and I only found myself thinking that this is what it must have looked like to be one of Eleanor's comrades. Tellingly, there's no obvious Theodora equivalent in Rose Red; it could be the Luke equivalent of Steve Rimbauer, current heir and owner of Rose Red who also has a relationship with Joyce on the side. It's easy to read him as slowly realizing their relationship is second to her obsession with Rose Red, in the same way as Theo and Eleanor... but what if the audience is Theodora in this case? Wild idea, I know, but we want to like Joyce and see her succeed... but we slowly learn what that success will mean, and we want it less, even if we care about her. Things end for Joyce the only way they could, and things end for Rose Red the only way they could. In the end, it's a rather fascinating and underrated little Stephen King adventure, and just like Jackson it takes an evocative look at a haunted house with lots of lavish cinematography. At three 90-minute episodes, it's not a light breeze... but I crunched through it in a morning and afternoon on a deadline, and so could you. You know, if you wanted to. Now what shall we do? Oh, I know.


KAIJU TIME, BABY!!!