For my independent movie viewing assignment, I decided to watch The Skeleton Key (2005), directed by Iain Softley. The protagonist of the film is Caroline, a young hospice nurse who moves to the outskirts of a Louisianan town to tend to Ben, an elderly man, at the request of the elderly couple’s attorney. Ben lives with his wife, Violet, in an old house. It is suggested throughout the beginning scenes that there is something mysterious or supernatural occurring in the house. Violet finally tells Caroline the story of the people that used to live there. Living in the house was a family with two small children and two servants. The servants practiced Hoodoo, the African American form of the Haitian Voodoo. One evening while the parents are having a party, the servants are caught teaching Hoodoo to the two children. The parents and their guests hang and burn the servants as punishment. As the story unfolds Caroline discovers that Ben did not suffer a stroke. Instead, Violet is using a Hoodoo curse on him to prolong her life at the expense of her husband. Caroline makes it her mission to save Ben from Violet and her magic. In the conclusion of the film, the audience learns the true secret of the house. The Hoodoo curse that was being performed throughout the movie by the servants and again by Violet does indeed work to prolong ones life through the sacrifice of another. It works by the practicer of Hoodoo changing bodies with another. Therefore the two souls exchange bodies leaving the victim in a state similar to a stroke victim. When the servants are caught they were performing the incantation on the children. By the time the parents get there, the servants had already changed bodies with the children. Therefore, the parents actually killed there own children, who were in the servants’ bodies, by hanging and burning them. With the servants then in the children’s bodies they lived out there lives in their new form. They grew up and sold the house to Ben and Violet. However, before the sale was made they used the incantation on Ben and Violet. The servants’ souls now resided in Ben and Violet’s bodies. As these new bodies began to age they were prepared for another exchange. The servant in Ben’s body changed with the couple’s attorney, leaving Ben in a stroke-like state, and Violet was preparing throughout the film to exchange with Caroline. In other words, the souls of the two servants were jumping from body to body, changing as the bodies aged. They left their own bodies and entered the children, then moved on to Ben and Violet, and finally the attorney and Caroline. Their goal: to live forever through the bodies of others.
Many of the concepts we have studied throughout the past three weeks can be seen in and applied to this movie.
In terms of the mise-en-shot, the camera angles were used repeatedly to add an eerie suspense. The audience, in many instances, views the actions of the characters through mirrors. Also used are long shots with nothing in the foreground but the intended focal character in the background. Both of these techniques gave the sense of another force or entity being present. It gives a supernatural feel that is only pertinent to the activity going on in this house. The editing also added to the suspense through the use of tight shot editing. The mise-en-scene also plays a large role. There seems to be a constant stream of rain falling throughout the entire movie, casting a dark light over everything. This darkness also extends into the house. There are never any lights on. The only light used is natural light from the outside, the sun during the day and moon at night. This lack of light adds to the mood of the scenes because the audience can only see a small segment of the scene allowing the mind to wander and imagine what waits in the darkness. The mise-en-shot and mise-en-scene were both used in this instance to exacerbate the eeriness and scariness of the movie.
The plot followed Carroll’s complex discovery plot. The onset occurs when Caroline arrives at the house and learns that there have been numerous hospice nurses to attempt the job before her but that each left because according to Violet they didn’t “understand the secret of the house”. Other strange things present like the fact that the house has no mirrors. These all give Caroline and the audience the sense that something is not right here. The discovery begins when Violet tells Caroline the story of the house and Caroline attempts to learn more about Hoodoo and what power it may have. What is unique about this movie is that the discovery period that Caroline undergoes is directed at herself for confirmation. She does not believe in the power of Hoodoo but tries to learn more to understand better what it means to Ben and Violet. The confirmation arises slowly as Caroline starts to piece the clues together implicating that Violet is the one who is inflicting the suffering on Ben. However, this is not a true confirmation because Caroline never learns the true secret of the house. She believes that she’s confirmed Violet’s role in this is through purely human means. She thinks she may be poisoning Ben but doesn’t realize the goal of the incantation. The confrontation arises when Caroline attempts to drug Violet and run away with Ben to get help while she is unconscious.
Near the end of the film the audience is left regarding the film with fantastic hesitation. The true secret is not presented until the last few scenes of the movie and up until this revelation the audience is unsure whether the threat is coming through human or supernatural means. Finally, with the revelation, the movie is pushed to the side of the fantastic marvelous. This is because it is revealed that Hoodoo, a supernatural means, is being used to threaten the characters.
The final aspect I consider in analyzing the film was whether it fit into the category of art-horror or art-dread. Even to this point I am still unsure of its fit. To follow Carroll’s theory of art-horror a monster must be present. In this case the monster is the servants and through their use of Hoodoo, Violet. The fact the servants are “dead” or merely souls but are still working as a threat through the use of others makes them impure in the fact that they interstitially combine life and death. But they are not regarded as disgusting by the other characters. Since the monster did not fully fit into Carroll’s description of an art-horror monster I thought it could be an art-dread monster. This reasoning came about because through out the movie the Hoodoo workings are an ever-present, ambiguous force that are threatening but are hard to identify until the end when we learn that the supernatural force had materialized through Violet. There are valid campaigns for either categorization but I am still not sure if the film fits completely in one over the other.
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