Bloody good: on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (and a Hamlet connection)

After watching Haider last week I revisited a couple of earlier versions of Hamlet (Olivier, Branagh), but also  happened to spend some time in the company of another fictional nobleman who wears an “inky cloak”. I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula in full for the first time (an embarrassing admission for a long-time horror buff, but there it is) and was unprepared for how masterfully constructed it was: how the pace and energy of the story sweep the reader along, preventing us from thinking too much about the handy plot coincidences; how the many narratives (the book is almost entirely made up of journal entries and letters) complement each other, provide slightly different perspectives on the same events, and dovetail so that we arrive in that comforting place so crucial to the effect of an adventure story about many good guys teaming up against a single powerful evil: oh yes, they’ve finally figured things out, most of the pieces are in place, now they can get on with doing what is required.

There are so many interesting things going on in this book. The shift in voices (this isn’t too pronounced, but once in a while it is done very entertainingly – when Dr Van Helsing is speaking in broken English, or the harbour scene where a garrulous old man blathers on about graves that don’t have the right people in them). The delicious little ways in which the reader is made aware of something that the other characters don’t yet realise the implications of. (A casual line like “She looks paler than usual” can be such a spine-tingler – that's Jonathan Harker, distracted by other things, mentioning his wife Mina in his diary.) The commentary on the social mores of the Victorian age and the scientific developments underway in the late 19th century, and what seemed to me at least a gentle satire on a certain type of self-consciously chivalrous man. (As the male heroes work out their plan to destroy the vampire, they are mindful of Mina’s delicate sensibilities, concerned that she be kept away from the action – not realising that by “sheltering” her thus they are creating more peril all around. Besides, she is actively helping them in important ways. Then there is the fate of the sleepwalking Lucy Westenra, a damsel so much in distress that she has to suffer numerous blood transfusions, the donor in each case being a gallant man – including three men who are in love with her. None of it helps in the end.)
 
Anyway, reading this book sent me back to some favourite vampire films: Nosferatu, Dreyer's Vampyr, the Lugosi Dracula and Roman Polanski's goofy Fearless Vampire Killers; or, Pardon Me, but Your Teeth are in My Neck. Along the way I noted little connections between Shakespeare’s prince of melancholia and Stoker’s Prince of Darkness. Hamlet’s “dread of something after death – the undiscovered country” is well-known. His father is technically undead, just as any self-respecting vampire would be. And take the scene with the grave-digger, culminating in our hero’s near-dash into the open grave meant for Ophelia: which famous coffin-dweller does that remind you of?  

To die, to sleep – no more. Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out. Etc etc. Definite theme here.

There is the joke about a woman who, after reading Hamlet for the first time late in her life, said, “I don't see why people admire that play so much – it is just a bunch of old quotations strung together.” We are meant to scoff at her, but perhaps one should be kinder. Reading merely the first act of the play again, I felt like I was swamped in clichés. (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”?? Forsooth, Will.) But that’s what happens when a literary work has seeped so thoroughly into popular consciousness and culture, and hundreds of lines that first appeared in it have – through over-use – become trite or ironical.

To a degree, this is also true of Stoker’s novel. After years of movie versions and rip-offs and tributes and parodies, I felt I knew iconic characters like Van Helsing (expert vampire combatant) and the heroic Harkers so well that it came as an atavistic pleasure to meet them in their “original” form. The last time I encountered Mina Harker was as the resourceful but hardened heroine of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, divorced from her husband after their misadventures with the dark Count and having reverted to her maiden name Murray. It took a few chapters of Dracula to shake that image away and start dealing with the compassionate Mina of this book.

Part of me, I think, was expecting something very quaint and dated, with little resemblance to the vampire story as it later became (I’m not talking about Twilight here, by the way – I’m not that up to date). I knew beforehand that the novel’s Count Dracula – initially an old man with a droopy white moustache, later growing more youthful after his blood infusions – was notably different from the debonair, black-cloaked satyr portrayed by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee. But the book IS full of familiar things, as well as little surprises: I hadn’t realised that the line “Listen to them, the children of the night – what music they make!” so memorably hissed by Lugosi in the 1931 film, was originally from the novel.

Some of my favourite passages feature the lunatic Renfield. For years now I have thought of this character as a caricatured, Igor-like henchman, tottering about Dracula’s castle and grounds, doing his master’s bidding. So the first reference to him - around 75 pages into the book in Dr Seward’s journals - made me sit up. These chapters, where Seward diligently records his patient's “zoophagus” activities, must have delighted the hearts of screenwriters working on Universal horror films.

5 June. The case of Renfield grows more interesting the more I get to understand the man […]
He has turned his mind now to spiders, and has got several very big fellows in a box. He keeps feeding them his flies, and the number of the latter is becoming sensibly diminished, although he has used half his food in attracting more flies from outside to his room.

1 July. His spiders are now becoming as great a nuisance as his flies, and today I told him that he must get rid of them. He looked very sad at this, so I said that he must some of them, at all events. He cheerfully acquiesced in this, and I gave him the same time as before for reduction. He disgusted me much while with him, for when a horrid blowfly, bloated with some carrion food, buzzed into the room, he caught it, held it exultantly for a few moments between his finger and thumb, and before I knew what he was going to do, put it in his mouth and ate it. I scolded him for it, but he argued quietly that it was very good and very wholesome, that it was life, strong life, and gave life to him. This gave me an idea, or the rudiment of one. I must watch how he gets rid of his spiders.

8 July. He has managed to get a sparrow, and has already partially tamed it. His means of taming is simple, for already the spiders have diminished. Those that do remain, however, are well fed, for he still brings in the flies by tempting them with his food.
[…]
My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him. What he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way. He gave many flies to one spider and many spiders to one bird, and then wanted a cat to eat the many birds. What would have been his later steps?

Macabre as these passages are, they are also very funny in the image they create of the conscientious doctor observing his demented patient and taking notes; the professionalism and scrupulousness of purpose contrasted with the informality of language (“several very big fellows in a box”), and the sense that the author is having some fun in detailing this relationship, the power equations of which are not always clear. How interesting it is that Seward – sane and balanced, but also melancholy because the woman he loves is betrothed to someone else – expresses envy and admiration for Renfield's orderliness:

“How well the man reasoned; lunatics always do within their own scope. I wonder at how many lives he values a man, or if at only one. He has closed the account most accurately, and today begun a new record. How many of us begin a new record with each day of our lives? […] If I only could have as strong a cause as my poor mad friend there, a good, unselfish cause to make me work, that would be indeed happiness.”

On this evidence I feel reasonably sure that Hamlet, Seward and Renfield could have a good tea-time conversation. But a little more on the Hamlet-Dracula connection: Olivier’s 1948 film has a scene where the prince holds his sword up like a crucifix, a Van Helsing keeping the monster at bay. This may have been an inspiration to Peter Cushing, who played the small role of Osric in the film, and would later be arguably the most famous Van Helsing onscreen.

(And as if that weren’t enough, the young Christopher Lee played a spear-carrier in Olivier's Hamlet. Spooky music alert.)
 
P.S. And now it turns out that Van Helsing's very name comes from Hamlet's Elsinore Castle - see this detailed post about links between the two texts. Talk about opening a can of (politic) worms...

Horror and its hidden layers - David Skal’s The Monster Show

“Tod Browning lay in his grave eating malted milk balls,” goes the opening sentence of a particularly gripping chapter in David J Skal’s book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. What is happening here isn’t as otherworldly as that bald sentence makes it sound, but it is freakish and scary in its own way. The year was 1901 and young Browning – employed with a travelling carnival in the American heartland – was playing the part of the Hypnotic Living Corpse; the trick involved being “buried” in full view of gawking spectators and then spending up to 48 hours underground, in a wooden coffin with a hidden ventilation system and nourishment.

Among the lessons from this anecdote, one is that the public’s fascination with morbidity can always be relied on to sell tickets; another is that individual experiences of this sort have had a far-reaching effect on popular culture. Tod the Living Corpse would later become a film director and helm two of the most influential horror movies ever made, the 1931 version of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi and the viscerally disturbing Freaks (1932), with its cast of actual deformed carnival performers. All the time Browning had spent six feet under was “conducive to thought”, he told an interviewer once. Perhaps he passed his lonely subterranean hours thinking of a future where he might terrify large groups of people without having to himself undergo such discomfort. And perhaps it was natural for him to find his calling in cinema, where a director can be a puppet-master, pulling the strings from behind a curtain, watching his audience squirm in their seats (or as Alfred Hitchcock once said of his fondness for manipulating viewers’ emotions, “I play them like an organ”).

It is understandable enough that horror as a genre is not for all tastes. What’s more bemusing is that so many people regard it as something inferior and disreputable – as frivolous escapism – despite the fact that fear is one of the profoundest and most fundamental of human emotions (going back to the oldest folk-tales like the one about a group of primitive people being terrified by the mouth of a deep cave because they had never known the darkness of night-time). Skal’s book, with its many fascinating stories, is a study of a century of horror in American culture – mainly in film, but also in other media such as photography, painting, television and pulp literature. It is about horror as a reflection of social currents or states of mind; a mirror – or an antidote – to a prevailing zeitgeist. As the author points out, it is no coincidence that one of America’s worst years of the century, the Depression-afflicted 1931, was also the best ever for monster movies (the Lugosi Dracula, the Boris Karloff Frankenstein, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde among other films).

The talking points in this book include things that have often come up in popular-film studies: for instance, the Godzilla monster as an embodiment of nuclear-age paranoia (the creature is a byproduct of radioactive waste, and it is of course Japanese in its origin). But there are others I hadn’t thought so closely about, despite having been a long-time fan of horror films. Contemplating the effect of World War One on horror in popular culture, Skal observes that “modern warfare had introduced new and previously unimaginable approaches to destroying or brutally reordering the human body” – and this found echoes in the Surrealist artists’ preoccupation with deformity and disfigurement, as well as in films like the Lon Chaney-starrer The Phantom of the Opera and the 1922 Nosferatu, with its rodent-like vampire and pestilential, plague-like images. The climactic scene of Abel Gance’s 1937 anti-war film J’Accuse – a montage of the ruined faces of real WWI soldiers – is notable in this respect: as Skal notes, these disfigured men, seen in unsparing close-up, could easily be the living models for the masks worn by actors like Chaney and Karloff in horror films. “As an unintentional revelation of horror’s major subtext in the Twenties and Thirties, [Gance’s film] is breathtaking.”

Equally engrossing is the chapter about the effects of the birth-control pill – which helped engender the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s – and the drug Thalidomide, which was safely prescribed to pregnant women but had horrific consequences and resulted in thousands of birth defects. These events found resonance in books and films about monstrous children, despairing parents and the idea that reproduction can happen independently of sexual intercourse: works such as Village of the Damned, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, David Lynch’s Eraserhead and David Cronenberg’s The Brood, even the iconic scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien where a male cosmonaut violently “gives birth” when an alien embryo bursts through his chest.

Reading The Monster Show made me think about concealed layers of meaning in our own horror movies. The recent Ek thi Daayan, for instance, can be read as the story of a man who, from his childhood days, has had a long-suppressed fear of women; now, as he sets about trying to consolidate a romantic relationship, the fear surfaces again and he seems beset by witches and unsure who to trust**. Similarly, the atmospheric 13B – in which a man realises that events in his house seem to be mimicking the plot of a new TV drama his family has become addicted to – can be seen as a comment on the seductive power of television and how media affects our self-perception. A variant, perhaps, on the famous scene in the 1982 film Poltergeist where a little girl is made captive, literally, by a TV set.

But what of earlier, more apparently simple-minded horror films? The possibilities, if you start thinking about them, are endless. In the Raj Kumar Kohli classic Jaani Dushman, a long-time personal favourite, a hirsute, long-fanged beast terrorizes a village, abducting and killing young girls on their wedding day. Given this theme, and a final scene where three macho heroes confront the monster in a den, the film could well be read as a parable about a conservative society’s fear that its young women might be seduced, their honour “compromised”, before they have been married and safely co-opted into the system. The somewhat confused structure of the film leaves a question dangling in the end though: was the werewolf just a controlling patriarch with an abundance of chest hair? Or was he a saviour, trying to yank a regressive society out of the dark ages - and were the real villains the Sunil Dutt and Shatrughan Sinha characters, who went sauntering home, phallic guns slung over their shoulders, to their little women once it was all over? Go on, discuss.

P.S. a nod of gratitude to the erudite Just Mohit, who so thoughtfully gifted me Skal’s book. I hope to write more about it sometime, because it contains much else of interest.
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** What made Ek thi Daayan an interesting test case for me was that I could identify the exact moment when the film started to become a disappointment: it is (minor spoiler alert) the point where we get “objective” evidence that one of the characters really IS a witch. Before this happens, it is possible to view the whole story as a fever-dream suffered by the Emraan Hashmi character, who may be an unreliable narrator. Much of the tension comes from our wondering just how disturbed he is: does he have deep-rooted problems with women, which manifest themselves in “accidents” that cause injury to his female assistants, or sudden attacks on women with long “chhottis”? There is even a scene where a psychiatrist offers credible “rational” explanations for everything that has happened so far. Once the film reveals its supernatural hand, it loses some of its psychological dimensions and turns its leading man into a generic action hero. But this doesn't mean that the subtext becomes invalid.

Monsters I have known

[Here is the full text of the essay I wrote for The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers, about my horror-movie love. It’s been long enough since the anthology came out, so I thought I’d put it up here. While I’m at it, a reminder that the book contains excellent pieces by many fine writers. More information here]

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It’s June 1988, a summer vacation in London, and I’m sitting in a darkened room with my cousins and their friends, watching a horror film called House. Ten-year-olds, eleven-year-olds huddle together, murmuring, waiting for the scary scenes. One of the adults partying in the living room outside sticks his head in, rolls his eyes dramatically and makes a deep howling sound, but we aren’t impressed; we saw Silver Bullet a few days ago, we know what a real werewolf sounds like.

So one of us gets up and bangs the door shut again, and now the only light comes from the TV set, which isn’t much to speak of, because it’s a dimly lit scene. We hold our breath as someone on the screen (the hero? Is there a “hero” in this film? Or am I thinking in the language of Hindi movies?) slowly walks up to a closet, puts his hand on the knob and turns it. Hanging in the air for a few seconds is the question: will a slimy monster leap out at him (and at us)? Or will he heave a sigh of relief (our cue to do the same), then turn around and find the fiend behind him (in which case our screams will be even louder than if the creature had been inside the closet in the first place)? Or will the jolts be postponed to the next scene? There’s a limited set of options and we know them all, but that doesn’t make the process any less frightening.

Afterwards we chase each other around the lawns, taking turns to play the film’s chief predator Ben (“Big Ben”?), a walking skeleton still grotesquely dressed in the soldier’s uniform in which he died. We were playing in the same garden a few hours earlier, but something has changed since then. The late-evening darkness is stiller than it should be, even though lights are on and the adults are just a few paces away. The rustling of the leaves in the trees and bushes seems full of strange meaning. Distant bird sounds carry portents. My senses are heightened, intensified, the world is suddenly an unfamiliar place.

More than twenty years later, as an adult movie buff with more developed and varied tastes, my favourite horror films continue to have this effect on me. Even when the films themselves are much more diverse in subject matter, style and vintage than the simple label “horror movie” could suggest.

The categories include (among many others) silent films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (a movie about a madman’s nightmare that, thanks to its brazenly Expressionist set design, looks every bit like a madman’s nightmare) and Nosferatu, the creepiest vampire film I’ve seen. Psychological horror, as in Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, about a painter visited by phantoms of the mind, and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, in which a young girl left alone in an apartment slowly loses her bearings. Comic-gothic horror (Polanski two years later, with Fearless Vampire Killers, or: Pardon Me, but Your Teeth are in my Neck, about an Albert Einstein look-alike and his bumbling assistant exploring castles in Transylvania) and portmanteau ghost stories, like Masaki Kobayashi’s dazzlingly shot Kwaidan. And yes, gore films too – properly speaking, a different genre, but one that occasionally intersects with the sort of horror I love.

Not all these films achieve their ends in the same way. Many of them don’t have a single jump-out-of-your-seat scene but they have something more invidious, something that crawls back into my mind at the most unexpected times, long after I thought I’d forgotten all about the film.

It has been a long relationship. A few months after that House viewing, back in Delhi, horror films became my major entry point into the world of non-Hindi cinema. Thrills aside, there was something very accessible about them: the accents in American movies were sometimes hard to follow, but horror didn’t depend on dialogue for its effect. When Freddy Krueger leapt out at witless teens in a dark alley, chased them down Elm Street and slashed them to witless teenie-weenies, the visuals – and my senses responding to them – were all that mattered. The camera tracking in on the sinisterly glowing pumpkin (accompanied by the brilliant minimalist music score) during the opening credits of Halloween spoke more forcefully than pages of writing. This was film at its most egalitarian.

And so I rented video cassettes of the Evil Dead and Friday the 13th films, and a low-budget series called Demons, as well as slightly more sophisticated “mainstream” movies (though I knew nothing about those distinctions at the time) like Gremlins and Poltergeist. An education began.

Around the age of 13 my attitude to movie-watching began to change in subtle ways, and this was in large part due to a film that is considered a seminal horror movie, but which I’ve never really been able to think of in those terms. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho encouraged me to take cinema seriously, as an art form with its own methods and a visual language distinct from the words being spoken by the characters on the screen. It led me directly to movie literature and some of its scenes became personal reference points for my subsequent movie-watching (as you’ll see later in this essay). But I was never scared by Psycho in an immediate way. Maybe this was because I already knew all the major plot twists – I had heard jokes about “mummification” from my own mummy, and a friend in the school bus had given me a shot-by-shot description of the final revelation of the embalmed corpse of “Mrs Bates” in the fruit cellar. (Sorry if I’ve spoilt the film for you, but if you’re old enough to be reading this you ought to know these things already; it’s primary-level stuff.) Besides, my first viewing of it was on videocassette, in a well-lit room.

Or maybe it was that I was too moved by the film, that I found a deep sadness in it – “we scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other,” says Norman Bates, “and for all of it, we never budge an inch” – and surely a movie that put sad thoughts in your head had to be “more” than a “mere” horror film?

Today, of course, I know better.

Anyway, in the early 1990s the most important book in my life was a fat video guide that had nearly 20,000 capsule “reviews” packed together. The films were classified by a rating system ranging from four stars to one star, with a special “BOMB” rating reserved for the bottom-of-the-barrel movies. (The “review” for a long-forgotten Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton film called Boom was the single word “Thud”. Next to the film’s title was BOMB, in all-caps. Criticism at its tersest, and a good counterpoint to the lengthy film essays I was reading around the same time.)

I carried the guide around in a polythene bag each time I went to the neighborhood video library – in a modest, five-shop community centre in south Delhi’s Saket that would, years later, become the location of India’s first multiplex theatre – and it made many important decisions for me. With one exception. Horror movies were never allowed to fall under its hegemony.

The video-parlour bhaiya looks amused when I extract the thick book from my bag with my free hand – I’m holding open his catalogue with the other – and leaf through it.

“Iss mein duniya ki sabhi movies ka naam hai?” (“Does this have the names of all the movies in the world?”) he asks.

“Haan,” I say without looking up, not wanting to get into a prolonged conversation.

“Hum isska photo-copy karaa sakte hain?” (“Can I get it photo-copied?”) he asks, but I’m not listening. The film I’m looking for is a Hollywood classic from the 1930s. The cassette cover carelessly fitted into the catalogue shows Cary Grant and Irene Dunne – two of my favourite actors – and I tell myself that I’ll take the film if the guide gives it three or more stars. But then something else in the catalogue catches my eye.

Demons 3.

Which has the dreaded “BOMB” next to it in the guide.

The Grant-Dunne film won the best director Oscar for 1937, is rated three-and-a-half stars and considered one of the classic screwball comedies – a genre that I’ve just started to relish.

Irrelevant. Demons 3 it is.

Even at that impressionable age, eager as I was to listen to what the Critics had to say, I had accepted that horror films spoke to me in ways that no film scholar could understand.

If I had to name a single quality that marks my favourite horror films, I’d point to a near-ritualistic intensity, a sense of belonging to a very different world with its own, special set of rules: a good horror film, even one that’s located in a familiar setting and has no obviously supernatural elements, feels weirder and more self-contained (to me, at least) than a science-fiction/fantasy film that really IS set on, say, Middle-Earth or Narnia or the moons of Jupiter. My child-self experienced this in the garden after that House viewing.

(“So you’re saying House was a good horror film?”, you ask, backing away slowly [and thinking to yourself, ‘What’s HE doing editing an anthology of film essays?’] Well, yes, it was. For me. At that age. If I saw it today I’d probably laugh, or worse, yawn. But how is that relevant to anything? By the way, more than 20 years after that evening in London, I turned to the Internet to confirm that bony old Ben really did exist – within the world of the film, that is; that he wasn’t just a manufactured childhood memory. I was thrilled when I discovered a photo of him on a website, looking more or less as I remembered him.)

Opening scenes are always crucial to a film’s success in pulling me into its world. Consider the first five minutes of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), where an everyday setting gradually turns into something lush and fantastical. As the credits roll, a solemn voiceover tells us that Suzy Banyon, a young American, has come to Germany to join a famous dance academy. We see Suzy walking to the airport exit, and a sense of menace is created by the most ordinary elements: the neon lights in the Departure terminal, a brief glimpse of a woman dressed in red in the distance, the sudden opening of the automatic doors through which Suzy walks (and our simultaneous realisation that a storm is raging outside the airport’s sterile, orderly interiors), the howling of the wind, the water flowing into a nearby drain, the initial obtuseness of the cab driver who takes her to her destination.

Contributing immeasurably to the mood of this sequence is the pounding, punk-rock soundtrack by the band Goblin, with whispers of “witch!” regularly punctuating the score. Suspiria is not especially discreet about the mysteries of its plot: you don’t have to be a student of the genre to figure out that Suzy will find a modern-day witches’ coven at the dance school.

Actually, for the most part this isn’t a subtle film. It’s very arresting visually, and it contains at least three grisly murders filmed with such imagination that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen (isn’t this the opposite of what a horror film is supposed to do?). But unusually for a movie with a lot of gore and blood, it also has graceful scenes that only hint at something unknowable. The barest suggestion of witchcraft, for instance, in the shot where a chambermaid momentarily dazzles Suzy with the light reflected from the silverware she’s cleaning. Or the prolonged nighttime scene in a deserted public square where a blind piano teacher and his seeing-dog sense something evil around them but don’t know exactly what it is (the viewer is given the privilege of a shot of shadows flitting across a building facade – witches? On broomsticks? Or just a flock of birds or bats?). These are the setpieces that stayed with me for weeks after I saw the film. In contrast, when the supernatural is explicitly presented at the end, it’s anti-climactic.

Suspiria would be unimaginable without its lurid colours, but Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (“The Devil Woman”) (1964) is shot in what is usually described as “stark” black and white. Set in medieval Japan, this film opens with an overhead view of a windy grassland, the reeds – more than six feet high – swaying in the breeze. The camera moves closer to show us a large pit in the ground and the next shot is from deep inside this hole, looking up at the sky. The image reminds me of another iconic Japanese horror film, the much more recent Ringu – and its American remake The Ring – apart from evoking the passage in Haruki Murakami’s immense novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle where a man shuts the world out by sitting at the bottom of a well.

But now Onibaba’s opening credits appear on the screen – the Japanese script is menacingly distorted at the edges – accompanied by a soundtrack that’s as mood-setting as the Suspiria score, but more drum-based and minimal, and much more disquieting. In the film’s (almost wordless) first five minutes we learn that the pit is a secret maintained by a middle-aged woman and her daughter-in-law, who live in squalid conditions in this large marshland. Struggling to make ends meet (the son/husband is away fighting in an army), they murder wounded Samurai who stagger into the grassland looking for shelter, and then sell the armour in exchange for meagre rations of food. Meanwhile they also get by with killing rats, dogs and whatever other creatures they can get their hands on, and generally live like wild animals themselves.

So claustrophobic and stifling is the mise-en-scene of Onibaba that one easily forgets it’s set in the same country and roughly the same period as Akira Kurosawa’s classic Samurai movies. Superficial details of time and place scarcely matter anyway; as in so many great horror films, the setting is really the human soul, and it’s always night-time. Atmosphere is created through hand-held camerawork, eerie aural effects (such as bird sounds in the scenes where the young woman, her face rapturous, races through the grass to meet a lover), and of course the setting itself. But for me the unforgettable image is the malevolent face of the old woman, a streak of white hair in her head making her look like a deranged simulacra of the Indira Gandhi photos I remember from the newspapers of my childhood. As the story progresses, my rational mind tells me that she’s a victim – terrified by the thought that her daughter-in-law will leave her to scavenge for herself – but when her piercing eyes fill the screen, the rational mind goes AWOL.

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In a lovely essay titled “Pictures and Secrets”, Ptolemy Tompkins recalled his father’s advice to him when movie monsters gave him nightmares. “Take them out of the context of the film,” said Peter Tompkins (co-author of The Secret Life of Plants), “and place them somewhere else. Control their actions with your own mind.”

At times I try similar mental games with my personal demons. So Onibaba’s “devil woman” reluctantly leaves her grassland at my bidding. I pull Gabbar Singh (bogeymen can come from far outside the genre) out of the sunbaked landscape that was the dacoits’ hideout in Sholay, then lure the rat-like Nosferatu out of his mansion and seat them all at a tea-party together, with a few zombies from George Romero’s films thrown in as foot-servants, and invitations sent out to Michael Myers from Halloween and Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The background music is the sound of Darth Vader’s raspy breathing (I can only hear, not see, him – there was nothing scary about the cheesy black suit!). Unfortunately my mind refuses to take this scenario much further; I’m not sure this lot would have much to say to each other.

However, the films I love have no trouble conversing with each other, even when they are separated by decades, different styles and languages, and an unbridgeable divide in quality. One scene frequently recalls another, setting off a chain of connections in my mind.

As an example, take a randomly selected scene from a film that isn’t strictly a horror movie but which made me shrink into the rickety seat at Delhi’s Shakuntalam Theatre when I first saw it: Fritz Lang’s M, about the hunt for a child-killer in the streets of Berlin.

Early in the film we see a pillar with a notice announcing a reward for the killer’s capture. A little girl bounces her ball against this pillar. At this point the scene is clumsy – there’s no spontaneity in the ball-bouncing, you can tell that the girl is carefully doing what the director is telling her to – but then the shadow of a man comes into the frame from the right. “What a pretty ball!” he says in a childlike voice. Shortly afterwards there’s an aerial view of him buying the girl a balloon while she titters excitedly. Cross-cut to the girl’s mother, waiting for her child to return from school, slowly coming to realise that something is wrong. The sequence ends with a pair of poetic images: the ball slowly rolling out of a hedge, into a patch of grass; the untethered balloon brushing an electric pole and floating away.

So here are three broad constituents of the scene: the girl; the man who approaches her; the ball and the balloon at the close. Whenever I think about any of these elements, other scenes from other films swarm into my head, one scene invoking another, and another, and another, building a monstrous skein of references.

The ball and the balloon adrift. A visual cue for the viewer: something terrible has happened to the little girl, we realise. But what did the man do to her, exactly? A 1930s film couldn’t plainly tell us, but in a way that makes it scarier.

“My son was torn to pieces!” screams the father in the 1980s slasher film Silver Bullet, more than fifty years after M (or five years earlier, in terms of my viewing chronology). In the scene before this, we see a young boy flying a kite late in the evening, in a deserted spot. He hears strange sounds, looks around him nervously; we already know that a ravenous werewolf is on the loose, and we half-cover our eyes. In the next shot we see a policeman carrying the kite, torn, dripping blood. And then the father’s cry.

In most ways that matter, there’s nothing to link M and Silver Bullet (well, except for the important detail that they are both made up of strips of film). Yet, for me, the dual image of the rolling ball and the unrestrained balloon are forever linked to the image of the tethered kite, and to the idea of innocence wantonly destroyed.

The man. The nervous-looking character actor Peter Lorre played the unhinged killer, the shadow on the wall, in M. Ten years later, the same Lorre – a little balder now – played the most scared character in one of my favourite dark comedies. There’s a genuinely creepy scene in Arsenic and Old Lace (assuming you watch it in the original black-and-white, not the hideous colorisation) where a runaway criminal played by Raymond Massey – made up to resemble Boris Karloff as the stitched-together Frankenstein monster – and his doctor, played by Lorre, descend the stairs to a basement. The bodies of 12 men lie buried here, which in itself is not as gross as it sounds: Arsenic and Old Lace is about a pair of sweet, well-intentioned women who do away with lonely old men to put them out of their misery. But the scene with Massey and Lorre going down the stairs, the shadows falling across their faces, the light flickering beyond the closed door they are approaching, gives me the shivers.

The girl: She’s a distant cousin of another young girl playing with a ball, in Federico Fellini’s short film “Toby Dammit”, about a depressive British actor visiting Rome for a movie shoot.

At a press conference, Toby Dammit is asked a string of banal questions. He answers them half-heartedly, crabbily; he looks like he badly needs to sleep. He turns around, seems to see images and people from his past. Dream and reality are blurred – it’s the sort of thing Fellini does so well.

A reporter asks, “Do you believe in God?” “No,” replies the actor.

“And in the Devil?”

Now, for the first time, Toby Dammit looks interested. He leans forward. “Yes. In the Devil, yes,” he says.

“How exciting,” exclaims the questioner, delighted to have hit home, “Have you seen Him? What does He look like? A black cat, a goat, a bat?”

“Oh no,” says Toby, a faraway look coming into his eyes, “To me the Devil is cheerful, agile…”

Cut to an insert of a girl, her face occupying the left half of the screen, grinning diabolically at the camera

“He looks like a little girl.”

Why the actor is haunted by this image I’ll leave you to discover for yourself. But while the little girl in M was a cherubic victim, the girl in “Toby Dammit” is Beelzebub. A role reversal, and a reminder that in horror there are no rules, no character types. Anyone can be monster or prey, or both at once.

But already the connections are overflowing, like the swollen river of blood coming through the slowly opening door in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. As I finished writing the last paragraph, I remembered that the British actor Terence Stamp played the lethargic Toby Dammit, and that my first ever viewing of Stamp was as the evil General Zod in Superman II. It was a supremely entertaining movie, with the inbuilt assurance (as in any Superman film) that things would turn out all right in the end, but it contained one scene that gave me many sleepless nights as a child: Zod and his two minions land on the moon, slay a human astronaut by tearing off his oxygen mask and then kick his dying body gleefully into the distance.

My chief memory of the film today is the utter helplessness of that poor moonstruck astronaut in the face of this assault by Godlike beings. It was so unfair, so far from a fight between equals. Even today, the scene makes it impossible for me to think of Superman 2 as a feel-good movie.

Other connections aren’t so obvious, or maybe they are obvious only to me. I mentioned Psycho being a reference point for much of my other movie-watching. Well, Suzy Banyon’s journey in the taxi at the beginning of Suspiria always reminds me of Marion Crane’s car drive in Hitchcock’s film – a voyage to the netherworld, with lightning heralding the way. It ends with a similar image too: a menacing building (the Bates Motel in Psycho, the dance school here) coming into clear focus through the rain-soaked night. Welcome to Hades.

“Take off your mask,” whispers Onibaba’s old woman to the young Samurai who has just told her that he has a beautiful face underneath the demon mask he is wearing, “I’ve never seen anything really beautiful in my whole life.” The words open a window to a lifetime of struggle and squalor, reminding us of the dire straits of the two women who need to hawk the armour of dead warriors to get food. But it also makes me think about the unhappy world that lies just beneath the surface horrors of Psycho: a world where the now-psychotic Mrs Bates was once a young widow, raising a little boy all by herself, vulnerable to the charms of a smooth-talking man who was after her money; a world where being left alone is the biggest fear of all.

But Onibaba’s Samurai mask is beautiful too, in its own way. It’s just as impassively beautiful as the smooth white face-cover worn by the young girl Christine in Georges Franju’s indescribably lyrical Eyes Without a Face. In this cult classic, the monster not only has a human face, he’s a loving father – a doctor who surgically removes the skin off the faces of kidnapped young women in increasingly desperate attempts to cure his disfigured daughter. Meanwhile she wanders the lawns of the mansion alone, wearing her white mask, communing with the birds and the captive dogs her father has been conducting grisly experiments on.

****

Often, when I’m driving alone late at night, I catch myself humming a certain tune without realising it. Then I remember: it’s Maurice Jarre’s spooky score from the opening scene of Eyes Without a Face, in which a middle-aged woman drives a car through deserted streets, occasionally stopping to glance in the rear-view mirror at a shadowy figure in the back-seat. We don’t yet know that the figure in the back-seat is a dead girl whose body has to be disposed of, but the music, the camerawork, the worried but determined look on the middle-aged woman’s face, combine to tell us that something is very wrong.

Driving, I look into the rear-view mirror, half-expecting to see a body slumped in the back-seat, its face inadequately covered by a large floppy hat, but darkened by a trick of the light.

Other scenes from other horror films have similarly infected my life, so that in certain situations and settings I find myself playing out those very moments. While sightseeing, if I see something I want to photograph and reach for the camera around my shoulder, my own gesture makes me think of the split-second shot in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom where Mark Lewis – a disturbed young man whose camera is almost an extension of his personality – reflexively reaches for his shoulder, where the instrument would normally be, the one time his lady friend persuades him to leave home without it.

Or when I’m walking through a deserted car park on a Sunday afternoon, I think of the agoraphobia-inducing scene in Halloween with Jamie Lee Curtis in a desolate neighborhood on a sunny day (who said a slasher movie’s scariest scenes had to be shot in the dark!), dozens of cars parked around her but not a human being in view – and the seemingly omniscient killer Mike Myers presumably watching her from somewhere. It’s a suburban setting – the old rational mind tells me there must be people around, possibly in their houses, looking out from behind the curtains or lolling on rocking-chairs on their porches – but the effect of the scene is just as vivid and intense as if this were Little Red Riding Hood walking alone through the jungle at dusk.

If I’m in a large hall with many exits and corridors, and just a few people moving in and out of the “frame” of my vision, I find myself in the glorious tracking shot from the museum scene in Brian DePalma’s Dressed to Kill, where a middle-aged housewife alternates between being quarry and pursuer to a handsome stranger. But then, if a flash of light – a reflection from someone’s glasses or cellphone – catches my eye, the scene quickly changes and I’m in a late scene from the same film, where another woman is momentarily blinded by the light glancing off the razor blade that a killer holds in his hand. Or there’s the chambermaid from Suspiria again, flashing her silverware at me.

Thinking about it, I realise that hardly any of my favourite scary scenes would be improved by better technology. No other genre can make such a virtue of being shot on a shoestring budget. Once in a while, even incompetence can be a useful thing. A jerky camera or careless editing can be unsettling in a certain context, and how many cases there have been – especially in zombie and vampire films – of mediocre actors unwittingly making a film more effective because their reactions seem so unnatural, so removed from regular human behaviour!

Which is not to say that good, low-budget horror films are “accidents”. Far from it. But finesse and money can spoil their effect. It’s no coincidence that the silent film was particularly well suited to this genre – horror and fantasy films from that era still hold up so well because their creakiness gives them an unmatched visceral effect. Watch the hero slaying an obviously papier-mache dragon in Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Siegfried, a smoky liquid flowing out of the creature’s ruptured sides, and you’ll know what I mean.

Improved technology can dampen the horror-movie experience in other ways, I realise, as I watch a 70-minute “Making Of” feature on my DVD of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Generally speaking, DVD Extras, with their audio commentaries and interview packages and outtakes, have been a boon to me as a movie buff. But the information overload can be deflating when it comes to films that I’d prefer to think of as belonging to a special, self-contained universe.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre exemplifies that sort of movie, and it would be so nice to be able to think of it as something that was made anonymously – perhaps by a cannibal family as a macabre home video – and then deposited into the mailbox of one of the studios, with a note asking them to distribute it. But here, 30 years later, are the crew members – respectably middle-aged, laughing and joking with each other, relating anecdotes. Director Tobe Hooper tells us he decided on the film’s title when his girlfriend at the time exclaimed, “Yuck, I’d never watch anything called that!” (Decided?! And here I was thinking that everything about that film just fell into place entirely independently of such banalities as human decisions.) One of the scriptwriters (this film needed to be scripted?) relates the story behind the dead armadillo we see as road-kill in the first shot. And here’s the actress Marilyn Burns, whom I’d have preferred to freeze into my memory-bank for all time as the screaming, blood-covered Sally trapped in a house of horrors; now she’s gazing into the camera with grandmotherly indulgence. Even Gunnar Hansen, who played the chainsaw-wielding, retarded monster Leatherface, participates in audio commentary.

And now here’s the Onibaba DVD, with colour footage (!) of the tents where the crew lived communally, cosily together during the month-long shoot. Those grasslands no longer look unfathomably creepy and alive, and the people are dressed in modern clothes, even T-shirts. Between shots, they were probably reading Manga or listening to their Sony transistors! For a fan of the film, that’s a blasphemous thought.

Of course, horror-movie DVD extras can be illuminating (as when Dario Argento relates a childhood memory of having to walk down a long dark corridor to his room every night, each half-open door on either side seeming to contain a threat) and I still watch them with enthusiasm. But when I’m alone at home and it’s dark outside and I see shadows and hear little noises (and it’s probably my years of experience in watching horror films that has made me conscious of all these things), at such times I return to the pristineness of those childhood days, the days before I started reading about cinema and discovering back-stories: sitting in a room with cringing children, watching a film that I knew nothing about beyond the images flickering the screen – images that were more real than most things in the real world.

****

“Everything means something, I guess,” says a character in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Could he be talking about the tendency of film buffs to read layers and layers of meaning into a movie that means a great deal to them (especially when the film isn’t widely deemed to be worthy of analysis)? Could this be the hidden message: if a film says something to you, touches something deep within you, listen to it, open yourself to it; don’t give in to the hectoring of those who dismiss it as “cheap entertainment”, even if you’re in a minority of one.

After all, horror film are especially vulnerable to genre-snobbery, with viewers routinely putting cerebra before instinct when it comes to assessing their worth. There’s the common phenomenon of people being genuinely affected by a horror film while they are actually watching it, but then emerging from the hall and laughingly dismissing it as nothing more than escapism. I suspect that my love for these movies provided me with a conduit for a basic open-mindedness towards all kinds of films: once you’ve given your heart to a genre that many people are snobbish about, it becomes difficult to be too judgmental about others’ tastes.

There’s the popular story from the earliest days of moving pictures, about the unprepared viewers of a Lumiere Brothers short film who ran out of a Paris theatre when confronted with the image of a train seemingly coming towards them. This is probably apocryphal, but there are other similar, less dramatic stories from that period, and even common sense tells us that the first movie viewers must have experienced quite a few shocks to the system. Today, even the most casual viewers unconsciously process such aspects of film grammar as cross-cutting between unrelated scenes. But in the earliest days, even basic cutting from one image to another (let alone rapid-fire splicing) must have felt otherworldly. To some, it must have been frightening, even demoniac. (Was that puffing train the first movie monster?) Only gradually must viewers have become inured to the violence of the cuts, learnt to stop being scared and love the new medium.

Some of us, though, never stopped wanting to be scared, even as our love for the movies deepened and grew.

Laughing zombies, dead mothers, undead poets, bloodthirsty plants...Peruvian terrorists?

[Did a version of this for Business Standard]

The cover of the new Granta has the word “Horror” in a vaguely Gothic font beneath a drawing of a fibrous blob with gooey things peering from its depths – the sort of thing H P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu might have birthed on a cold day. This could lead a reader to expect a collection of supernatural tales in the classic horror tradition, but what emerges is something subtler and more wide-ranging – perhaps too wide-ranging at times. When the word makes its first appearance inside the book – in Will Self’s “False Blood” – the reference is to the author’s long-time drug addiction (“that horror has cast a long shadow over my lives and the lives of my family, and infiltrated my fictive inscape, poisoning its field margins, salting its earth”). A theme is established: these pieces aren’t just about malevolent spirits that might assail us from without – they are also about inner betrayals of mind and body.

Thus, “horror” can mean looking down at the dead body of the woman who gave birth to you. (From Paul Auster’s “Your Birthday Has Come and Gone”, an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, written in the second person: “You have seen several corpses in the past, and you are familiar with the inertness of the dead...but none of those corpses belonged to your mother, no other dead body was the body in which your own life began, and you can look for no more than a few seconds before you turn your head away.”) It can also mean being in a sleep-deprived, drunken state two days after the cremation, answering a phone call to find yourself verbally assailed by a sanctimonious cousin who disapproved of the dead woman’s character and has no compunctions about expressing her feelings.

Nearly as intense as Auster’s account is Julie Otsuka’s poetic “Diem Perdidi”, about another mother suffering from Alzheimer’s, while Kanitta Meechubott’s “A Garden of Illuminating Existence” is a series of hypnotic illustrations that tell the story – in nine intricate colour plates – of her grandmother’s bout with cancer of the womb. In an eerie echo of Auster’s “the body in which your own life began”, the very place that is meant to nourish life becomes a sort of hell where “the pain spreads like a great forest fire”. What greater horror could be imagined? (You can see Meechubott's illustrations here.)

I thought the most intriguing pieces were the ones that mixed tones, weaving genre tropes into real-world narratives. Self’s essay, for instance, is a reminder of how versatile a thing blood can be, mundane, mystical or terrifying depending on the context – it’s a life-force but also a traitor, and an enduring prop in the horror and gore genres. He begins with the words “Sometime over the winter of 2010-11 I began to be gorged with blood, or rather, my blood itself began to be gorged with red blood cells.” (This isn’t good news for him, but what wouldn’t a vampire give to be similarly “gorged”?) The piece also includes a morbid anecdote about a man who used his own siphoned-out, iron-rich blood as a fertiliser for pumpkins (“vampiric gourds”) – a detail that is tantalisingly close to all those pulp stories about carnivorous plants.

“Is vampirism a matter of the overly self-conscious being awakened to life by the vitality of those who are barely self-conscious at all?” wonders Mark Doty in “Insatiable”. But mark the context: this is from Doty’s book about the poet Walt Whitman, and it builds on the possibility that Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, based his vampire on Whitman. (The sentence immediately after the one quoted above reads: “Is that why Whitman liked stevedores and streetcar conductors and Long Island baymen, the big guys at home in their bodies, who would never think to write a poem?”) How could “the embodiment of lunar pallor” emerge from “the quintessential poet of affirmation”, Doty wonders, and attempts to answer his own question in a piece that touches on the bloodsucking implicit in art, and on the hints of vampirism in the relationship between a poet and his readers. (“Great poets are, by definition, undead. The voice is preserved in the warm saline of ink and of memory.”)
 
There are a few fiction pieces, of course, and some of them concern horrors of the mind. Joy Williams’ “Brass” and Don DeLillo’s “The Starveling” are about different kinds of isolated people: the first is in the voice of a small-town father whose boy will become a sociopath; in the second, an obsessive movie-watcher follows a woman who could be a kindred spirit, a doppelganger or perhaps just a creature of his imagination. And Sarah Hall’s atmospheric “She Murdered Mortal He” is mainly about the inner turmoil of a woman on the verge of a break-up, but leaves us wondering at the end if her emotions might have summoned up a bloody vengeance.

Meanwhile horror buffs with a sense of humour should enjoy Roberto Bolano’s “The Colonel’s Son”, which is essentially a plot description of a C-grade zombie movie so bad it’s brilliant.

“...there’s only the sound of biting and chewing until the door opens and Julie appears again with her lips (the whole of her face, actually) smeared with blood, holding the Mexican’s head in one hand.

Which makes the other Mexican crazy; he pulls out a pistol, goes up and empties into the girl, but of course the bullets don’t harm her at all and Julie laughs contentedly before grabbing the guy’s shirt, pulling him towards her and tearing his throat open with a single bite.”

(Also see this animation inspired by Bolano's piece)

But the piece that best fits the conventional definition of a horror tale is Stephen King’s “The Dune”, about a nonagenarian judge who has been obsessed since age 10 with an island a short rowing distance from his Florida estate. What draws the judge back to this place is something we learn as the story proceeds – and it builds to a conclusion that should satisfy any genre fan – but as in all of King’s best work, there is a deeper current. This story, which begins with a reflection on how human bodies deteriorate with age, touches on our foreknowledge of mortality and the attempt to beat it off; it’s also a reminder of how fleeting our lifetimes are when measured against larger forces. (I thought there was a moving subtext here: the old man has changed immeasurably, accumulating a lifetime’s worth of experiences, over the 80 years he has known the island, but the island itself remains as still and unchangeable as ever, and will continue to be so long after he is gone.)

There’s little to fault in this book if you consider just the quality of the writing, but I had a minor reservation about the two reportage-driven pieces – Tom Bamforth’s chronicle of a UN mission in Sudan and Santiago Roncagliolo’s personal account of terrorism in Peru. These are good long-form journalistic essays, but do they belong here? If the broadest possible meaning of “horror” is to be used, then of course the answer is yes. But a thematic collection that accommodates such a wide spectrum of fiction, personal memoir and reportage is a little too diffused for my liking. (For a really broad interpretation of the word, why not include one of P G Wodehouse's Blandings Castle stories on the grounds that the absence of Blandings from the real world is the most terrifying thing one can think of?) Besides, the book’s back-cover quotes Arthur Conan Doyle as saying “Where there is no imagination there is no horror.” But I'm not sure the Sudan and Peru essays, matter-of-factly listing real-world monstrosities, require quite the same level of imaginative participation from the reader as the other pieces here do.

Deathless in wartime: fantasy and reality in The Tiger's Wife

[Did a shorter version of this review for The Hindu]

Around sixty pages into Tea Obreht’s Orange Prize-winning debut novel The Tiger’s Wife, a young doctor in a Balkan village in the 1950s encounters a Deathless Man. Gavran Gaile is sitting up in his coffin, two bullet-holes in the back of his head, somewhat thirsty but not much worse for wear, and the terrified villagers think he’s a vampire. But he isn’t, he patiently explains to the doctor – it’s just that he cannot die. Before departing in the night, he even offers some proof.

When they next chance to meet, more than 15 years later, Gavran will tell the doctor about the reason for his unusual condition. And there will be one final encounter, at a time when the doctor is very old and nearing his own death.

Needless to say, this is not the stuff of literary realism, but by the time I had finished Obreht’s book I was no longer sure there was anything supernatural about the story. For one thing, the Deathless Man interludes come to us second-hand; the book’s narrator Natalia, the doctor’s granddaughter, has heard these stories from him, and there’s no particular reason for the reader to take them at face value. They can be read as allegory, or even as wish-fulfilment (the three meetings take place at key stages in the doctor’s life when the spectre of death is all around him).

But there’s another sense in which fantasy and hard reality become indistinguishable in this story: The Tiger’s Wife is set in a region with such a war-fractured history – countries break up, then reorganise themselves with new borders and new names – that real life quickly acquires a surreal tinge. In times of war, we are reminded, all recognisable rules and patterns vanish; anything is believable. Armed with makeshift axes, little children play games of “Us vs the Ottomans”. A cannon-ball wedged into the wall of a monastery, with the plaster and paint creating a spidery pattern around it, is something you look at, shrug and walk on. A tiger sauntering through the ruins of a city can seem like nothing out of the ordinary – even if you don’t know that the animal escaped when a nearby zoo wall was destroyed by a stray bomb. Young people even twist the situation to their advantage. “When your parents said get your ass to school, it was all right to say there’s a war on and go down to the riverbank instead. When they caught you sneaking into the house at three in the morning, your hair reeking of smoke, the fact that there was a war on prevented them from staving your head in.” Making up stories – about yourself and about others – is one way of coping.

The book’s anchoring narrative has Natalia, a doctor herself, travelling with a friend named Zora to a seaside village across a freshly created border; they are visiting an orphanage to provide inoculations, and her description of the journey suggests how war has ravaged not just the land but also individual psyches.

We had an old map, which we kept in the car years after it had become completely inaccurate. We had used the map on every road trip we had ever taken, and it showed in the marker scribbling all over it: the crossed-out areas we were supposed to avoid on our way to some medical conference or other, the stick man holding crudely drawn skis on a mountain resort we had loved that was no longer a part of our country.

Natalia herself is part of a post-war generation for whom every major adult choice is “based on circumstances that were no longer part of our daily lives [...] Major decisions trended toward the assumption that the war and its immediate effects would always be around.” Shifting definitions of “us” and “them” will run through her story. “Twelve years ago, before the war,” she writes, “the people of Brejevina had been our people.” But now she and Zora are in this village to sanitize children orphaned by their own soldiers.

Early in the journey, Natalia receives news of her grandfather’s death, and this provides the pretext for two narratives that punctuate the present-day story. The first is about the Deathless Man. The other, gleaned from an old man living in her grandfather’s village, is a tale from his boyhood days – the story of a tiger that made its way to the village, and of the bond it may have formed with a deaf-mute girl who became ostracised by the other villagers. Other stories about other people – with names out of fairy-tale and myth, such as Darius the Bear and Luka the butcher – coalesce around these three main narratives, and the one minor flaw of the book, I felt, was that Obreht occasionally gets carried away with these side-characters. That apart, her storytelling is riveting.

You don’t need in-depth knowledge of Balkan politics to understand this book – there’s something deliberately abstract about the narrative, with Natalia’s frequent references to “the City” (possibly Belgrade) where she grew up. (In any case, the characters themselves are often more disoriented than any reader can be.) This could be a portrait of just about any war-torn region, its people searching desperately for meaning in meaninglessness, turning to faith and superstition – even deciding that the cause of their family’s misfortune is that a long-dead relative wasn’t buried in the customary way and that his body must be dug up and subjected to the proper rites.

The Tiger’s Wife works on different levels. Some passages have the surface appeal of magic realism, but it can also be read as a fragmented biography of a man whose name we never learn. What do the story of the “tiger’s wife” and the story of the deathless man add up to tell us about Natalia’s grandfather? What effect did they have on the building of his character and the more practical aspects of his daily life, such as his marriage to a woman from a different religion (whose family still lives on the other side of the border)? Or could they be red herrings, with the "real" story occupying the gap between the hyper-dramatic narratives?
 

Ultimately, this book is also an exploration of mortality and of how storytelling itself can make people immortal – how legends come into being, how old family yarns become embellished as the decades go by. Consider this passage about a young man with possibly homosexual leanings. “He was too eager to strip naked and bathe with other young men in the mountain lake above the pasture – although no one will ever accuse the other young men of his generation of being too eager to bathe with him. This may be because the young men of Luka’s generation are the fathers of the men telling these stories.” In two sentences, Obreht makes a pointed comment on the reductive, self-serving ways in which personal histories get written, and on the many undocumented things that might so easily slip through the cracks – especially when chronicling lives that were lived in “interesting times”.