[Editorial] 20 Years Later: The Others (2001)

Released 20 years ago in 2001,  Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others was part of a short cycle of slow, supernatural horror films with twists, along with M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) and Guillermo Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001), with JA Bayona’s The Orphanage following a few years later in 2007. These were characterised by Gothic stylings, narratives rife with secrets, and a humane approach to the entities behind the various hauntings.   

Taking place in 1945, The Others is set entirely in a manor house on the isle of Jersey that Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) shares with her two children, Anne and Nicolas. The family are already under some strain -  both children have extreme photo-senstivty, which as Grace explains to her new servants, Mrs Mills, Mr Tuttle and Lydia, necessitates the house being kept in a constant state of near-complete darkness. Grace’s husband Charles went to fight in France 18 months before, and there has been no word about him since, despite the war having ended. At the start of the film, the household has just undergone further upheaval: the previous servants left suddenly a few days before and the postal service seems to have stopped; as Grace says, she is “beginning to feel totally cut off". Behind her back, the children whisper about a recent incident where “mummy went mad”. 

Peculiar events begin to escalate - Anne sees strange people around the house, doors open by themselves, and one morning the family find all the curtains have disappeared. Charles returns home, but seems distant and soon leaves again, saying he is going back to the front. Grace and the children discover that the servants are ghosts, having died of tuberculosis in 1891, and Grace tries to banish them from the house. Mrs Mills insists that they must face the real intruders, and talks of the need for the living and the dead to co-exist. In an upstairs room, the family finally see the source of the hauntings: the new owners of the house, who are conducting a seance. Grace is confronted with the truth: she killed Anne and Nicolas and shot herself; the film ends with the family trying to come to terms with their new existence.

Like all good plot-twist films, The Others foreshadows the answers to its mysteries, and when the truth is revealed the clues, with hindsight, fit neatly into place. On a second viewing, the reality that the characters we are following are ghosts makes perfect sense, and is telegraphed throughout the film. The characters all acknowledge that things have changed recently - food tastes different, and all of a sudden no-one is visiting. The “intruders” have an increasing amount of physical control over the house as the film goes on, suggesting that they are the ones more in touch with the physical plane of existence. It’s impressive that the twist is as surprising as it is, especially given the massive success of The Sixth Sense, (released only a couple of years before The Others) which had the same premise of a main character having been dead all along. 

Amenábar retains the element of surprise by using the audience’s familiarity with the trappings of Gothic horror, leading us into assumptions with the use of these genre conventions. The “ghostly” happenings are all things that we expect to occur in a haunted house: disembodied crying, doors closing on their own, footsteps in an empty room. But significantly, all are the result of normal human activity, but are made uncanny by virtue of their cause being unseen. The historical setting, atmospheric candlelight and household staff with secrets all guide us to interpret the events within the framework of a classic, straightforward ghost story. The striking similarities to The Turn of the Screw and its adaptations (a brother and sister in an isolated manor by a lake, in the care of a highly-strung guardian) push the viewer further towards the idea that the occurrences are either a simple haunting, or perhaps psychological in origin.

Although set in the 1940s, The Others has a very Victorian feel to it. With the electricity cut off and thick fog surrounding the house, the place feels transported back in time, far from 20th century comforts. Grace herself tries to embody the Victorian ideal of the “angel in the house” - she is houseproud, pious and a seemingly devoted mother. But her isolated circumstances are clearly starting to take a toll, and she describes the experience of living in the darkened house to Mrs Mills as “unbearable”. The home has become somewhere she is trapped, like Victorian women such as the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. The complex nature of motherhood is explored through the character of Grace - she is by turns affectionate, punitive and fiercely protective towards her children. Watching the film for a second time with the knowledge of Grace’s horrific actions brings a terrible irony to her drive to shield Anne and Nicolas from both physical and spiritual harm. 

Alongside its narrative twists, The Others functions perfectly as a genuinely frightening Gothic thriller. The horror that Grace feels as her control over her own home slips away permeates the whole film, and the atmosphere of tension rarely lets up. There are some superbly unsettling set-piece scares, like Anne’s possession by the medium, and the discovery of the servants’ post-mortem photographs and their graves. The sense of danger around letting light into the house is built up throughout, so that the simple and seemingly innocuous act of removing the curtains becomes a terrifying threat. 

While it shares many features with other films in the supernatural horror subgenre, The Others remains unusual in focusing almost entirely on the experience of the ghosts themselves. Amenábar does not simply use this narrative flip as a gimmick: he explores the tensions between the living and the dead, (and the past and present) as they struggle to coexist. As an origin story for a haunted house, The Others is in many ways a melancholy version of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988) - as in that film, the recently deceased are at first unaware of what has happened to them, and need guidance in order to adjust to their new ghostly existence.  

In most supernatural tales, the ghosts are seen as simply a problem for the living, to be exorcised or appeased, but ultimately to be banished. The Others acknowledges the humanity of its spirits, as flawed and confused as they were when living. Having rightly become seen as an enduring classic in the 20 years since its release, it is a film that will continue to reward rewatching, and whose influence will still be felt for decades to come.  

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