Halloween Beat: PAPERHOUSE finds horror in magical realism and child imagination

It’s said that horror master Clive Barker wanted Bernard Rose to be the director of Candyman after watching his first feature-length film, Paperhouse (1988). It’s easy to see why. The movie resides in a world governed by magical realism, that narrative space where the fantastical lives comfortably besides the real. It’s something that Barker constantly traffics in, though his variation of it leans more willingly towards darkness.

Rose’s Paperhouse is a more whimsical take on magical realism. The story follows 11-year-old Anna Madden (Charlotte Burke), a girl that starts drawing a house on a large sheet of paper after a bout with glandular fever keeps her bedridden. Anna misses her dad, who works at an oil rig for long stretches of time and isn’t around as much as she’d want him to be.

As she fills the house she’s drawn with the stuff she would want to play around with, she starts having dreams that take her into the drawing. There she finds a boy that can’t use his legs called Marc (Elliott Spiers). It’s all going well until Anna decides to draw in her father so he can help Marc move around. Suddenly, a nice dream becomes a nightmare as Marc’s wellbeing starts becoming a problem of existential proportions. Anna’s father enters the scene more as a slasher-like presence than a loving and protecting one.

Paperhouse aims at the heart with its focus on child imagination and how it can bend reality to its will. It speaks to the malleability of a kid’s view on life, death, sickness, and emptiness. Marc brings all these considerations to the table for Anna. For instance, no matter how hard Anna tries to draw in a solution for his mobility issues, they never seem to fix anything. That this isn’t a problem solvable through imagination points to the limits of childhood magical thinking. Some things are just too steeped in reality.

Rose frames childhood as both a time of wonder and a time of danger. Despite what we’ve been led to believe, we’re shown that there’s never been a guarantee of total safety or uninterrupted happiness at our earliest stages. The magical elements of our youth only ever allowed for a risky fairy tale setting where things could go either way. The movie is a stark reminder of that, which is why it’s unafraid to bake heartbreak into its story. It’s a hard lesson, but one that embraces fantasy for its delivery. And like all good fantasy, monsters are always close by to remind us that bad things can and will happen.