Don’t Look Now! It’s The Ghost of Donald Sutherland’s Daughter: The Story of the Prettiest Horror Film You’ve Never Seen

Don’t Look Now uses trauma to tell a horror story about the effects of death.

One more week has passed, moving us one step closer to that holiest of holidays: Halloween.

Last week we started with the most ubiquitous of horror films, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, The Shining. It’s obviously a movie that you’ve either seen already, especially if you’re a horror fan. At the very least you’re familiar enough with it and its iconography that you might as well have already seen it.

This week, I’d like to take us down a darker, more abstruse path with a somewhat little-known film by once famed cinematographer turned filmmaker Nicolas Roeg. The film in question is the Donald Sutherland-Julie Christie starring psychological horror film Don’t Look Now.

Now, if you’re saying to yourself, “I’ve never heard of this movie, why should I care?” I have one thing to share with you: this movie has one of the most frightening, surprising, goosebump-inducing endings in horror movie history.

In fact, if you don’t believe me, despite its relative obscurity, the moment in question ranked number 22 on Bravo’s list of “100 Scariest Movie Moments,” beating out scenes from “Pet Sematary,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Nosferatu.”

Now, I’ll be honest, I picked this film because it is one of my favorites. It’s beautifully filmed; Roeg, the film’s director, cut his teeth as a cinematographer for the likes of famed “bad filmmaker,” Roger Corman on his Edgar Allan Poe adaptation, The Masque of the Red Death.

But Roeg also worked on films by the likes of François Truffaut and David Lean, the latter of which was as a camera operator for Lawrence of Arabia, a movie that is noted as being one of the most beautifully photographed films of all time.

Beyond that, Don’t Look Now is also an incredibly influential film in the genre, as many of its elements can be found in later horror films. For instance, the film begins with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie’s daughter wearing a red raincoat and drowning in the pond at their residence as they sit inside, working.

If you were a fan of Ari Aster’s whole thing of starting a movie with a traumatic event, get ready for this.

This “red equals danger” motif plays throughout the movie as Donald Sutherland’s character takes a job restoring a church in the water-filled city of Venice, Italy.

That’s the foreground of the story. The horrifying death of our protagonist’s child by drowning sets off the events that lead them to the restoration of a church in a city literally surrounded by water. It’s almost as if they can’t escape, quite literally, the reminder of their loss.

The background is a pulpy story revolving around blind mystics and a serial killer loose in a gorgeous European city.

It’s at this point that Sutherland’s character begins seeing a small figure in a raincoat, accompanied by a haunting score making its way through the city, but no matter how hard he tries, he can’t catch up with the figure.

The figure stands as an obvious reminder of his daughter, who died wearing a red raincoat.

This “red equals danger” motif comes up in later films, not all of which are horror like The Sixth Sense, Ex Machina, Schindler’s List, and even last week’s film, The Shining, which applied the color beautifully in a tense bathroom exchange that sets forth the film’s bloody climax.

It’s not a new technique. The “red equals danger” motif can be found in a lot of films during the ’70s and before, but it’s arguably in films like this and in Italian Giallo horror films like Suspiria and Deep Red, as well as other American films being made at the time, where this motif really took off. And I would argue that a lot of films took inspiration from Don’t Look Now for said usage.

It’s also not the first time Roeg has applied it. For obvious reasons, Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death, in which Roeg served as the cinematographer, applied this “red equals danger” technique at various times throughout.

One such instance features Vincent Price, in full-on early technicolor glory, appearing in full red from head to toe, his face even painted beat red, a hooded personification of death to come for Prince Prospero and his guests cordoned off from the infected citizenry below.

Vincent Price ups his creep game.

That being said, I’m sure you could pluck out a bevy of instances in other films and tv shows where that red motif plays out as a way of signaling, most often, that danger is afoot.

I would explain what the danger of that red motif equates to in the film, but that would ruin one of the better endings in horror movie history. You’ll just have to watch to find out.

All I can say is that from start to finish, the film is tense. Not in the same sense that a movie like Wait Until Dark is, wherein terror literally leaps out from every dark corner, but in a more complex emotional way.

After all, the film begins with the death of the two main characters’ daughter, and from there it lays, much like Hereditary or The Babadook in that bed of sadness until the film’s skin-peeler of an ending.

As I said, it’s one of my favorites and it’s because of its beauty and its ability to sink its horror below the surface of superficial jump-scares and cheap tricks. In other words, the horror is more about how death and trauma root into us and pull us apart from the inside.

Well, that’s about all I can say, without ruining large chunks of the movie, so I’ll stop there.

[embed]The classic trailer featuring Donald Sutherland and his magnificent mustache.

But next week we’ll veer slightly away from “horror,” though we’ll still very much be exploring one of the genre’s oldest tropes; that unearthly being that personified for much of the Western world the face of consumption, a.k.a. tuberculosis.

Next week we’ll peer beyond the veil to find out exactly what it is that makes us laugh, in the deep dark beyond the shadows.