MASTERS OF HORROR
Season 2 Episode 8
“Valerie On The Stairs”
Teleplay by Mick Garris; based on the short story by Clive Barker; directed by Mick Garris
“`Valerie on The Stairs’ is about a house which has been given by a now-dead writer, a failed writer, over as a kind of hospice for failed writers. They take rooms and they can stay there and the moment they get a piece of work published, they're out, OK? I think in the story there are nine rooms; it's a big house and nine fervent and fevered and desperate imaginations working each in solitude can do strange things to houses...The thing that's fun about it is it's about writers and it's about the agony of it, really, it's about the pleasure of it and it's about the things that haunt you.”
-- Clive Barker
I’m a big Clive Barker fan, so hearing he’d
written a 45-page treatment for MoH, well, that got me stoked. Apparently, it’s something he’s wanted to write for quite a while, but never got around to.
Sadly though, this isn’t a particularly strong episode. Maybe this conceit would have been effective on the printed page, with Barker’s exquisite and darkly melodic prose guiding us through the tale. As it is though, an hour-long
MoH entry, it just doesn’t work.
Struggling, unpublished writer Rob Hanisey (Tyron Leitso, from the brutally cancelled
Wonderfalls) moves into Highberger House, a residence for aspiring writers where they can write their masterpieces free of distractions. Taking a sudden vacancy (suicide in the wake of a sea of rejection slips), it isn’t long before Hanisey starts to hear and see things, chief among these phenomena, Valerie (Clare Grant, seen recently in
Black Snake Moan), a beautiful young woman with a penchant for running around starkers, and being pulled into the walls by a menacing Tony Todd (looking like a citizen of Barker’s Midian, as seen in
Nightbreed).
Playing like a writer’s version of Barker’s “Son Of Celluloid,” “Valerie On The Stairs” is ultimately about the monstrous egos of writers and the true power of the imagination. A lot of the time, this sort of post-modern story, where fiction intrudes upon reality (and vice versa), doesn’t quite have the power on the screen as it does in print. Past genre offerings that followed this tack, John Carpenter’s
At The Mountains Of Madness and
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, were both botched attempts at this kind of tricky storytelling.
And perhaps, like Carpenter’s
Mountains, “Valerie On The Stairs” doesn’t work because it’s telling a story about the novel and writers and the written word; it’s being post-modern with a different medium, which has a different set of rules. (Having said this, the long-talked about film adaptation of “Son Of Celluloid” seems a more promising match for the silver screen. Set in a movie house, it’s about a sentient tumour which takes the mercurial shapes of Hollywood icons like John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe.)*
Another problem which plagues this entry is a collection of half-hearted performances which badly need some raw infusions of honesty. Only Todd (who made a genre name for himself as another Barker creation, the eponymous
Candyman) registers here, his darkly poetic delivery of the dialogue going a long way in making up for all the other off-key performances.
Even
Back To The Future’s Christopher Lloyd (as Highberger resident Everett Neely) seems ever so slightly off his game here.
All that, and a climactic effects sequence which looks awkward and comes off flat due to its staging and execution (budgetary constraints are a real b!tch), cripple “Valerie On The Stairs,” leaving a hobbling mess that, like “Haeckel’s Tale” (another Barker adaptation, from Season 1), is a particular disappointment.
* Yes, you read that right.
Parting shot: More Barkerian news in
Afterthoughts (11): Archive June 2007.
(
Valerie On The Stairs DVD cover art courtesy of fangoria.com.)
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