Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

It was a rambling dialogue, and a silly little notion such as any young lad might have, but I was immediately struck that it had been an affectation that I myself had had as a teenager. Predisposed toward our hero on the strength of this, I was rather looking forward, as he was, to seeing his sweetheart, if the director would ever allow him to arrive at her house. When he eventually knocked at the door, predictably we had to wait for the mother to answer it, and for him to be shown into the comfortable, dark kitchen. He had to wait, of course, for the girl who, he was told, was brushing her hair upstairs and would not be long. He talked to the mother, stroked a cat and looked out of the window. Finally the object of his affections descended the stairs.

At this point I sat forward in my seat. The young girl looked exactly as my wife, Yvonne, had looked at that age. She was pretty, with startlingly blue eyes, and long blond hair. I was delighted by the coincidence.

They took their time, of course, in going outside to where the sun was now higher in the sky. I felt a frisson as they sat close together on the bench outside the door, and, unseen by the mother, he tenderly kissed the nape of her neck as she bent down to look into a box of buttons. I marvelled at the film-maker's art. As the boy's lips brushed the girl's skin she slid her hand through the buttons in a way that was incredibly sensual. Then she picked out a heavy green one, shaped like an apple, and asked him if he knew that it had once belonged to the costume of a famous clown?

Up until this point I had enjoyed the coincidences I had found in the film, but this was stretching them too far. My mother had also had a very similar button in a sewing box, which was also said to have once belonged to a well-known clown. I did not know what to make of its appearance in the film.

The hero and heroine then decided to take a walk through the fields, talking of love and their future. And then, in the woods, there was the most delicately handled love-making scene, shown to us through carefully concealing trees. When he eventually walked home we had another voice-over where he declared his love for the girl whom he inevitably calls Yvonne.

After a few more meetings between the two of them, the only scenes involving several other actors are played out on a day of celebration; their last at school. Here another character is introduced, an older boy who clearly has an interest in the heroine. I immediately cast around for the equivalent character in my youth. There had been jealousies in my relationship with Yvonne when we were still at school, but I had finally married my childhood sweetheart. Completely lost to the apparent reality of the film I hated this potential suitor with a passion. Suddenly it is revealed, in a scene where Yvonne tentatively kisses this second boy, that we had been watching the earlier love-making scene at a distance through our hero's eyes!

The film then changed in style. In an instant the long, beautifully framed scenes from a single static position were replaced by abrupt, short images from what appeared to be a hand-held camera, and which were presumably meant to be from our hero's viewpoint. It conveyed the black rage within him. He was retracing the journey to Yvonne's house from the start of the film, but this time at a run. He was looking all about him in desperation. When he arrived at the farmhouse he hammered at the door, and when the mother answered it she told him that the girl had gone out. He rushes off across the fields and into the woods, and as the hurried camera-work shows his journey the viewpoint subtly moves down from the eye-level of a young man to that of an animal running, finally, over the floor of the woods. For only a few moments we see the lovemaking couple once again. The hero rushes upon them and there are terrible screams and the wild movement of the camera makes it impossible to see what is happening. The screen goes black, and just as the audience is getting restless and wonders whether the film has finished, or if the reel has not been replaced by the projectionist, the picture slowly comes up to show an incredibly languid sunset, and the hero, looking dirty and ragged, crying uncontrollably, walks slowly back to the village.

We are back to the earlier, slow direction. He slips unnoticed into a dark garage, and in the dim light we see him loop a length of rope around the rafters. The music has started by this time, a variation on the opening theme, and in front of one long, apparently unedited shot we watch him climb a chair, tie the rope around his neck, and kick the chair from under him. By now it is so dark that we can't make out the details of his horrible death, and the music has taken the place of the sounds in the garage, but the imagination makes up for what is not shown.

I was emotionally drained by the film. I emerged into a Birmingham afternoon light, deeply affected by the closing scene and not thinking particularly of the earlier coincidences. The rage that had been in the hero as he rushed to find the lovers had seemed to grow in my own breast and it was a while before the shock passed. Eventually I remembered and was able to reflect upon the uncanny similarities between the hero's circumstances and my own. I could not work out what was real, what was my imagination, and what had been the film-maker's art. I was standing on the pavement outside the cinema, angry at the injustice of the film. To this day I do not know how I managed to compose myself for an interview thirty minutes later, and how I made the shortlist.

When I arrived home that evening and related the events of my day, the film assumed more importance than the interview. Yvonne listened to my description patiently, amused, and said that she too would like to see it. I had written on a flier taken from the cinema

Loup-garou and the director's name, "Alain Legrand." She pointed out that loup-garou meant werewolf, which I had not registered at the time. "You've been watching horror movies then," she asked, and I had to agree that it was horrific.

Having unburdened myself to my wife, and, I am embarrassed to admit this, having cried while re-telling the story, I felt remarkably better, and with a little distance was able to be amused by the coincidences of the film. Perhaps I had made too much of them. As I lay in bed that night I told myself that if there was anything supernatural about the apparent coincidences, anything at all, then it was there to show me how lucky I was to have made my childhood sweetheart my wife. I looked at her as she slept beside me, at her tangled blond hair and fine skin, the shape of her nose and at her soft, parted lips. For the first time that day I thought of the hero as an actor rather than as myself, and I slept soundly.

I did not get the job when I was called back for the second interview, and in retrospect I am glad that I didn't. At the time I was disappointed, but my life carried on comfortably and provincially, and city life has never since appealed to me. On my return to Birmingham for the ill-fated second interview I looked in at the cinema but the film they were showing was apparently a Norwegian "comedy of manners." It didn't appeal, and I did not have the time to watch it.

Almost immediately

Loup-garou became something of a joke amongst our friends. I had explained what had happened one evening to another couple at a dinner party, and my wife saw a tear in my eye as I explained the plot, and a great deal of fun was had at my expense. I played up to it, and berated my wife for leaving me for another in her filmic existence, and letting me, presumably, attack her and her lover and then commit suicide. My wife was quite fascinated by the idea of the film, and between ourselves we resolved that we would try and see it. Obscure French art films don't often appear on the provincial film circuit, though, and it was some years before I saw any reference to it anywhere.