In his introductory essay included in this release, film critic Peter Tonguette writes the following regarding the setting of the film, “Halloween! Is Flatliners a horror film? Not quite, and certainly not at first.”

I disagree.

In fact, in honor that Halloween is coming up, I thought I would pick a few Halloween appropriate stories and films that I like to blog about and the first one that came to mind is Flatliners. More so even than The Crow, which is my favorite Halloween movie. It’s just that this one is more disturbing than any of the others, and whenever the year starts to fade and the weather turns cold, I find myself thinking of this movie, with its theme of death and regeneration and time. I think at the end of the year, with its figurative death, you naturally start to reflect upon some things, and this movie is, if nothing else, reflective. It even features the Fountain of Time in its opening credits.

Tonguette goes on to conclude that Flatliners is more “medical thriller” than “Universal monster movie”, but that’s sort of what makes it more horrifying. The film concerns itself with real questions about mortality and what might come next, and that which really haunts us, exactly the sort of thing that the festival of Halloween concerns itself with. “All Hallows Eve” is a combination of the Celtic festival of Samhain, where ancients used to dress up in scary costumes to ward of the dead at the end of the year because that’s when the boundary between the land of the living and the land of the dead was weakest, and All Saints Day, which Pope Gregory III created later for the faithful to reflect upon the lives of the saints, and, by proxy, upon their own shortcomings.

That’s literally what this movie is about. In case you haven’t seen it already (it is thirty-something years old), Flatliners is about a group of medical students who want to see what is on the other side of death by “flatlining” deliberately and then coming back to life through the miracle of science and their fellows’ expertise at medical intervention. But they inadvertently bring their sins back with them from the land of the dead and things go very wrong from there.

It’s exactly a Halloween movie, not least of all because it takes place over Halloween (with a full moon no less, as one of the students points out.)

And though Flatliners is also a sci-fi medical drama, and a good one at that–the scenes where they are trying desperately to bring each other back with defibrillators and other medical accoutrements work quite well–it is more, I think, a study of the sublime and the grotesque in a kind of Ruskian sense, and I think that also weighs in favor of it being a Halloween movie, or at least, not a straight medical procedural. And frankly, it’s a more interesting movie if you consider it this way. Nelson (Kieffer Sutherland), the main character, explains as the rationale for why he’s conducting this experiment, “[it’s] quite simply to see if there’s anything out there beyond death. Philosophy failed, religion failed, now it’s up to the natural sciences. I think mankind deserves to know.” (This by the way, is Ruskin naturalism). But I think what interested the filmmakers had more to do with “the Gothic” than with biology, and I think that’s why it’s still interesting to us.

By Gothic I mean that which thinkers like John Ruskin wrote about in the second half of the nineteenth century. It’s a philosophy of art and architecture and morality, and maybe just life in general, that was inspired by the gothic architecture of Europe. I know it sounds like we’ve gone full crazy town here, but I think I can explain.

Amanda Reyes, the author of the first included essay titled “Land of the Almost-Dead: Flatliners and a historical overview of the near-death experience”, describes the setting of Flatliners as “[the] darkened recesses of a Gothic, decomposing building”. She is right to pick up on this. It is Gothic. There are grotesques decorating the walls in the form of what appears to be gorgon’s heads. There is also a frieze of man and the grim reaper fighting over the Staff of Asclepius at the entrance to the chamber where the students perform their experiments. The setting is vaguely church like, almost a Gothic cathedral. The medial school the students attend is associated with a church. Julia Roberts looks like the type of woman the pre-Raphaelites favored in their paintings.

I think Halloween plays into this idea of the gothic.

For thinkers like Ruskin, the Gothic contained both the sublime and the grotesque. Wikipedia’s entry on Ruskin links to its definition of “grotesque” which, it says “has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks.” (emphasis mine). And we get Halloween masks in the movie in various forms, not the least of which is at the mock Witches’ Sabbath that takes place outside of the school on Halloween night.

In an essay titled “Feeling Gothic: Affect and Aesthetics in Ruskin’s Architectural Theory” by Timothy Chandler, and published online in The Courtald Gallery Institute of Art‘s resources section, the author writes: “With the Grotesque we discover that the Gothic subject is not just the one who makes Gothic art but also one who experiences the world as Gothic, one who has seen the spectre of death and played with fear.”

Fear is actually a feeling this movie manages to engender in its audience. And I think that especially around the time of Halloween, people are looking for a something to give them a little fright, and Flatliners does that, but not in a monster movie sort of way. But simply with the “spectre of death.”

This interest in the Gothic appears in other of Schumacher films I’ve seen, although I don’t know if that is something he did deliberately or if he just let it happen (evidently, according to some of the Blu-ray extras on Flatliners, Schumacher took a hands off approach to film production, trusting the people he had hired to make the right decisions without too much of his input. Basically, the opposite of a micro manager. Everyone thought Flatliners was more of a collaboration, even between the actors.)

It appears in The Phantom of the Opera, with the disfigured Phantom, of course, but also the gothic architecture of the old Paris Opera House, complete with its own grotesques we are shown immediately after the chandelier is raised. It’s also in the vision of the vampire, both beautiful and deadly in The Lost Boys, and it’s found also in Batman Forever in the figure of Batman, who resembles nothing so much as a gargoyle (another fixture of gothic design, also mentioned in the Wikipedia entry of Ruskin’s Gothicism.

(It can also be found in the Edgar Allen Poe poem that this blog takes its name from. The “spectre of death” can be read as the pilgrim shadow. The “ideal” or the sublime is the city of gold, Eldorado.)

I think the director had to have some interest in this subject, or at least recognized its appeal, and maybe that was why he was hired to direct these projects and not, as Tonguette suggests in his essay, because he was undiscerning (In Tonguette’s defense, he was making this point to distinguish Flatliners from the rest of the director’s oeuvre. Needlessly, in my opinion, but as least he got that far).

I think maybe the lasting interest in the Gothic is actually something Ruskin used to distinguish that style from Classicism. He believed classicism was an affectation, too restrictive and not free spirited enough (and Jan de Bont, the cinematographer, used free spirited to describe the making of Flatliners) whereas the Gothic provided for the individual creative freedom of the craftsman (Ruskin would not have approved of the use of the Neo-Classical design of the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry as part of the setting). I think that this might be right. There is something humanizing about the Gothic, in its deformed shapes and often roughly hewn construction. This is why we still gravitate towards it and almost feel at home in it, as opposed to the more modern styles such as Classicism. And I think that’s what Halloween is about, and festivals in general, a time to let your hair down and be more human. Especially amongst Catholics (All Saints Day; they’re students at Loyola University, a Catholic Jesuit University), for whom Christ is as much revered for his humanity as his divine aspect.

Anyway, this post has become much more complicated than I had originally thought, although it does pave the way for some of the other Halloween movies I want to talk about, such as The Crow and The Cowboy Bebop Movie, both of which share aspects of the Gothic as well.

But before I end this post, I would like to at least mention something about the shooting of the film in a technical sense that I found interesting.

One of the included interviews in the extra features is with the cinematographer Jan de Bont. He talks about how he shot the film with the camera moving in the group shots. He didn’t cut that much to close ups in the editing room, so that the shots are longer and more organic. He thought that the only way to get an ensemble cast to work as a group was to shoot them as a group, but not with a static shot, he created dynamism with the moving camera. His philosophy is that the cinematographer is one of the cast in the scene, the camera interacting with the scene. He doesn’t like the editing approach where he says it’s like “tennis”, the camera cutting back and forth between two actors talking to each other for example. He would rather film both actors at the same time having the conversation.

I love this approach and it might be one of the reasons why I like Flatliners so much, and it’s the opposite of what Hollywood normally does. Jan de Bont is European, and he mentions that there is a different approach between American and European cinematographer in that in Europe the cinematographer actually holds the camera themselves, whereas in America they just direct someone else. Maybe that is why in Hollywood they rely so much on the editing room and closeups, because those require less feel for the scene. Bont says he holds the camera because the feel and timing for the scene can’t really be directed, you have to catch it in the moment.

In the book, The Way Hollywood Tells It, the author David Bordwell talks about shots have become so much shorter over the years. Watch any tv show or movie nowadays and it feels exactly like Jan de Bont said, like “tennis”, the camera ping-ponging back and forth between closeups of faces. It’s awful, I think. Just talking heads between action scenes. There are no “bodies” for example, like what we talked about in the Conan movies.

So, if you are looking for an example of an ensemble cast interacting with each other without closeups every two seconds, look no further than Flatliners.

Because this movie has Kevin Bacon in it, I thought we could play Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon with some of the Conan stars using the Kevin Bacon Oracle website.

None of the stars of the Conan movies are more than two degrees removed from Kevin Bacon, including Gerry Lopez, who only has a few credits. But also, interestingly, none have been in the same move with him.

Anyway, hope you get to see Flatliners this Halloween.

Feeling Gothic: Affect and Aesthetics in Ruskin’s Architectural Theory – The Courtauld