ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - August 10th
"THE OTHERS" released in 2001
[first lines]Grace: Now children, are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...
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Raising her sickly children, Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley), after the death of her husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) in World War II, devout Catholic Grace Stewart (Kidman) is initially eager to welcome the arrival of three new servants to the house - aging Mrs. Bertha Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), elderly gardener Edmund Tuttle (Eric Sykes), and a mute girl named Lydia (Elaine Cassidy). As Grace shows the servants around the home she explains the rigid rules she has in place to protect her children, who suffer from a rare photosentive disease xeroderma pigmentosum, from direct sunlight. Little time passes before odd events start to occur. Grace finds a 19th-century "book of the dead", an album of mourning portrait photos of deceased family members from a previous generation (with some pages missing), Mr. Tuttle is seen covering gravestones under autumn leaves, and Anne starts to draw pictures of four people she has seen in the house numerous times: a man, woman, a boy called Victor, and an old woman. Grace does not believe her daughter has seen the others until she hears the ghosts herself, and fearing something unholy is the house, runs into the fog to find the local priest for a blessing - and instead finds her husband Charles wandering in the mist, distant and confused. A short time later, Grace attacks someone dressed up like her daughter; frightened by the face she sees underneath Anne's First Communion veil, and is shocked to discover she has actually attacked Anne. Grace's already fragile grip on reality starts to strain even further as Charles suddenly disappears again and discovers the servants are holding a dark and terrible secret about the Others in the house that may will take Grace's sanity to breaking point!
Grace: You told your brother there was someone else in the room.
Anne: There was.
Grace: That'll do, Anne.
Top: Grace Stewart starts to question her sanity when she hears strange
noises throughout the house; Above: Grace searches for help but is lost in
a strange fog.
Impressed with Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar's film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), producer Tom Cruise bought the rights intending to remake the film as Vanilla Sky (with Cameron Crowe). After meeting with Amenábar, Cruise would later offer Amenábar the opportunity to write and direct The Others, a gothic thriller based on an episode from the British series Armchair Theatre called The Others made in 1970, and in fact had already been adapted into a feature film, Voices, in 1972. While director Alejandro Amenábar's version of the story is much more elaborate, the plot remains largely the same, with Amenábar basing a lot of the script on his Catholic school upbringing. Although this film would be the director's first English-speaking movie, he did in fact write the script in Spanish before having it translated for the cast and crew.
Anne: [about the Others] They're everywhere - they say this house is theirs.
Top: Nicholas and Anne begin to wonder about the Others;
Above: "Are you Mad? I am your daughter"
Amenábar's first choice for the role of Grace Stewart was producer Cruise's then wife, Nicole Kidman, having been a fan of hers after seeing Kidman in To Die For. Although Kidman initially tried to persuade Amenábar and the Weinstein brothers (of studio Dimension Films) to find another actress for the part as she had just come off filming the bright and exuberant Moulin Rouge! and was reluctant to do a film that explored such dark places. Kidman would however accept the role and later pressed for the hiring of Eric Sykes as Edmund Tuttle, as she and Cruise had twice been hugely impressed by his theatre work (in School for Wives and Kafka's Dick). The most difficult casting choices were for the roles of the Stewart children, Anne and Nicholas. After an exhaustive casting search of over 5,000 children, Alakina Mann and James Bentley were finally cast (Bentley was cast first, but Mann took a little longer to be cast as the filmmakers wanted someone who'd be strong opposite Nicole Kidman).
Grace: If you're dead, then leave us in peace. Leave us in peace!
Mrs. Mills: And suppose we do leave you, ma'am, do you suppose that They will?
Grace: Who?
Mrs. Mills: The intruders.
Top: The eerie new servants, Mrs. Bertha Mills (Fionnula Flanagan),
Edmund Tuttle (Eric Sykes) and Lydia (Elaine Cassidy);
Above: Grace confronts the servants outside the house
Although set in the island of Jersey, off the English south-east coast, only a small portion of The Others was filmed in the UK, notably the Lime Walk gardens in Penshurst Place in Kent which was used as a location for the scene where Grace runs into the fog looking for the priest but instead finds her presumed-dead husband Charles. Most of the filming would actually take place in Spain, including Las Fraguas, Cantabria, and in Madrid. Basing the look of the movie on drawings from books of the '30s and '40s he read as a child, Amenábar would sometimes light entire scenes with lit candles in order to play with the shadows. To prepare his two young stars for a particularly scary scene, Amenábar would play scary music when Mann and Bentley weren't expecting it to get the kids tense and wound up!
[interrupting the seance]
Grace: We're not dead, we're not dead!
Top: The psychic Old Lady (Renée Asherson) tries to commune with "the dead";
Above: Grace finally learns the truth about the Others!
On it's release, The Others was a major financial success, grossing almost $100 million in the US alone (and an additional $113 million worldwide) placing it on the list of Top 20 highest grossing horror films of all time! Critics were also impressed, Roger Ebert gave the film two and a half stars out of four, praising that "...Alejandro Amenábar has the patience to create a languorous, dreamy atmosphere, and Nicole Kidman succeeds in convincing us that she is a normal person in a disturbing situation and not just a standard-issue horror movie hysteric." The Others would be the first film ever to receive the Best Film Award at the Goyas (Spain's national film awards) with not a single word of Spanish spoken in it.
Above: Director Alejandro Amenábar with Nicole Kidman
This period would mark a low point in Kidman's personal life with the release of The Others occurring in the very same week as the finalization of her high profile divorce from Tom Cruise. Ironically, Cruise's American remake of Amenábar's Open Your Eyes would open a few months later, although Vanilla Sky reached nowhere near the commercial and critical response as The Others. The Others would also go on to be parodied in numerous later films, including Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror XXV and Scary Movie 3 (particularly using the famous "I am your daughter" sequence). Two unauthorized Bollywood remakes would also follow, with Hum Kaun Hai? in 2004, and Anjaane in 2005. Both films were not well received and mainly criticized as merely being a "copycat" version of The Others. Still Hum Kaun Hai? manged to garner some praise with Taran Adarsh from Bollywood Hungama writing that the film "revolves mostly around Dimple Kapadia's [playing the Kidman role as Sandra Williams] beliefs and perceptions and the actress is up to the task of making it look one thousand per cent convincing. Undeniably talented, Dimple's performance can be rightly referred to as the soul of the enterprise."
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 83%
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