With these words, Jaz is making it clear that her stories, each set at a different location in “one of the most haunted places in the country” (“Haunted?”, Venus responds sceptically, “Ohio!?”), are also didactic, intended not just to entertain, but also to change the mind of their audience (both Venus and the viewer) if they are attentive to all their allegorical nuance. They are tales of sexual difference, of small-town prejudice, of longings and loathings that never die – and they are all located at points where sexuality and race intersect.
This is what sets Parker Brennon’s feature apart. For where a regular complaint against anthologies is their bittiness, here a certain cohesion is maintained across these four stories and their frame, thanks all at once to a fixed thematic focus on LGBTQ issues, to a ‘hauntological’ concentration on a single region and its legendary history, to a certain ‘genetic’ connection between the tales (all of which ramify from the long, intertwining family trees of the Price and the Cashel clans), and to the steering influence of a singular (if pronominally plurally) writer/director.
Witchcraft Becomes Her follows the fugitive Julian Cashel as s/he transitions, with help from local witch Annalisa Drouais (Naomi Grossman), from male (Ace Rosas) to female (Zoey Luna), and then has to exorcise once more from her existence a ‘perfect’, if demonic, distillation of masculinity. The Day Mabel Came Out of the Grave enables the ghost of Venus’ great great great grandmother Mabel Bishop (Jacinda Forbes) to embrace her sexuality in a more accepting age, with another lesbian (Abigail Esmena) who has had enough of her own loneliness within a relationship.
As its allusive title implies, Paint and Black Lace adopts the tropes of a classic giallo (the black-gloved killer, the colour-coded lighting). Such overt imitative appropriation comes with a certain irony, as this story follows another of Venus’ relatives, the deceased artist May Felner (Kim Lea Mays ), taking her revenge from beyond the grave on those who steal, copy or fake her own work, and transforming their corpses into polychromatic canvases for new art. The love witch herself Samantha Robinson appears as May’s ex-lover Christina, still in the grip of the possessive late painter.
Finally The Old Dark Cashel House pits journalist Madeline Ishii (Lindsey McDowell) against the lingering spirit of hateful white patriarch William Cashel (James DeForest Parker) who had murdered Mabel over a century ago, and who continues to persecute those – like Jazmine and Venus – who are different. The way to survive him, as his living relative Josephine Cashel (Nancy Loomis) has learnt, is to abide by his strictly imposed, thoroughly outdated and suffocating rules, but some – like Jazmine and Venus – would prefer to expel him from their lives altogether than to have to keep living in accordance with his antiquated, patrician values.
What Venus is learning through these paradigmatic stories is that the very family she is fleeing in fact has its own long history of non-conformity, heterodoxy and resistance, however belated, to repression – an inheritance that she too can continue, if she so chooses. The same, of course, goes for viewers, who can ally themselves where they please in these spooky narratives of injustice and discrimination paid back – but also paid forward. For here, solidarity and sisterhood cross different generations and planes of existence, and never die.
Hauntology had its international première at FrightFest 2024, 23 August
