The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 4-10
Paperhouse (1988)
Directed by Bernard Rose
This eerie horror-fantasy sort of follows the sick-kids-who-fall-in-love template, but the romance is set in a nightmarescape created by the girl’s pencil drawings. She’s a newly rebellious tween, prone to fainting and fever fantasies, who travels psychically while unconscious to her own personal ChalkZone, making the movie also an entry in that odd genre about artists and their responsibilities to the characters they create. The oneiric titular structure is her subconscious made manifest, first on paper and then in dreamland, part of a world becoming increasingly nightmarish because she can’t erase away the mistakes, and the more she tries to draw it right the more she fucks it up (a nice metaphor for real life), until Paperhouse is a decaying building, home to a dystrophic boyfriend (whose condition’s worsening) and beset upon by a drunk and blind hammer-wielding dream dad. The surreal, grip-tightening tension is elemental, all about fears of fire and bad parents—of violence and lovelessness. And then it opens up into a sappy, bittersweet romance, unnerving yet oddly touching. There really are no other movies like this one. Henry Stewart (November 5, 9:30pm, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Scary Movies 9,” introduced by Rose)
