The TV show American Horror Story is probably partly responsible for Damian McCarthy’s Oddity, a horror movie that cuts through the subgenres with a cackle.
AHS does it season by season, but McCarthy is doing it all in one compendious film, a bit of 1970s here, some 1930s there, a hint of silent-era horror even, plus a hefty dollop of 1980s and 1960s, the two epochal mainstays.
Which is to say dangerous dolls (1980s) and psychics (1960s).
But first the funny old big house, where Dani is in charge of doing up this doer-upper – and very grand it’ll be when finished – while husband Ted works long shifts at the local asylum, where some very rum characters are to be found.
Carolyn Bracken doesn’t get much time on screen as Dani, but it’s long enough to establish that phone signals do not reach this remote pile. Dani is soon dead, possibly at the hand of an escaped lunatic, or possibly AN Other. This allows Bracken to shift from dark hair to bleached platinum and take on the role of Dani’s sister, Darcy, an antiquarian/junk shop owner who’s blind and also a psychic.
The film proper gets underway with Darcy arriving at the big old house one night about a year after Dani’s funeral. The house is more or less finished and Ted (Gwilym Lee) is now living there with Yana (Caroline Menton), a sales rep for a pharmaceuticals company Ted might or might not have been seeing before wife Dani died. Darcy clearly does not approve of Yana, or of how hastily Ted has replaced his dead wife. She maybe had designs on Ted herself.
So, Ted killed Dani and Darcy’s here for paranormal revenge, the end? Not so fast. McCarthy is interested far less in the whys and wherefores than he is in working up a spooky mood. Darcy, for example, is accompanied by a strange, full-size, mud-coloured doll reminiscent of the creature from the silent 1920 classic The Golem. And in scenes taking place at the asylum, the frankly rather suspicious Ted confabs with an orderly straight out of the 1930s – cadaverous cheeks, dark looks, hair that could use some moisturiser.
Meanwhile the backroom boys do their thing. The sound design, by Aza Hands and team, repeatedly brings ambient sounds to the fore. This is a house of wheezing floorboards and wind whistling through windows. Richard G Mitchell’s score hovers like an impending thunderstorm. Lauren Kelly’s production design makes much of this quasi-baronial building in County Cork, Ireland (and I do hope that’s not Portland cement holding the building together where lime would have been more structurally appropriate).
In front of the camera Bracken is very impressive in a purse-lipped way as the disapproving clairvoyant, while Lee plays her husband as an unlikeable man whose just deserts cannot come soon enough. Steve Wall as orderly Ivan (of course) looks like he’s come straight from an acting module on understudying Boris Karloff.
A bit of splatter here, some starey-eyed psychic mumbo-jumbo there, McCarthy rips back and forth through the decades, stylewise, but it’s only as the film enters its final act that it feels like the parts become a whole.
It takes off. And as it does McCarthy eases off a touch on the style tributes and focuses more on adding dramatic weight. As Oddity becomes less reminiscent of the anthology movies of yore, like Tales from the Crypt or Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, things start to go their own way while staying true to the initial trajectory.
There is style to burn, boxes to tick and much geekery and nerdery to be done. In the end it is one for connoisseurs of horror, rather than people who want to be properly scared witless. There are other movies for that.
Oddity – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
