Film

Review by Marlon Wallace, The M Report – No Country for Old Men (2007) proved how effective a suspense film could be with minimal sound and an extreme lack of a musical score. It was probably the quietest thriller I’d ever seen, and yet still quite terrifying.

This short film by co-directors Eric Walter and Jon Parke rivals this year’s Oscar-winner by co-directors Joel and Ethan Coen as a sort of a “No Country for Old Women.” Instead of a mostly hushed yet aggressively-active chase, Walter and Parke make theirs a mostly loud yet passively-chilling following.

Here, an old woman, presumably widowed, living alone except for her dog, is stalked and essentially haunted, not by a psychotic bounty hunter, but a noise, or a series of noises. It’s not just haunting. This film, in fact, is an assault of sounds. It’s in the vein of The Raven or The Tell-Tale Heart, except there is none of Edgar Allan Poe’s psychological insight. Yet, all the Gothic charm as well as all the evocative and symbolic power remain.

Working from a template by C.B. Colby, a short story adaptation of a folklore, which feels like it could have penned by Poe, Walter and Parke embrace a sort of nihilistic approach to filmmaking, like the Coens, that provides no answers and that exists merely to overthrow or shock the senses.

Yes, there have been plenty of ghost or paranormal films that have used the idea of assaulting with sounds, but, what Walter and Parke achieve here is more than just a woman being terrified by creaky floors, or mere bumps in the night. This is a symphony of sonic sensations orchestrated within a Sergei Eisenstein-like montage.

The whole thing feels like a slowly-built Eisenstein montage. There’s no dialogue, just a succession of shots to sound. All told is longer than most montages in feature films, but I was so absorbed in the assault and so on edge that it suspended time. A hour and a hurricane could have blew by and I wouldn’t have noticed.

As dependent on sound as this film is, though, it would not have worked without the visuals caught by Walter who was also the sole camera operator. When asked, one of Walter’s chief concern was how to make this short about what can’t be seen. He didn’t want to simply make a radio or audio-only program. There had to be pictures.

Yet, this short is about an unknown and invisible force that attacks an old woman of yesteryear. How do you capture that? How do you see what can’t be seen?

Walter illustrates this with ordinary things you might find outside an old farmhouse and intensifies them. He stacks them, not only sonically but sight-wise, one on another like a Tower of Babel. Of course, none of it would have worked without the great performance of his one and only actress, Bobbie Calloway.

If Walter is indeed stacking, he’s stacking on the back of Calloway who carries it and who makes you feel the weight of that stack. It’s a gradual crushing weight that does literally collapse her, but she transfers, without speaking a word, by her face and body language alone, the confusing and scattering anxiety.

Through it all, we see and feel that invisible force. What is it exactly? We don’t know. Consciously or not, Walter and Parke give a naturalistic attachment. The woman hurries inside her home after noticing the nosies, their increasing proximity and volume. She locks the door, shuts all the windows, which only briefly diminish the problem. Though she’s inside, the filmmakers keep cutting back to images of the skyline and rolling clouds over trees, as a nagging omnipresence.

There’s one moment where the possibility arises that it’s all in her head, as the old woman stares in a scratched mirror. But, perhaps, the filmmakers are saying that what is most scary is not the supernatural, but what is absolutely natural, that which is all around you, everything… as well as nothing.

Production Notes by Eric Walter

I first heard this story when I was a kid. My father had given me a book, Strangely Enough by C.B. Colby, a collection of short folkore stories, each about a page and a half long. Growing up on books like Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to the Tell in the Dark, I had a deep fascination with American folklore from an early age. Unlike your typical horror story, The Whistle built a sense of dread by introducing an unknown, unseen threat.

In the original story, it’s described more like a human whistle, as if something or someone was approaching the old woman’s farmhouse. Wherever the sound was coming from, it was never to be seen.

“One night, as she was going about her chores, she became conscious of an odd whistling sound somewhere outside. It seemed to surround the house but did not sound like high wind in the pines, noises of nature, or a human whistle. It was very strange.”

The elements were there for an effective short. I’ve always been interested in what you don’t see in film. The unknown. Those things which we do not understand or cannot see that may be threatening us. This structure forces the viewer to imagine what might be lurking in the shadows. This is the way I remembered the story as a kid. Therefore, this was the way I pursued experimenting with it on film.