In one of many eerie scenes inAlejandro Amenábar’s 2001 haunted house movieThe Others,Nicole Kidman’s character Grace discovers a “book of the dead” in her house, filled with photographs of dead people dressed in their finest and placed before a camera by their relatives. This scene is a reference to theunsettling real-world tradition of death photography, which caught on quickly with the advent of modern photography in 1839. The historical context of post-mortem photography helps deepen the meaning ofThe Othersto another level.
The Others
In 1945, immediately following the end of Second World War, a woman who lives with her two photosensitive children on her darkened old family estate in the Channel Islands becomes convinced that the home is haunted.
What Is ‘The Others’ About?
The Otherstells the story of Grace Stewart and her children Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley), who are living in a large, old house on the Island of Jersey in the Channel Islands in 1945, while Grace’s husband is fighting in the war. Anne and Nicholas suffer from an extreme sensitivity to light, so the drapes must be closed at all times in any given room. Gradually, the house becomes more active withwhat appears to be paranormal activity.Anne reports seeing several distinct ghosts around the house, who she calls “the intruders” and “the others.” Inone of the greatest horror plot twists, Grace eventually faces the truth that she and her children are ghosts, while the “intruders” are residents of the house attempting to conduct a seance. Rewatching the “book of the dead” scene with historical context and knowledge of death photography changes the way we interpret this scene asforeshadowing Grace’s frightening realization.
‘The Others’ References a Morbid Victorian Tradition
In the scene where Grace discovers the book of the dead, she is in the midst of searching through a box of photographs of former residents of the house and comparing them to the drawing her daughter made of “the others” she has seen around the house. She stumbles on an album containing photographs of dead people who she believes to be sleeping. Grace asks her maid, Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), about the album. Mrs. Mills explains that the people in the photographs aren’t sleeping, but are dead. As she turns the pages, Grace is shocked to see group portraits and children seated next to each other, eyes closed. Looking at Grace with a piercing gaze, Mrs. Mills says, “sometimes the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living.” Towards the end of the film, as the truth is unraveling itself to Grace, she finds a photograph under Mrs. Mills' bed which has been removed from the book. It is a post-mortem picture dating to 1891 of Mrs. Mills, the gardener, Mr. Tuttle, and another maid, Lydia, lying next to each other, all dead from a tuberculosis outbreak.
Death photography was a popular form of portraiture in the19th century, andoften a photograph of a dead relative would be the only photograph taken of that person,as reported inThe New York Times.The invention of photography coincided with a series of disastrous epidemics which shook Victorian society, including cholera, diptheria, typhoid fever, and scarlet fever.According to theBBC,families would often paint over the eyes of their deceased relatives to make them appear more lifelike. The trend died down as photography became more accessible and affordable, and eventuallyphotographs of the living replaced these homages to the dead.
The way that early photography worked made for some unsettling visual details in post-mortem photography. As reported in theBBC, because daguerreotypes relied on long-exposure camera techniques, if a dead person was photographed next to a living person, the dead person would appear in sharper definition because they were completely still. In contrast, the living person would appear more blurry, due to slight movement. This technical detail isperfect for horror because it implies an inverted world, where ghosts appear more real than the living.This is exactly what happens inThe Others,where Grace gradually realizes that “the others” haunting her house are in fact living people, and she and her children are ghosts. It is these subtle details which make viewers think rather than terrify with jump scares, and which ultimately placeThe Othersamongthe best paranormal movies of all time.
Looking back at the “book of the dead” scene with the context of post-mortem photography, this moment in the film serves a much more significant purpose for Grace than merely being creepy. Finding photographs of the dead, who look lifelike with their painted eyes and sharp definition, acts as a literal metaphor for Grace’s new reality. For nearly the whole film, she and her children are not even aware that they are dead, because they feel just as alive and real as they did before, though the rules have changed. Grace has also been in denial about the way that she and her children died, and when Mrs. Mills says, “Grief over the death of a loved one can lead people to do the strangest things,” this also foreshadows Grace’s later realization that she killed both of her children in a moment of grief at the death of her husband. Theatmospheric, shadowy house and the increasingly dense mist surrounding itact as ametaphor for Grace’s denial and failed attempts to keep herself in the dark.
The Haunting in ‘The Others’ Has an Emotional Core
Just as death photography for Victorians was a way of memorializing their loved ones and embracing the beauty in death, similarly, Amenábar took amore emotional approach to ghosts than most blockbuster supernatural films.The Otherscaptures the simultaneous humanity and fear surrounding death and what happens after it, and is apsychological exploration of grief and regret.Finding the book of the dead serves as a literal memento mori for Graceas she begins to unravel what has happened to her and what she has done.
The Othersis available to rent on Prime Video in the U.S.
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