Admittedly, Valerie on the Stairs isn't quite a full movie, but one of the many long-form episodes of the Masters of Horror anthology show. But let's ignore that because this is (in spite of the negative reviews all over the internet) a fun little flick with a fantastic cast and credentials. Based on a story by Clive Barker, it features Clare Grant, Christopher Lloyd, and Tony Todd.
What is real? And its companion question: What is fiction? are common themes in movies from Matrix to Cool World. And here both questions are taken to the farthest logical ends. But I'll stop that line of thought to avoid spoilers.
Valorie on the Stairs begins like so many writers' stories, with rejection. Stacks of letters saying the proverbial thanks but no thanks. Robert knows what it's like to be a storyteller without an audience, a preborn, perhaps unborn, creative with something personal to offer to the world. So, to hone his craft and become a published writer (i.e., successful) he moves into Highberger House, an enclave for unpublished writers to help them have a quiet place to work.
Now, as he begins to see visions of a beautiful girl on the stairs, he works up the nerve to ask a fellow member of the house, "Is this place haunted?" After a smirk and a laugh, the neighbor responds, "Only by the specter of failure."
It's a danger we all fall prey to too easily at times. See enough rejections, and failure becomes not a temporary place we're moving through, but a character trait we wonder if we've caught like a disease.
One of the exchanges I really love from this movie is the following:
"Weird fucking people. We're writers. It's not like you're seeing ghosts."
But as writers, we are, aren't we? We're always seeing and hearing ghosts. Of course, granted, they're not actually spirits of the dead but the people, the words, the action in our work that is always floating around our brains.
Those are our ghosts. And our only recourse is to write them away. How often have you not been able to sleep at night simply because there is a scene or snippet or bit of dialog you have to write down before your mind will let you relax and sleep?
In many ways, our stories own us, not the other way around. They have the power to control our lives simply by existing in our imaginations.
Like Rob, we write to know we are real, that we exist. We write, as I said in a previous review, what we are looking for within. Rob Hanisey wants love. It's why he dreams of a lost romance. It's why he is drawn to Valerie and is willing to risk everything to save her. It's why he writes that love is a claw. It's all he knows of love.
I have a friend who is a fantastic example of this. He believed that he had experienced and lost his "one great love," and because of that, the idea of that one great love that transcends time and space and dimensions filtered its way into his work -- and I mean a lot of his work. His fantasy book was all about the man who ventures through hell to save the girl who was that love. His short stories often talked about loves separated across time. He was obsessed with the one great love, and it showed in his work. As he got older and his life experiences took him beyond that, his work started to reflect his new needs and obsessions. It's only natural.
And those characters are what they are as they are birthed from our mysteries. For example, is Valerie good? Is she evil? Is she a captive? Is she complicit? She simply is as she is written.
In spite of how the stories can affect reality, in spite of how the stories reveal our needs and wants, in spite of how the stories make us feel like either failures or successes, we are the drivers who chart the path. We are the painters who decide the colors and the emotions in the work. We are the architects who put the Valeries in the walls and on the stairs. That's all our doing as writers.
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