The Cutprice Guignol

Rose Red is very nearly a haunted house horror classic.

After I gave Storm of the Century a go earlier this year – and was pleasantly surprised by how much I loved it – I decided it was time, what with it being spooky season and all, to take a look at Stephen King’s other excursions into the televisual realm. Which, of course, brought me to Rose Red, his horror story set in Seattle and following a group of the supernaturally-blessed as they attempt to navigate the complex history of a bizarre haunted house built in the early 1900s. Rose Red is another collaboration with Craig R. Baxley, who also directed Storm, and was broadcast on ABC in early 2002.

Rose Red is King’s love letter to the iconic and brilliant The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, a novel which King himself has often quoted as one of the best pieces of horror literature of all time – the story was originally conceived as a loose remake of 1963’s The Haunting, which itself is an adaptation of the Jackson book. Now, I’m as huge a fan of Hill House as King is, and King’s love of this story and its themes is evident in practically every second of Rose Red – if there’s one aspect that’s most prominent, though, it’s the idea of a literal mad house, a building that no longer abides by the rules of sanity. King pulls on another iconic bit of haunted Americana to expand on this idea, weaving through aspects of the Winchester Mystery House and its bizarre history to reflect this sort of metastasised growth of a home as a result of its crazed nature. Rose Red as a structure has lost its mind, flexing and bending and growing and shrinking as it attempts to contain the madness within.

And, at least for the first couple of episodes, these ideas coalesce into a pretty damn entertaining slice of haunted house TV. The series revolves around Joyce (Nancy Travis), a parapsychology professor whose career is on the line after her fascination with the occult has left her reputation severely dented, as she leads a group of psychics into Rose Red to try and activate the house into paranormal activity to prove her line of research is worthwhile. Joyce is one of the highlights of the show, an obsessive so consumed by her goal that she loses herself and her humanity to it entirely – it’s a bold choice to make the show’s protagonist so morally questionable, but it offers a richness of character that would have been lost had they tried to swerve her into the sympathetic instead.

The psychic group that she assembles to enter the house with her fill out the rest of the cast, with Annie Wheaton (Kimberly J. Brown) and her sister Sissy (Melanie Lynskey, my beloved) serving as the centre. Annie’s an interesting character, as a teenage girl with telekinetic abilities – it’s hard not to draw parallels with Carrie White, but he takes a very different approach with Annie. Annie is protected and cared-for by her sister, and, later, by members of the group, her powers a strength rather than a subject of ridicule or vitriol for the majority of the show. Julian Sands is the standout from the rest of the super-powered group, imbuing his Nick with warmth and wit, while David Dukes chews up the scenery as the interfering department head set against Joyce’s mission.

The premise of the visit to Rose Red involving people who are already believers in the paranormal lets the show skip out on all the disbelief and dismissal that’s usually present in haunted house stories like this, and to dive straight in to the spookery of the place. The first day or so we spend in the house is genuinely brilliant, as far as I’m concerned; winding the house’s sprawling history around its surreal, ever-changing presence, the real effects used for the sinister ghosts, the slow sense of dread creeping up on the characters, it ticks off all the boxes as the house’s presence closes in on the unfortunate guests.

Which is what makes it doubly disappointing that the third act of the show fumbles the ball so badly. After such a solid set-up, the final hour or so is a rush to knock off as many characters as possible, or so it seems – there are some decent set-pieces here, but some characters don’t even get an on-screen sequence to see them into the ether, which feels bizarre given how character-driven the show’s been till this point. It’s a distinctly cluttered finale, with so much of the intriguing history of the house dumped to make way for another dodgy CGI sequence of someone meeting their ghostly demise – I couldn’t help but feel that it would have worked much better in book format, with more direct POV sequences of the various characters adding to the tension and terror as things ramp up past the point of no return. And, maybe this is just me, but if I had to watch one more minute of Matt Ross as psychic Emery breathing snortily through his mouth while he bugged out his eyes furiously, that house wasn’t going to be the only thing they had to worry about, you know what I mean?#

Rose Red is about two-thirds of a good story – two-thirds of a great one, even if it is one that relies on the tropes of classic haunted house stories of decades past. But it goes off the boil so severely in the finale that it’s basically unforgivable by the time the credits roll, and that’s a real shame given its obvious strengths. If you’ve seen Rose Red, I’d love to hear what you made of it – how does it stack up against King’s other work, literary or otherwise, and where does it stand in his TV-specific writing? Let me know in the comments below, and check out my other writing on Stephen King here and here!

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(header image via IMDB)