VALERIE ON THE STAIRS

Aspiring writer Rob Hanisee takes a room in a hotel where aspiring or declining writers are housed for free until the publication of their work. The building is inhabited by failed writers, mostly cynical, disillusioned, or still full of hope, and Rob fits in with the latter, despite a not-so-rosy family past. But strange events «disturb» Rob's work continuously: a girl often asks for help in the building's corridors and then disappears between the walls, dragged away by a monstrous being. Rob cannot understand if these visions are the product of his imagination or if a ghost moves between the walls of the hotel. He will start investigating. «Masters of Horror» is a singular project born from the mind of Mick Garris, a director known in the horror field, especially for the adaptations of Stephen King's novels. Garris thought of bringing together the most representative horror film directors in a project destined for cable TV Showtime and home video, the result is «Masters of Horror», a series of 13 half-hour films of 60 minutes each, each directed by a great name in genre cinema; each episode has a budget of 1.8 million dollars, the location set in the Canadian city of Vancouver, and total creative freedom was granted to each director. The names involved in the second season of this project are: Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, Stuart Gordon, Joe Dante, John Carpenter, John Landis, Ernest Dickerson, Brand Anderson, Tom Holland, Peter Medak, Rob Schmidt, Norio Tsuruta, and Mick Garris himself. Mick Garris, creator of the «Masters of Horror» project, returns behind the camera also for the second season. After the potentially interesting but disappointing «Chocolate» from the first series, based on his own story, Garris decides to tackle a work by friend Clive Barker and thus gives life to one of the best things realized during his long career. Garris, it is known, has never been a great director, rather bogged down in tedious TV adaptations of Stephen King's novels. Garris is a writer, he has a long career as a screenwriter, he debuted as a journalist in film magazines and regularly writes stories, so a story that talked about writers, broken dreams, and literary imagination characters could not be better suited to him. «The Beast» (bad title replaced in Italy by the much more suitable «Valerie on the Stairs») is a curious and fascinating object; it immerses us in the world of literature in a singular way, showing us the life of failed writers and their creations endowed with their own life. «Valerie on the Stairs» is a never-published novel, but Valerie is also a girl that the protagonist often encounters on the hotel's internal stairs: reality and imagination continuously mix, Valerie is a ghost, a lover, a desire, but also an idea that has not had a concrete development, she has not managed to leave the walls of that building and is therefore forced to wander in those corridors forever. But Valerie is not the only one who moves in those corridors, there is also a horrible infernal creature (the beast of the title) who keeps her chained to herself, possesses her as one possesses an object, but at the same time loves her and kills anyone who tries in some way to put an end to her existence, or somehow tries to take her away. The film struggles a bit to get started, the initial description of the characters is not very original and the first appearances of Valerie remind too much of the countless ghost stories of which Hollywood is full; then, with the entrance of the manuscript and the meta-literary dimension, everything becomes more interesting and relatively original. The splatter scenes are very well realized by the usual excellent team of Berger and Nicotero and in this case are optimally dosed throughout the story. The cast is convincing and alongside the protagonist Tyron Leitso («House of the Dead»; «Seed») appear especially the seductive Clare Grant («Black Snake Moan») in the role of Valerie and Christopher Lloyd (the unforgettable Emmett «Doc» Brown of «Back to the Future») in the role of the writer Everett Neely. It is mandatory to mention Tony Todd («Candyman»; «Night of the Living Dead»), hidden behind the unrecognizable makeup (a bit derivative, to be honest) of the Beast. Strange, metaphorical, and surreal ending.