Paperhouse (1988)

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This is one of the most memorable films I saw in my younger days. Dreams have always fascinated me. This film is about a young girl Anna, who draws a sketch house in her drawing book. She then has a fainting spell. When she wakes up, she finds herself looking at the very house she has drawn.She then realizes the enormous potential her house has. She starts first by drawing an occupant in the first floor of her house(which is actually a face in the window). She forgets to draw any doors or stairs in the house. When she has her fainting spell again, she finds her new occupant is a boy called Marc. Marc states that he had been living in the house before Anna arrived. Anna tells Marc to let him in, but Marc replies that he can't as Anna hasn't drawn any stairs or doors.Anna draws some stairs and doors and furniture for her next visit. She finds Marc is a cripple who can't walk. She tells Marc that when she drew him, she forgot to give him any legs. Marc tells her that he isn't a drawing but a real person and that he has been in this way for a very long time.Who is Marc and what happens next is for you to find out.If you can afford it, buy the DVD of this film, you won't regret it.This film is directed by British director Bernard Rose, who directed the horror film Candyman(1992) based on Clive Barker's short story The Forbidden. I thoroughly recommend you see Candyman if you haven't seen it yet.

Young Anna (Charlotte Burke) leads a lonely life: her mother (Glenne Headly) works all day and her father (Ben Cross) is working abroad; Anna doesn't get along at school, starting fights with classmates and teachers. To make matters worse, she starts having dizzy spells on her birthday, and in dreams she travels to a house she has control over through her drawings.This is the premise of Paperhouse, a movie by Bernard Rose, based on a novel by Catherine Storr, and which belongs to that persistent subgenre of movies about troubled children who mix their fantasy worlds with their real frustrations and problems; in recent years it has given us Where The Wild Things Are and Pan's Labyrinth and has been going on since Victor Fleming decided Dorothy didn't actually visit Oz but dreamed it up instead.Remarkably Paperhouse takes less inspiration from The Wizard of Oz and more from Roman Polanski's Repulsion, like in the feeling of loneliness, or using the father figure as a source of fear there's a tense sequence in which Anna's father comes into her dream to kill her with a hammer. The movie, however, brings nothing new to this fantasy subgenre.The movie has some storytelling problems. In one of the subplots Anna learns from her nurse the story of Marc (Elliott Spiers), a boy who can't walk and is dying. Anna, without knowing his look or anything about him, promptly imagines him and several details of his past in her dreams that turn out to be real. How she does that is never explained and the movie never decides whether it's trying to be a supernatural thriller or just the wild imagination of a sickly child. In fact this movie suffers from trying to be too many things at the same time: a horror movie, a love story, a family drama – so that it always falls short of successfully being anything at all.In spite of that there's a good emotional story somewhere in the movie, as Anna believes that through her drawings she can change Marc's fate. Everything that she draws happens in the dreams, so she draws Marc a pair of new legs, only to see them turning to dust. The moral is very simple: you can't change reality to your whim; growing up is accepting things as painfully as they are.Visually the movie is quite good – it's always fun to see how Anna's drawings change her fantasy world; at first she just sees it as a house surrounded by Stonehenge-like rocks in a deserted landscape, but then she draws the trees, the interior rooms, stairs and objects to fill the house with. Considering the movie clearly didn't have many resources to dispose of, the crew did a fine job making the house familiar but also otherworldly.Glenne Headly and the under-appreciated Ben Cross give good performances here, but the movie belongs to Elliott Spiers and Charlotte Burke, who strangely never made a movie again. People tend to despise child actors, but the two practically carry the movie with their chemistry and genuine feeling.A note must go to the music by Hans Zimmer. His career was just starting when he composed the score for Paperhouse and the style is similar to Rain Man and Black Rain, two of my favourite scores by him. People who only know Zimmer from his loud, synth-heavy modern style (which I also love) would be surprised to see the elegant and melancholy music he composed here.All in all, Paperhouse should leave anyone looking for a good time satisfied. The movie has a fast pace and ends before the viewer knows it, leaving him marvelled with occasional flashes of visual creativity, solid performance and a heartbreaking finale.

I saw paperhouse the first time when I was about 15, 16, and I have to admit I enjoyed it a lot more back then than I did when I watched it again recently. But apart from that, it still deserves a decent score. There are some creepy moments in this film, especially a very foreboding Ben Cross who acts brilliantly as the ultimate "nightmare" dad.Anna (Burke) is removed, a loner, leaving childhood, entering the real world where make-believe fantasy, dreams and monsters and boogeymen are no longer supposed to exist.From the viewers perspective, it could be this desire to remain in the childlike world of imagination that creates a parallel dream world where her drawings come to life, but at the same time, this strange ability of hers brings the boogeymen to life as well...

In 1988, Paperhouse was hailed as a "thinking man's horror film." Wow, you might say, sign me up. This thing is a mess. It features a one time young actress who has a range of like 1 to 2. G. Headley with a bad British (dubbed) accent, and a story with no chills, thrills or spills.It isn't even interesting psycho-babble. One will only laugh at its cheap effects and long for a showing of Leprechaun 5.The story involves a girl with glandular fever who escapes in her dreams. WHat you get isn't good horror, art house or even a decent after-school special. I found myself after the two hour point saying..where did my two hours go.The direction is uninspired and I wished it could even be pretentious...something interesting..it seems like the producers were on lithium.Even in the dream world things are boring.A short no on this one.