"Gothika", "The Unknown" and Otherness

The elements used to create shock and awe in the cinema of attractions are more blatant in earlier films than in more recent films. If films used the same old elements in the same way that they first did, the movie would seem corny or played out, which is why it is easy to assume we have surpassed such cheap tricks, but as Tom Gunning puts it, “[t]he cinema of attractions persists in later cinema, even if it rarely dominates the form of a feature film as a whole” (744). Most of the films we enjoy today don’t rely on the overacting and winks to the audience that films like The Unknown (1927) did, but they do work to produce the same reaction in audiences in similar ways. The film Gothika (2003) uses otherness and an awareness of the medium to thrill the audience similar to how The Unknown (1927) does. 

In the film, The Unknown (1927), the characters are made digestible by the masses through othering. Alonzo is defined by everything the audience members are not which acts to suspend realism and keep the audience aware that they are watching a film. This sort of othering can also be found in Gothika (2003). Halle Berry plays Miranda Grey, a psychiatrist turned mental patient when she finds out from a dead girl that her husband and his best friend are sadists that like to kidnap teenage girls to torture and rape. The carnival workers are rebranded as mental patients and the carnival has become the mental hospital. 

The film keeps us aware of the medium with supernatural elements in an otherwise incredible, but realistic story, such as the messages from beyond the grave and Miranda’s possession by the dead girl. The images used also work to create an awareness of the medium. When Miranda first meets the dead girl, she is driving home from work and spots her in the middle of the road, she gets out to help her, and the jolt to the audience comes when the girl bursts into flames. Another scene in the film occurs later on when the audience gets to recount what happened that night. The scene starts with Miranda in a hospital bed remembering flashes of the night she killer her husband. 

It starts with her husband on the couch with his arms raised in self defense and proceeds to play in reverse so that we see her rain-soaked arm dripping water, then the look of machine-like blank determination on her her dripping wet face, her hands grasping the axe from somewhere in their yard, her entering the gate, all the way back to her in the middle of the road with the dead girl. All the while the music is played in reverse as well as the sound effects of the rain and thunder so it has a sort of metallic and tinny sound. This creates an uneasiness in the viewer, not only in the reversal of the sequence of events and the unnatural sounds, but there is still the desire to witness the actual murder. The reversal of the events tells us that we don’t get to bear witness to this.

Unlike in the film, The Unknown (1927), where Alonzo is the other and continues to be the villainous other until his death, in Gothika (2003), Miranda goes through a transformation from the other to a different, more sympathetic other, and the “good” or sympathetic characters become the other. Until we know what happened and why Miranda killed her husband, all the “normal” characters treats her as the villain while the other patients understand her plight or are indifferent to her. When all is revealed, the two men, her husband and his best friend, become the other or abnormal and Miranda becomes a different kind of other. Instead of appearing in stark contrast to the audience, Miranda is now sympathetic, she becomes an other that the audience understands and is open to, but the audience still shares nothing with her. (Spoiler alert: she could see the dead girl, because she has supernatural abilities and she will continue to encounter dead people.)