Basic synopsis
the film
is the telling of the story of Arthur Cartwright, a wealthy young noble who
upon his return from fighting in the Boer Wars in South Africa reunites with
his wife who eventually dies of consumption. Consumed by grief, he struggles to
keep the estate afloat and deal with the post-traumatic stress he got from the
wars in Africa. He eventually gives in and visits a well-known medium who gives
him the means to try and communicate with his passed wife. When he tries to
contact her alone in the manor, he finds that the house has a very dark past of
hideous torture and murder, and that he has awoken the spirit of a young woman
who anger at her untimely death is inconsolable. Arthur starts to experience
terrifying supernatural events that led him to part of his manor he didn't even
know existed, and that expose the dark secret of his families past.
The film
will start with an unknown man reading aloud of the story, breaking the fourth
wall as he directly talks to the audience. He starts reading the tale then it
goes into the actual film.
Arthur's backstory
Arthur is
the heir to the Cartwright fortune and was born in 1888 in Cartwright mansion,
from a young age his parents kept him away from certain areas of the
house, the basement was off limit until he was of the age of 18. However, he
was sent away to boarding school in faraway Cumbria, were he excelled at sports
and sciences, whilst he was at boarding school his parents stayed in the manor,
rarely travelling far from the manor and the village that resides near. The
villagers do not trust the Cartwright's, due to the families long history of
abusing the populace of the village long ago, and some people going into the
mansion and never coming out. Throughout his schooling career he would come
home on school holidays and usually go to London, where he attended grand
parties with his school friends and tried his best to stay away from the manor
and his overly traditional parents. After school he attended Oxford university
to study classics, and quickly becoming bored of that started to spend his vast
loans on drink and woman, much to the disapproval of his parents. When he
left university he quickly turned his attention to join the army, and quickly
joined Sandhurst and trained to become an officer, it was at the graduation
party that he met his wife, Elizabeth and they were married soon before he went
to his station in South Africa. With the death of his parents when he was half
way through his training, he inherited the Cartwright fortune and moved his
wife to the manor, where she was looked after by the army of servants under the
employment of the Cartwright's, the basement of the manor was sealed off by the
parents before they died and the room was quickly forgotten.
In his
first tour of South Africa in 1901 Arthur was put in charge of the Welsh
guards, a hero unit of the Zulu wars and he quickly gained the respect of his
troops with being a strong leader in a brutal guerrilla conflict. Although he
shows outstanding bravery in the field the war has affected him greatly, and he
starts to show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. This apparent when he
returns home after his first tour and is troubled by dreams and normal noises
such as doors closing. However, despite this he still seems to be his old self
and is enjoying being home, but that soon changes when he is called back into
service due to the way the war is going for the British. Around the same time,
his wife starts to show signs of consumption, but he has faith that she will be
properly looked after by the family’s personal doctor. Arthur's second tour of
duty is the one that pushes him over the edge, as he struggles to deal with the
fact his wife may be dying and the increasingly brutal nature of the conflict.
After the wars end in 1902, he returns home just in time to see his wife just
before she dies, which is where the story starts and the tale begins.
The plot
the film
begins with Arthur just after his wife's funeral, sitting in his drawing room
still in his black suit. As he sips on his brandy his friend and fellow soldier
Joseph Sampson enters and sits with him. It is revealed that Arthur
deliberately didn't wear his military uniform to the funeral as he wants to
leave the army behind him, his friend showcases his concern for Arthur as it is
obvious his drinking has increased, he suggests using part of the vast
Cartwright fortune to travel to help him cope with the loss. However, the
demands of running the estate, which Arthur knows nothing about, seem to take
over as Arthur starts to become more serious and business like, much to the
disgust of his friends and servants that have known him his whole life. Whilst
asleep, Arthur is tormented by the scenes of war he saw in Africa and awakens
to find himself in an empty bedroom. However, upon trying to get back to sleep
he looks up to find an apparition of his wife's decomposing corpse is standing
at the foot of the bed, he panics and turns on the lights to find that there is
nothing there. It is obvious that he has been hallucinating and decides maybe
that he needs to get away from the manor. He gives the servants in the house a
paid leave and uses the rest of the money to prepare to travel. However, whilst
in London he finds a shop for the supernatural, and convinced that his wife's
apparition was not a hallucination he buys a Ouiji board and whilst in the
manor alone, tries to contact her through it.
After a
brief moment of happiness when he thinks he has made contact with her, the
message suddenly becomes very sinister, spelling out "WHY, THE PAIN WE
ENDURED" as he backs away from the board various objects begin flying
around the room, and the power goes out. In the silence Arthur finds a torch
and upon turning it on, looks over his shoulder to find a ghostly young woman
who then screams at him as he drops the torch. He eventually regains his
composure and finds the torch again only to find that the ghost is gone.
During the next few days Arthur begins to have terrifying dreams of people
screaming and ghastly scenes of torture from people being flayed to people
having their arms and legs amputated. The dreams seem to take place in a large
room that is underground. The dreams alleyways end with the ghost of the young
woman pointing at him and screaming. Arthur also sees the woman around the
manor and objects frequently throw themselves around rooms and the piano on the
ground floor of the manor starts to play sinister music in the dead of night.
Arthur writes to Joseph urging him to come to the house to see the activity for
himself, and Joseph reluctantly agrees, thinking Arthur has gone off the rails.
One day Arthur awakes in excruciating pain and rips off his clothes to find
that the word " Down to Hell" have been written over and over into
his skin, burning the words onto his back. After showing the scars to Joseph he
starts to believe what Arthur has been saying. Both men awake the nigh of
Josephs arrival to find the apparition of the young woman, now accompanied with
another apparition of a little girl, they follow them towards the walled up basement,
and they disappear through the brick wall. Arthur and Joseph see that the
spirits want them to follow, and proceed to get to work breaking down the brick
wall. When the wall falls, the staircase to the basement is revealed, and the
two men go down to find a bug timber door has been sealed, connoting that
Arthur's parents didn't want anyone to go in there, after they break the door
down they find that there is nothing unusual about the basement, with only
crates of old wine of interest. However, upon investigating the basement they
come across a hidden handle, that when pulled unlocks a latch on a seemingly
normal wall. When the two man open the wall, they find another staircase which
looks at least 800 years old. They go down the spiral staircase and find that
there is a barred door. They pull down the metal bars and the door opens,
revealing a gruesome discovery. The room from Arthur's dream falls out before
him, dozens of cages with decomposing corpses and skeletons in fill the room,
along with various medical and torture equipment, the room goes on to reveal
various medical tables with straps on to obviously hold down the victim, and
hollow walls that when the two men knock down, reveal that there are some
people who have been walled up alive due t the scratch marks on the inside of
the walls, and the various rope bindings on the roof. the skeletons behind the
wall are various men, woman, and even children. Sickened by the discovery
Arthur proceeds to be sick, whilst Joseph looks around, he finds various
graffiti with years etched in, dating back all the way to the 1500s.
Another
room in the chamber reveals a desk with a big book on top, upon reading them it
became clear to see that the Cart wrights have been kidnapping and torturing
members of the village for centuries, first off because they didn't pay their
rent, then for the sake of it. The book also revealed that in the that 1700s
the Cartwright used to hold parties where the guests could drunkenly torture
the victims that the Cartwright's kidnapped, this practice has been going on
all the way to Arthur's parents. The book shows that they stopped due to the
increasingly competent nature of the police and also the lack of police
officers who they could bribe if they found out, therefore they left the most
recent victims for dead and walled up the basement and the chamber hopefully
for good. Arthur then realizes he contacted the spirits of the dead victims and
his presence in the chamber has angered them, poltergeist activity increases in
the house and becomes aggressive to both Arthur and Joseph. Having no
idea how to stop the activity, and due to the village peoples distrust of the
Cartwright's, the local vicar refuses to help them exorcise the house. So they
take matters into their own hands and decide to do it themselves. During the
ceremony, a ghost knocks over a candle and sets the house a light, as the house
burns the ghosts do numerous things to try and keep the two men inside the
burning building, they escape the building with very bad burns and sit there in
disbelieve as the manor burns down, and stay until the house collapses.
It is
later revealed that Arthur ended up moving to the sea side, where he traveled the world looking for paranormal incidences, and trying desperately to reform
his families honor and bury their sadistic past. He sets up numerous charities
for the poor and uses his vast fortune to help the village people pay off their
land lords, in turn making sure the Cartwright's family name is remembered more
fondly than before. It is then revealed that shortly after the incident at
Cartwright manor Joseph suffered from severe panic attacks and nightmare, he
later killed himself by hanging himself outside the ruins of the house. All
previous servants of the house were released with pay, and told not to go back
to the ruins of the manor.
The film
then cuts to the man originally telling the story, saying that the land that
Cartwright manor used to sit on is now haunted by the ghost of Joseph, who
comes up to passers-by and yells them to run from the ground. It is also stated
that his spirit is still seen hanging from the tree outside the house. The
camera then pans out to show the ghost of Joseph standing behind the narrator,
as the narrator smirks the lights go out and the screen is plunged into
darkness.
Theories
I wanted
the character of Arthur to be his own binary opposite in compliance to
Strauss's theory. I felt as though it would be good to have a character who has
very good yet very bad traits about him. He is families binary opposite as well
as himself, this is because the Cartwright family are sadistic serial killers whereas
Arthur is a lot more generous and good nurtured. This is one of the biggest
sources of conflict between him and his family. He also has conflict within
himself for the horrifying atrocities that he has committed in Africa, whilst
being as great of an actual person as he is. The theme of post-traumatic stress
disorder is something I wanted to explore as well, which links to Strauss's
theory of Binary opposites within one character, as the guilt caused during war
puts ex soldiers at war with themselves almost.
I also
wanted to add a lot of Equilibrium to Arthur's backstory, and quickly change
the narrative to a more De-equilibrium stance later on in his story. I also
wanted Equilibrium to never be achieved after the events of the story by some
characters, as I felt as though it is an unsettling part of a story that things
never truly get better for characters.
