Horror As Folk: Walling Off Genres In Anchoress (1993)

For those who don’t know, an anchorite is, according to Merriam-Webster, “a person who lives in seclusion usually for religious reasons.” That’s not necessarily an inaccurate definition, but it is an imprecise one.

The case of the titular anchoress (played by Natalie Morse) in Chris Newby’s 1993 film is more firmly rooted in a specific tradition in which anchorites are enclosed in cells in the walls of churches. In fact, the film is a loose adaptation of the life of Christina Carpenter (also the name of Morse’s character), an actual anchoress who was walled up in the church in Shere, just as she is in the movie.

Much of the information about the real Christina Carpenter that is readily available on the internet is drawn not directly from her life (which began and ended in the early 1300s) but from a 1981 play by English dramatist Sir Arnold Wesker. Called Caritas, the play was partly inspired by Carpenter’s story and contains details of her life and her internment as an anchoress.

At least some elements of the real-life Christina Carpenter match the one in Newby’s film almost exactly. In the film, Christina is a village girl who becomes enamored with a statue of the Virgin Mary and convinces the local priest that she sees visions of the Virgin. This leads him to petition for her to become an anchoress, walled up in a small cell on the side of the church that is specially built for her.

However, the priest (played by future Doctor Who Christopher Eccleston) is a giant piece of shit, and his holier-than-thou attitude quickly begins to clash with the warm and humanistic faith (or delusion) of Christina. Eventually, the priest convinces the villagers that Christina’s mother (a local midwife) is a witch, and Christina digs her way out of her internment to take her case directly to the Bishop.

While the specifics and the motives are mostly lost to history, at least some of this really happened.

The real Christina Carpenter did, in fact, flee her cell, only to subsequently write to the Pope begging for forgiveness and to be reinstated as an anchorite – which she apparently was around 1332. Even some elements of movie-Christina’s cell mimic those of the cell in which the real Christina Carpenter was interred. For example, the number and alignment of the windows match historical accounts and the remains of the cell in Shere, though one of the extant windows into the real cell is a quatrefoil, rather than the film’s trefoil.

As you might be able to ascertain from everything I have said so far, Anchoress is a slow-moving picture. There’s a lot going on around the periphery of Christina’s story, but when your main character spends much of the movie confined to one small room barely large enough for her to lay down, you know you’re probably not looking at something terribly dynamic.

In fact, there’s not a single line of dialogue spoken for several minutes at the beginning of the film, and Christina herself barely speaks at all. Instead, much of the picture is given over to long, still, quiet shots. It’s the kind of atmosphere that modern “elevated horror” movies are always angling for. In 1993, however, it was probably drawing more from the likes of Ingmar Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer – a fact that I’m largely extrapolating from online reading about the movie, as I’m not as versed in either Bergman or Dreyer as I probably should be.

Shot entirely in black-and-white save for one very brief moment of red, Anchoress is purely art house; a portentous film ostensibly about human nature, despite the fact that hardly anyone in it ever acts like a human, instead delivering weighted silences and single lines of heavily metaphorical monologue now and again.

Which is not to say that Anchoress isn’t good. It played in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, and was something of a critical darling when it was released, but has since dropped into relative obscurity before being rescued onto the All the Haunts Be Ours boxed set from Severin. Anchoress may not have much that’s new to add to the age-old discourse about religious hypocrisy or women’s suffrage or how absolutely shitty it was to live in the 14th century, but it is a gorgeously photographed film that never abuses the audience’s patience, despite its 108-minute running time.

No, the problem is more that it probably doesn’t belong in a folk horror box. Is it folk? Sure, why not, though we may wonder – as indeed we have before – if the dominant religion of the land, itself a colonialist overlay of local beliefs, can truly be considered “folk.” But is it horror? Not in any meaningful sense. Regular readers will know that I am all for an expansive and inclusive definition of what constitutes horror. But, while Anchoress may be haunting at times, it is pure arthouse drama, without any elements drawn from horror or thriller cinema.

So, how did it find its way into All the Haunts Be Ours? You’d have to ask the programmers at Severin. But whether it belongs or not, it’s nice to see a movie like this get preserved, even if it may not be your thing, as it kind of wasn’t mine.