The Others (2001)

The Others (2001)

Director Alejandro Amenábar's spooky, haunted house horror-thriller (his first English-language production) was set at the end of WWII, and was similar in plot to Henry James' 1898 Gothic ghost story The Turn of the Screw. and also to The Sixth Sense (1999) . Its most used tagline was:

"Sooner or later they will find you."

Another tagline gave away the entire plot twist:

"Sometimes the world of the living gets mixed up with the world of the dead."

• the film opened with a family in the mid-1940s moving into a spooky gothic English mansion; the family members included:
  • Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman), an overprotective, overly-religious, migraine-suffering Roman Catholic governess - the high-strung single mother of two light-sensitive children (both with "a very serious allergy to light")
  • Anne (Alakina Mann)
  • Nicholas (James Bentley)
• Grace began to suspect that their rambling, remote country house was haunted when they heard odd sounds and thought there were intruders.
• Grace was awaiting the return of her husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) from the war in France, a year and a half earlier
• the arrival of three new servants occurred after the previous ones vanished into thin air a week earlier (without collecting their wages):
  • Mrs. Bertha Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), housekeeper
  • Mr. Edmund Tuttle (Eric Sykes), an old gardener
  • Lydia (Elaine Cassidy), a young mute girl
• Grace stressed to the new hires that the curtains had to remain closed (to protect her "photosensitive" children from reacting by breaking out in sores, suffocating, and dying!), and she was concerned about doors: "No door must be opened without the previous one being closed first." She also stated:
  • "Silence is something that we prize very highly in this house. So we have no telephone, radio or anything that makes a racket. We don't have electricity either."
• another strange comment made was that the servants said that they used to work there, a few years earlier
• the two young children discovered that the graves outside were of the three servants that were now newly employed (who arrived for the job even without a want ad, since Grace's letter to be mailed to the newspaper, a want-ad request, was still in the mailbox); Anne screamed for her brother Nicholas to flee: "They're dead!"
• the eerieness was intensified when their death (or mourning) portrait daguerreotype dated 1891 was discovered by Grace
• during another scary moment, Grace confronted a decrepit old woman with a veil over her head, who had the voice of a little girl:
  • Grace: "What have you done with my daughter?"
    The voice: "Are you mad? I am your daughter."

• Grace attacked the figure and attempted to strangle it, while screaming out: "You're not my daughter" - although the figure when unveiled was her daughter!
• by the film's ending, the meaning of the film's title - "The Others" - was explained; it referred to the Marlish family (the parents, a boy named Victor, and an older woman) who had moved into the mansion. They were considered "intruders" by Grace.
• the film's double-twist was revealed during a seance conducted by "The Others"
  • Governess Grace and her two photosensitive children were dead, and were the ghosts haunting the house
  • in a murder/suicide, Grace had gone mad after her husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) left her for the war, and smothered her children with pillows before suicidally shooting herself in the head with a shotgun
  • the "ghosts" Grace kept seeing in the house were actually the new alive tenants who had moved into the house, and were attempting to exorcise them during a seance. [Note: When their efforts failed, they vacated the house and put it up for sale.]
  • in addition, the three servants were actually 'ghosts' of servants who were long dead from tuberculosis (for more than 50 years), and whose gravestones were hidden under leaves in the yard