The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

Loup-Garou by R. B. Russell

I first saw the film,

Loup-garou, in 1989, in a little arts cinema in the centre of Birmingham. I had driven there for a job interview and, as usual, I had allowed far more time for the journey than was required. I had reasoned that it should take me two hours to travel there, to park, and to find the offices of the firm of accountants where I desperately wanted a position. The interview was at two-thirty, so I intended to leave home at midday. I had worked it all out the night before, but then became concerned that the traffic might be against me, and I decided to allow another half-hour for the journey. That morning I checked my map, but no car parks were marked on it and so I added yet another half-hour to the time I would allow myself. Leaving at eleven o'clock seemed prudent, but I was ready by half-ten and, rather than sit around the house worrying, I decided to set out.

I know my nervousness about travelling is a failing, but I've always lived and worked in this small provincial town and it is not a day-to-day problem. On this occasion it was made very obvious to me just how irrational my fear of being late for appointments really was; the traffic was light and the roads clear and I was in the centre of Birmingham by a quarter to twelve. I found a car park with ease and was immediately passed a ticket by a motorist who was already leaving, despite paying to stay the whole day. I parked, and as I walked out on to the street I could see the very offices that I wanted directly opposite. I had two and a half hours to kill.

For no reason other than to pass the time I looked into the foyer of the cinema which was immediately adjacent to the car park. Pegged up on a board was the information that a film called

Loup-garou was about to start, and that it would be finished by two o'clock. It seemed the perfect solution to my problem.

I doubt if there were more than five or six people in the cinema. It was small and modern and the seat into which I settled myself was not too uncomfortable. I was in time to watch the opening credits slowly unfold. The sun was rising over a pretty, flat countryside, and the names of the actors, all French, slowly faded in and out as the light came up over fields and trees. It was beautifully shot, and a simple, haunting piano piece repeated quietly as the small cast were introduced, and finally the writer and director, Alain Legrand. I noted the name carefully from the information in the foyer when I left the cinema two hours later.

The film was incredibly slow, but each scene was so wonderfully framed, and the colours so achingly vivid that it was almost too lovely to watch. The sunlight, a numinous amber, slanted horizontally across the landscape as we were introduced to the hero, a boy who was walking from his home in the village to a house only a half-mile distant. The camera was with him every step of the way. There was a quiet voice-over, in French, that was unhurried enough for me to understand it. The boy was kicking a stone and noting that he had a theory that four was a perfect number, as exemplified by a square. Therefore, if he kicked this stone, or tapped the rail of a fence, he had to do it three more times to make it perfect. If, by some unfortunate mischance, he should repeat the action so that it was done, say, five times, then he would have to make it up to sixteen-four times four. The penalty for getting that wrong was huge; the action would need to be repeated again and again to make it up to two hundred and fifty-six, or sixteen times sixteen.

It was a rambling dialogue, and a silly little notion such as any young lad might have, but I was immediately struck that it had been an affectation that I myself had had as a teenager. Predisposed toward our hero on the strength of this, I was rather looking forward, as he was, to seeing his sweetheart, if the director would ever allow him to arrive at her house. When he eventually knocked at the door, predictably we had to wait for the mother to answer it, and for him to be shown into the comfortable, dark kitchen. He had to wait, of course, for the girl who, he was told, was brushing her hair upstairs and would not be long. He talked to the mother, stroked a cat and looked out of the window. Finally the object of his affections descended the stairs.

At this point I sat forward in my seat. The young girl looked exactly as my wife, Yvonne, had looked at that age. She was pretty, with startlingly blue eyes, and long blond hair. I was delighted by the coincidence.

They took their time, of course, in going outside to where the sun was now higher in the sky. I felt a frisson as they sat close together on the bench outside the door, and, unseen by the mother, he tenderly kissed the nape of her neck as she bent down to look into a box of buttons. I marvelled at the film-maker's art. As the boy's lips brushed the girl's skin she slid her hand through the buttons in a way that was incredibly sensual. Then she picked out a heavy green one, shaped like an apple, and asked him if he knew that it had once belonged to the costume of a famous clown?

Up until this point I had enjoyed the coincidences I had found in the film, but this was stretching them too far. My mother had also had a very similar button in a sewing box, which was also said to have once belonged to a well-known clown. I did not know what to make of its appearance in the film.

The hero and heroine then decided to take a walk through the fields, talking of love and their future. And then, in the woods, there was the most delicately handled love-making scene, shown to us through carefully concealing trees. When he eventually walked home we had another voice-over where he declared his love for the girl whom he inevitably calls Yvonne.

After a few more meetings between the two of them, the only scenes involving several other actors are played out on a day of celebration; their last at school. Here another character is introduced, an older boy who clearly has an interest in the heroine. I immediately cast around for the equivalent character in my youth. There had been jealousies in my relationship with Yvonne when we were still at school, but I had finally married my childhood sweetheart. Completely lost to the apparent reality of the film I hated this potential suitor with a passion. Suddenly it is revealed, in a scene where Yvonne tentatively kisses this second boy, that we had been watching the earlier love-making scene at a distance through our hero's eyes!

The film then changed in style. In an instant the long, beautifully framed scenes from a single static position were replaced by abrupt, short images from what appeared to be a hand-held camera, and which were presumably meant to be from our hero's viewpoint. It conveyed the black rage within him. He was retracing the journey to Yvonne's house from the start of the film, but this time at a run. He was looking all about him in desperation. When he arrived at the farmhouse he hammered at the door, and when the mother answered it she told him that the girl had gone out. He rushes off across the fields and into the woods, and as the hurried camera-work shows his journey the viewpoint subtly moves down from the eye-level of a young man to that of an animal running, finally, over the floor of the woods. For only a few moments we see the lovemaking couple once again. The hero rushes upon them and there are terrible screams and the wild movement of the camera makes it impossible to see what is happening. The screen goes black, and just as the audience is getting restless and wonders whether the film has finished, or if the reel has not been replaced by the projectionist, the picture slowly comes up to show an incredibly languid sunset, and the hero, looking dirty and ragged, crying uncontrollably, walks slowly back to the village.

We are back to the earlier, slow direction. He slips unnoticed into a dark garage, and in the dim light we see him loop a length of rope around the rafters. The music has started by this time, a variation on the opening theme, and in front of one long, apparently unedited shot we watch him climb a chair, tie the rope around his neck, and kick the chair from under him. By now it is so dark that we can't make out the details of his horrible death, and the music has taken the place of the sounds in the garage, but the imagination makes up for what is not shown.

I was emotionally drained by the film. I emerged into a Birmingham afternoon light, deeply affected by the closing scene and not thinking particularly of the earlier coincidences. The rage that had been in the hero as he rushed to find the lovers had seemed to grow in my own breast and it was a while before the shock passed. Eventually I remembered and was able to reflect upon the uncanny similarities between the hero's circumstances and my own. I could not work out what was real, what was my imagination, and what had been the film-maker's art. I was standing on the pavement outside the cinema, angry at the injustice of the film. To this day I do not know how I managed to compose myself for an interview thirty minutes later, and how I made the shortlist.

When I arrived home that evening and related the events of my day, the film assumed more importance than the interview. Yvonne listened to my description patiently, amused, and said that she too would like to see it. I had written on a flier taken from the cinema

Loup-garou and the director's name, "Alain Legrand." She pointed out that loup-garou meant werewolf, which I had not registered at the time. "You've been watching horror movies then," she asked, and I had to agree that it was horrific.

Having unburdened myself to my wife, and, I am embarrassed to admit this, having cried while re-telling the story, I felt remarkably better, and with a little distance was able to be amused by the coincidences of the film. Perhaps I had made too much of them. As I lay in bed that night I told myself that if there was anything supernatural about the apparent coincidences, anything at all, then it was there to show me how lucky I was to have made my childhood sweetheart my wife. I looked at her as she slept beside me, at her tangled blond hair and fine skin, the shape of her nose and at her soft, parted lips. For the first time that day I thought of the hero as an actor rather than as myself, and I slept soundly.

I did not get the job when I was called back for the second interview, and in retrospect I am glad that I didn't. At the time I was disappointed, but my life carried on comfortably and provincially, and city life has never since appealed to me. On my return to Birmingham for the ill-fated second interview I looked in at the cinema but the film they were showing was apparently a Norwegian "comedy of manners." It didn't appeal, and I did not have the time to watch it.

Almost immediately

Loup-garou became something of a joke amongst our friends. I had explained what had happened one evening to another couple at a dinner party, and my wife saw a tear in my eye as I explained the plot, and a great deal of fun was had at my expense. I played up to it, and berated my wife for leaving me for another in her filmic existence, and letting me, presumably, attack her and her lover and then commit suicide. My wife was quite fascinated by the idea of the film, and between ourselves we resolved that we would try and see it. Obscure French art films don't often appear on the provincial film circuit, though, and it was some years before I saw any reference to it anywhere.

For a while I bought a few books about werewolves, fiction and non-fiction, but it struck me that the power of the film didn't derive from the legends, but the way in which the film had been put together, and my fascination for the subject quickly waned. My interest in foreign cinema grew, though, along with my video collection, and soon I was quite knowledgeable on the subject of art-house European cinema. In my researches I found a reference to

Loup-garou in the biography of the director, Alain Legrand, which claimed that the film had never been distributed because it had fallen foul of the censors (because it appeared to condone under age sex). A few years later it appeared on the internet in a French language film database which claimed that not only had it never been distributed, but had never even been edited. These claims were repeated, word for word, on other databases, and although a large reference book on European cinema later corrected these errors, those entries remain unrevised on the internet. The reference book added that those critics that had seen Loup-garou reported that it contained some of the most beautiful, as well as some of the most amateurish camera-work they had seen. The only other reference that I discovered in the intervening years was on a "werewolf" website, where it was described as "disappointing," and "hardly to be described as a werewolf film at all." Nowhere could I find any reference to it being made available in any form. Without any hope of success I programmed the details into internet search-engines with no result, and left it as a permanent "want" on an auction site, which I refreshed every year without success.

And then only a couple of weeks ago I had an email notification that the film was being offered for auction. A private seller had a DVD to sell that he admitted was an unauthorised copy from an unreleased studio video. I didn't hesitate to put £50 on as my maximum bid, and despite there being no other apparent competition, with a day to go I raised it to £100. I watched the end of the auction on a Sunday evening, waiting for the flurry of last-minute bidding, but none came. I won the DVD for the minimum bid of £5.

It arrived in the post two days later, sent by a Frenchman living in London. There was no accompanying receipt and the DVD was blank, with no artwork. Yvonne and I had decided to make an occasion of watching it, and planned to wait until the children were in bed. We had opened a bottle of wine in readiness, but a nagging headache that Yvonne had earlier complained of became worse, threatening to develop into a migraine, and she decided to go to bed.

I watched the film anyway. I knew that I'd be happy to see it again in a few days time when Yvonne was feeling better, but after all this time I could not wait.

In the quiet house I sat down before the television, and pressed "Play" on the remote control. The credits came up as they had done in the little cinema over fifteen years before. The picture jumped a couple of times at the beginning but settled down after that and the quality was good. The sound was clear, and the music was just as haunting as I remembered it. A part of me was worried that it wouldn't be quite as before, but it still looked beautifully shot, and I waited to see the young boy walking out towards the farmhouse. He duly appeared, and explained in the voice-over about his obsession with the number four. A shiver ran through me.

When the camera panned slowly around Yvonne's family kitchen I noticed a number of things that I hadn't seen on my initial viewing; the first being that their dresser was similar to one that my wife's family had once owned. The mother, too, looked a lot like her own mother. I drew in a breath as the young Yvonne started to come down the stairs, but suddenly found myself completely bewildered.

The girl that appeared was certainly not the girl that I remembered. This actress had dark hair, and was slightly plump as opposed to the skinny little thing from before.

As though wilfully ignoring my confusion the actress assumed the role as though it had always been hers.

Outside the door they sat on the bench, and the whole scene with the buttons was repeated exactly as I had retold the story to over the years. As far as I could tell, the walk across the fields and into the woods was the same, scene for scene, and the love-making was carefully, and enigmatically, handled as before. I could understand now that there might be some who would protest that the actor and actress were under age, but almost everything was inferred by the viewer; suggested but not shown by the director.

Disillusioned at my apparent inability to remember the film correctly I watched the scenes with the alternative suitor without quite the same passion as before. I had retold the story of the film on so many occasions and nobody had ever said that I had changed any details, therefore I must have reported it wrongly from the very beginning-immediately after I had seen it!

I was too annoyed with myself to enjoy the rest of the film, and suddenly it seemed to drag interminably. I made myself watch it, wondering if I'd even bother showing it to Yvonne, when the final scenes eventually appeared. The attack on the love-making couple was as sudden and almost as unexpected as before. But again I had got the details wrong. It was not the hero but the other boy who made his way back to the village, and into the darkened garage. He climbed the chair and fixed the rope. Barely perceptible in the dark, and with the sound masked by the music, he hanged himself.

The credits came up and I turned it off. I put the DVD back in its blank case and decided to go and get myself ready for bed. I locked up the house and turned off all but the landing light, where I stopped to look in at Yvonne, who was sleeping.

I sensed that something wasn't quite right, though, and walked into the room.

There, in our bed, was a dark-haired woman. I stood quite still, not wanting on any account to wake her. I found myself trembling, though, and backed out of the door, not knowing what to do. There, at the top of the stairs was our wedding photo, and I had problems standing as I saw myself, in a picture from twenty years ago, beside a pretty, plump, dark-haired woman.

I must have fallen asleep on the sofa that night, and the next morning was the usual whirlwind of getting the children's breakfast and taking them to school before I myself carried on to work. I murmured something to the darkened bedroom before I had left the house, trying not to think who was lying under the blankets.

I am not sure how I got through the day. All that I could think of was that my wife had changed. This was a ludicrous proposition, especially as the wedding photograph showed that it was my error. I certainly didn't feel mad, but through the whole day I examined every possibility, and the only one that made any sense was that I had made an error of vast proportions. This did not convince me, of course, and it was with the greatest trepidation that I made my way home that evening. I parked in the garage and stood in the dark, not wanting to go indoors. Despite the turmoil that my mind was in, I realised that I was not thinking about the dark-haired woman in my house, but of my confusion between the heroines of the film I had seen. It was when I found myself thinking about the last scene of the film that I decided to go indoors.

My daughter greeted me in the hall as though nothing was at all amiss. Indeed, she announced brightly that "Mummy is feeling better and is up, out of bed."

I walked through to the kitchen where the dark-haired woman was preparing dinner. My other daughter walked out with a cheery "hallo" as I walked in, and the woman saw me with a smile. She walked over to me and took my hands in hers.

"You watched that film last night, didn't you?" she asked.

I agreed that I had.

"I understand," she said. "We were meant to watch it together, but after all these years you couldn't wait to see if it was the same as you'd remembered it. I hope you don't mind, but when I got out of bed this afternoon I wasn't up to anything other than sitting in front of the television. I decided that I might as well watch the film as well. And you were right; it's a wonderful film, but you didn't remember the end properly, did you?"

I shook my head.

"But you were right about Yvonne… she is just like me."

And she hugged me, and although I could not see her face I knew that she was crying. I should have felt love for her, but all that I could think of was the dark garage, and the rage that was growing within me…