Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman
Shadowed (2020), directed by
David F. Sandberg, star his wife, Lotta Losten, and five shadow
people. The plot is simple:
A woman (we'll
call her Lotta) reads in bed. Her light goes out. She sits up
quickly, on the edge of the bed. She hears a noise. Worried, she
activates a small flashlight that she takes from the drawer of her
bedside table. The beam illuminates a single, flat dish on the beside
table. But two shadows show on the wall behind the table: the shadow
of the dish and the shadow of a jar. As the shadow of the jar
indicates, she picks up the invisible jar and then drops it back onto
the table. She hears another noise. A shadowy woman sits in the chair
near the foot of Lotta's bed. Lotta tosses a blanket on the bed over
the shadow woman in the chair. The blanket falls onto the chair,
assuming the shape of the chair's contours, suggesting the shadow
woman has vacated her seat. Her bedroom door opens of its own accord,
showing the hallway outside her bedroom. Lotta stands in the darkness
of her bedroom. She approaches the bedroom's doorway. She enters the
hallway. She follows the hallway to another part of the house,
pausing near the foot of the stairs leading to the house's second
story. A shadow of a man stands hunched over in front of a closed
door. The shadow man twists, before turning quickly toward Lotta, and
snarls, The shadow man continues to transform into a more clearly
human shape. The shadow man rushes toward Lotta. She runs back down
the hallway to her bedroom. Closed, her bedroom door is presumably
locked. Trapped, Lotta turns when she hears a sound behind her. Five
shadow figures—three women and two men, one of the which holds a
shadow hatchet. Lotta mutters an unintelligible word or two—maybe
“David” or “keep back.”
Some people believe that shadow people
are spirits; others believe that they are beings from other
dimensions. Some suggest that shadow people are evil;
others think that shadow people are either friendly
or neutral toward human beings. Scientists suggest that such
figures may be hallucinations caused by sleep
paralysis, and methamphetamine addicts have reported seeing
shadow people as a result of sleep deprivation.
Sandberg's 1:48-second film doesn't
provide many clues by which to decipher its message, if there is one.
The view of the leaves of a tree through the small window in Lotta's
bedroom indicates that it is nighttime. The bed is still made, and
she is fully dressed, except for her shoes, and she is, we later
learn, downstairs, possibly in the guestroom, which is sparsely
furnished with a bed, a bedside table, a simple lamp, a fireplace,
and a vaguely seen larger piece of furniture visible for a moment in
the sweep of her flashlight beam as she turns toward the shadow woman
in the chair. The only decorative items seem to the the dish on the
bedside table. Such a sparsely furnished and relatively small room is
obviously not the master bedroom. She wears no wedding ring, so,
apparently, she is unmarried.
The bedroom door appears to open by
itself. Later, it appears to have closed and possibly locked itself.
We do not see any shadow people when these occurrences occur, and no
other characters are present to provide us with a point of view other
than Lotta's own. Therefore, it is possible that the shadow figures
are nothing more than the products of her hallucinations, perhaps
brought on by sleep deprivation: although it is night, she has
neither undressed (except to remove her shoes) nor donned pajamas or
a nightgown. She does not appear to be in her own bedroom, but in the
guestroom. Instead of sleeping or trying to sleep, she reads.
At first, there is only one shadow
person—a woman. Then, there is a shadow man. The first shadow
person, the woman, does not behave in a threatening manner, but the
shadow man rushes Lotta. Finally, there are five shadow people, three
women and two men, one of the latter of whom holds a hatchet. The
hatchet and the menacing manner of the five shadow people, as well as
Lotta's fear of them and her attempt to flee from them and to return
to the sanctuary of the guestroom suggest that they are hostile
toward her and intend to harm her, although it is impossible to
determine how they can do so, since they lack material substance.
Their only means of attack seems to be to frighten Lotta to the
extent that she injures herself by fleeing from them: she could run
into a wall, into furniture, or trip and fall, as the narrator in H.
G. Wells's short story “The
Red Room” does.
Or are the
shadow people immaterial?
They
would seem to be, but the jar that Lotta picks up and then drops on
the bedside table seems real enough and material enough. Although it
appears to be invisible, its shadow rises on the wall as she lifts
the object and “falls” on the wall when she returns the object to
its original position on the tabletop. It is real enough and tangible
enough to cast to block the light of the flashlight, real and
tangible enough to cast a shadow. If the shadow jar is real, if it is
tangible, the shadow people could be real and tangible as well. We do
not see them exert force, but that does not mean that they are
incapable of doing so, and Lotta certainly believes they are capable
of harming her.
We
must conclude that if
the shadow people exist, they are definitely invisible and they could
be tangible. However, we have no
proof and no reason to believe that the shadow people are anything
more than products of Lotta's hallucinations. They do not disturb
anything. They do not move anything. They leave no trace of their
presence, as far as we know—no footprints or fingerprints. They do
not speak. True, the shadow man that Lotta sees as she stands at the
foot of the stairs seems to undergo a transformation of sorts, as he
twists and twitches and lifts his seemingly outsize head becomes more
clearly human. But these apparent changes could be merely the effects
of Lotta's imagination or results of hallucinations.
As we
have seen in previous posts, Tzvetan
Todorov categorizes fantastic literature, of which horror fiction
is a type, into three varieties: the fantastic, the uncanny, and the
marvelous. A story, he says, is uncanny if its incidents can be
explained through scientific knowledge or through reason. It it
remains inexplicable in such terms, it is marvelous. Only a story
that cannot be resolved as being either uncanny (explicable) or
marvelous (explicable) remains fantastic. For example, Wells's “The
Red Room” is uncanny; Stephen King's short story “1408” is
marvelous; and Henry James's novella The
Turn of the Screw is
fantastic. Since science can explain the phenomena that trouble Lotta
as effects of sleep paralysis or sleep deprivation (or, for that
matter, a wild imagination), Sandberg's short must be reckoned an
exercise in the uncanny.
Although
Shadowed doesn't have
a plot and is not, therefore, an example of flash fiction, it does
achieve one of the tasks that Edgar Allan Poe sees as critical in
horror fiction. It creates a single emotional effect (“The
Philosophy of Composition”). Of course, Poe believes that a
story must accomplish more than the creation of a single, unified
effect. It must have a plot, for example, as all of his own tales
certainly have. To produce an effect, of fear or disgust or horror or
terror or any other emotion suitable to horror fiction, all the
elements of the tale must work together to lead to and maximize the
effect with which the story ends, and these other elements include,
among them, a plot.
A
couple of the criticisms that Mark Twain directed at James Fenimore
Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales
can be said of Shadowed:
“A a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere, and “the
personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient
excuse for being there” (“Fenimore
Cooper's Literary Offenses”). Shadowed
is a handsome, well-executed vignette, but it is not a short story,
even of the length of a flash fiction narrative. It may entertain for
a minute or two, but it cannot truly satisfy anyone who takes his or
her horror—or his or her drama—seriously.