Borley Rectory again - The Banishing (2021)

There has been a rash of films in the past few years based on the Borley Rectory narrative. This is the first this year (and there's a second called The Ghosts of Borley Rectory later in the year) and I bought it because the online reviews were almost unanimously positive.

I have read nearly everything about Borley Rectory (ever since a copy of The Most Haunted House in England I found in our local library was my entry to weird shit years ago) but I have not kept au courant with this rush of films. 

The whole Borley mythology makes it difficult to turn into a film, because even if you just wrote a script giving the reported incidences as written, it would be like one of those overdone sixties Amicus films and frankly, nobody would believe it was true. Which, frankly, it probably wasn't.

This one takes an unusual tack by focusing on the relationship between Lionel (rector of Borley in the 1930s) and Marianne Foyster. It is an interesting tack because it brings to the fore the tension between a rather stuffy husband and his young and flighty wife. It also brings to the fore the true nightmare that marriage would be if the wife can't have children.

Another thing which is better than in most films is they have used a house which feels like the rectory - at least according to the pictures before it mysteriously burned down after the insurance was mysteriously dramatically increased. The film gets the isolation right.

It does depart from the narrative of the haunting and makes it actually rather more dramatic. It takes the classic horror film path of letting the tension build up. This is clearly a departure from the haunting and it's slightly naughty to describe it on the case as a true story when it is to my mind based on the said true story but not as close as implied.

I do quite see why though. There is a problem with the literature, which can be clearly split down the middle into the totally credulous and the totally disbelieving. None of the literature investigated the haunting in a sufficiently controlled way, and when you take into account the effects of local legend, stressed and isolated people, and the fact that many of the phenomena could have been explained by the building itself, you are left with very little. If you then account for investigators who were either credulous or have been shown to cheat at other times, you are left with very little indeed. My opinion is that the most likely phenomena to be supernatural would be the apports, and the noises in the church but not the noises in the rectory.

I can see that the story would provide a rather boring film except for the real fanatics. Films like a clear story arc and the film invents stuff to create that, which is fair enough. A story of rambling rectory, local gossip, rector who makes the mistake of involving a publicity mad paper salesman turned ghost Hunter, new rector with nymphomaniac bored wife, and the house being burned down in the most obvious insurance scam ever - frankly this isn't the arc the public wants.

So the thing to do is forget any Borley connection and enjoy this as the superlative horror it is.