RhoDeo 1901 Supernatural 11

Hello, Daphne du Maurier wrote some of the most compelling and creepy novels of the twentieth century. In books like Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn she transformed the small dramas of everyday life—love, grief, jealousy—into the stuff of nightmares. Less known, though no less powerful, are her short stories, in which she gave free rein to her imagination in narratives of unflagging suspense. Many of Du Maurier’s works were made into films, notably Hitchcock’s Rebecca and The Birds, but Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 adaptation of “Don’t Look Now” is the one that most successfully captures Du Maurier’s special tone, the ghostly sensitivity of grief.


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Though she’s best known as a novelist, Du Maurier’s strange, often beautiful stories deserve to be more widely read than they are. Like her novels, they are built around elements of suspense, romance, and the supernatural, but they are less fettered by plot contrivances, and the best of them are heartbreaking. They show that Du Maurier, whose name is still associated to her detriment with middle-brow romance, is an altogether weirder and more modern writer than this slapdash categorization implies.

“Don’t Look Now,” follows a couple named John and Laura on a trip to Venice, meant to rekindle their marriage after the tragic death of their young daughter, Christine. One of the unusual things about Du Maurier is that she wrote often and well from the perspective of men, and “Don’t Look Now” takes on John’s tense, rationalist point of view. He begins the story watching his wife anxiously for signs of hysteria and grief. Instead, after meeting a pair of Scottish sisters who claim to see Christine’s ghost, Laura is happy — and her happiness unnerves him more than anything else could have.

It’s these other women, the sisters, who upset the story’s fragile equilibrium and set it on its way. They keep referring to the “gift” of second sight, which John simultaneously refuses to believe in and is frightened by. Are these women harmless? Why is Laura so drawn to them? (Interestingly, given the story’s setting, “Venetian tendencies” is a euphemism Du Maurier used in life to refer to attractions between women.) John can’t trust his wife’s happiness, which feels to him like a betrayal, as it might to any grieving parent whose partner seems to be moving on.

“Don’t Look Now” brilliantly dramatizes the perils of looking — you can look too closely, or not closely enough, or sometimes both at the same time. What you think you see can’t be trusted; what you refuse to see may be your downfall. The story is rife with doubles, dark alleys, and confused or mistaken identities. What makes it more than a ghost story though, is how spookily tender it is. Its subject is the vulnerability of the family unit to the world outside, and the desperate, tenacious work of parents to protect it.

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Daphne du Maurier's classic tale of slow-dawning terror first published in 1971. Dramatised by Ronald Frame, Directed by Patrick Rayner


Stars
Michael Feast as John,
Anna Chancellor as Laura,
Sean Baker as the Policeman,
Ewan Bailey as the Waiter,
Colette O'Neil as Sister,
Carolyn Pickles as Elidah and
Carl Prekopp as the Porter.


Daphne Du Maurier - Dont Look Now. ( 57min mp3  38mb)

John and Laura Bennett are on holiday in Venice, trying to get over the tragic death of their daughter.They seem to be succeeding, until a blind psychic starts relaying messages from beyond the grave

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previously

Robert Westall - The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral ( 87min mp3  60mb)
Robert Westall - The Wheatstone Pond ( 60min mp3  39mb)
Victor Pemberton - Dark. ( 86min mp3  60mb)
Scott Cherry - The Book of Shadows ( 78min mp3  60mb)
Koji Suzuki - The Ring ( 78min mp3  60mb)
Wilkie Collins - The Haunted Hotel ( 60min mp3  38mb)
JCW Brook - Jonas ( 60min mp3  60mb)
Stephen Sheridan - The House at Worlds End   ( 44min mp3  30mb)
Nigel Kneale - The Stone Tape ( 56;30 min mp3  38mb)
Gregory Evans - The Hex ( 51;12 min mp3  35mb)
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein pt 1. ( 52min mp3  67mb)
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein pt 2. ( 60min mp3  79mb)


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