On The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015)

Wednesday 2/25/26

This is from something I'm writing on winter horror films, which will also be in my horror film book. Composed this morning. Will need to set this aside now, though, to write a piece about Louis Armstrong.

You can’t shake an ice-encrusted stick without swatting someone moaning about winter. As soon as Christmas is done and the New Year’s resolutions are discarded by January 3, the whinging commences.

“I just want to go out and do things and living in [insert name of northern state that isn’t Alaska but, rather, like New Jersey] means I can’t!”

Or…you simply could? There are coats, yes? Gloves have been invented?

I feel like this occurs with greater frequency than in the past, when weather was understood to only be weather and not the latest opportunity for people to play the victim as part of their grandstanding act for the attention of their peers and the latest self-videoed unboxing of excuses for themselves. These tend to be the same people who also carp about being old the moment they turn thirty and blame their flab not on their sloth and sedentary lifestyle, but that prick Father Time.

I will take no responsibility! It couldn’t be me!

(I’m reminded of that scene in Frasier, when Martin tells Frasier that the damn dryer shrunk his clothes again. How like that we are.)

I confess to detesting these people. Ah, the horror, right? How could you, author? Everyone is wonderful, doncha know?

Well, these are some words about winter horror films, so consider that me sprinkling in my own special ingredient. If you’ve ever seen the Rankin-Bass special from 1979, you know that people once loathed Jack Frost, too, but a world without winter is a world that can’t self-regulate. The planet needs what it needs. And so do you. Whether you’ll allow that, though, is a different matter.

Thoreau wrote that you should aspire to be cold. Does that sound silly? Then brace yourself because he also said you should shoot for being tired and hungry as well. He didn’t mean these words literally. He meant go out and get some air. Clear your head. Have a brisk ramble in your warm coat, while wearing your hat, scarf, and gloves. Move with purpose. Think with purpose. Keep your nose clean mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

When do you have the most energy? Is it when you “rot” on your couch watching Netflix pablum for sixteen straight hours that you won’t remember ten minutes after and leave a dent in the cushion that will be there come the next day after you’re gone, or is it when you put forth honest effort and have at life hard?

It’s scenario number two. We all know this from experience, regardless if we treat what we know as some friend that we’ve opted to ghost. But that’s when we’re at our healthiest and best.

The characters in Osgood Perkins’ The Blackcoat’s Daughter aren’t functioning at the highest levels. A couple of girls who attend a prestigious—a word which increasingly means nothing as our human experiment limps along—boarding school in upstate New York have nowhere to go over the winter holiday. You can feel the chill through the screen, which we expect would be cold were we to touch it. This is a dimly lit movie, as if the school had stinted on its light bulb budget. Bedrooms don’t look warm. Nor does the kitchen. The breakfast table might as well be frost-covered. Parents onstage and off are equally icy. Give thanks if you didn’t have a parent who had a hand in messing you up.

Rose (Lucy Boynton), a senior, is put in unofficial charge of Kat (Kiernan Shipka), a freshman. The former has her own issues—like an unwanted pregnancy—but these pale next to Kat’s, which involve demonic possession and a menacing furnace in the basement. Basements have a flair for being scarier in winter for some reason, and that’s before you encounter a creepy kid in the middle of some black magic ritual. Think of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Those boiler room scenes number among the darkest in the franchise.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter proceeds at a funereal pace—it’s like watching water freeze, which isn’t a criticism—despite interweaving multiple plot lines across different periods in time. We’re moving around in the temporal sense, but a cabin fever sensation takes hold of these girls the same as it does with us. Some push-ups might help—get the blood flowing, rather than splattered over the walls. But no—this is the movie version of today’s snow falling atop yesterday’s such that you can’t tell a difference.

Cold itself has an emotional coldness in The Blackcoat’s Daughter. The film is most potent as metaphor, a lesson in how we can be our own worst enemies—monsters against ourselves—when we play a part in giving in and staying in, symbolically and attitudinally. Get off your literal and figurative ass. Do some jumping jacks, shovel out your neighbor’s car, make a snow angel, in actuality and spirit; that is, think, move, be cold, tired, hungry. Have your repast when you return home. Fall asleep fast with zero pangs of conscience (remember those?) because you’ve earned that peaceful repose after a day of doing what’s right. A good faith effort has a warming knack for keeping the demons at bay.