Whilst unlikely to beat out any film with ‘chainsaw’, ‘massacre’ or ‘slumber party’ in the title, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) is nevertheless classic Horror cinema made manifest.
A defining moment in the ‘A Star Is Born’ film type, The Red Shoes is perhaps most curious for its relationship towards style and excess. Herein, the British penchant for cinematic realism finds itself uncharacteristically, violently endowed with crazed, expressionistic passion - exemplified best in its fifteen-minute-long depiction of the titular ballet performance. It is a sequence that delights in shadow-play, montage and throwing reality itself into question. But it is in that inner turmoil between styles that the film is most engaging; where its characters maintain that recognisably restrained affect, so coveted by contemporary David Lean, the macabre world they are thrust into takes those internal conflicts of the soul and forces them to emerge in malevolent spectacle. Victoria Page’s dual longing for love of a man and the love of ballet, a conflict between a life of normalcy and one of expression, is this internal style conflict writ large. She dies in want of an unattainable solution.
The dark fairy tale was born from a post-war Britain, one whose national optimism belied a time of austerity, toil and drudgery. On the horizon, Britons could see the promise of self-actualisation. But it would not yet be theirs to take. That the film’s conflict emerges so violently, its consequences so fatal, speaks to that prime function of the great horror pictures - to bring out and confront us with that which we deny in ourselves.
