Horror cropped up in an unexpected place for me last night, specifically in a TiVo’d episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent that I just got around to watching. To my surprise and delight the entire episode played like an extended tribute to J-horror.
Titled “The View from Up Here” (written by Jim Starling from a story by Starling & series co-creator Rene Balcer and directed by Alex Chapple), the ep revolved around the murder of a tenant in a hip Manhattan high-rise. The killing may or may not be related to a dispute between the tenants and the building’s main contractor, who’s allowing the ostensibly world-class post-modern apartments to fall into disrepair in order to collect bribes to finish the work he’d already been paid to do. But to my eyes the plot was all but incidental; the real attraction of the episode was the atmosphere of dread, decay, and wrongness created by the filmmakers, using the tools that J-horror and its Western analogues and acolytes have provided to makers of creepy pop culture.
The usual information-technology anxiety is present: Security cameras and monitors record everything; digital cameras materialize with impossible pictures taken by phantom photographers stored within them; a pager is used to receive messages from beyond; night-vision technology casts its green light over illicit goings-on; notably, a pair of binoculars being used to spy/peep is broken during the murder that kicks off the mystery. (I’m actually a little bit surprised that computers and the Internet didn’t figure in at some point.) Shades of The Ring, Blair Witch, and Dionaea House abound.
The “evil building” trope is also deployed; in fact, it’s central to the plot, as the tenants’ debate as to whether to bribe the contractor, and moreover a mentally disabled character’s belief that the building itself has succumbed to a mystical “plague” that presages a repeat of a 9/11-level atrocity, provide possible motives for the murder. But the filmmakers play around in this particular sandbox far too much for it to be mere plot-moving. In the episode’s opening sequence, bizarre and disorienting as is the series’ trademark, mirrors get fogged up for no apparent reason, steam erupts from strange places like wooden floorboards, the building’s concrete walls dissolve into sticky white powder, a mystery hole appears in a penthouse window; later in the episode, disembodied voices echo eerily in a hidden crawlspace connected to every apartment in the building by a series of ladders and trap doors; rain pours down the inside of a window. Dark Water, House of Leaves, and (again) Dionaea House fans would hardly be disappointed.
I was extremely tickled at how specific some of the homages got: The optical-illusionism of the scene in The Ring where Naomi Watts pauses an image of a fly on a monitor, then reaches out and touches it only to find that it’s now outside the TV, is neatly replicated by the scene in which the retarded housekeeper touches the rainy windowpane and discovers that the water is pouring down her hand. The most explicit reference is a hidden-camera night-vision shot of guest star Adam Goldberg climbing up through the darkness of a crawlspace in a scene that couldn’t look more like Samara scaling the walls of her well in The Ring and The Ring 2 unless he suddenly grew a head of long black hair.
Needless to say, the episode ends up faithful to the could-be-true-crime roots of the Law & Order franchise, and the potentially uncanny roots of the various phenomena experienced are duly explained away (though the writers do insert a commentary to the effect that some people are indeed tuned into “different wavelengths,” so to speak). Also, perhaps sensing that the weirdness of the episode was pushing the envelope pretty hard, the filmmakers had star Vincent D’Onofrio tone down his famously quirky performance as Det. Bobby Goren; his not-quite-rational mannerisms and odd leaps of intuitive logic played as small a role in the solving of this case as I’ve ever seen them play. But as a study of the uncanny in its classic German sense–unheimlich, meaning literally un-home-like–“The View from Up Here” was quite a sight to behold.