The 80-foot wire statue of a sitting man in Flevoland, the Netherlands. Because we are culturally highly sophisticated, the sculpture by Antony Gormley soon became known as “pooping man”.
Dutch horror, THE LIFT (1983).
First off: it’s available on YouTube, in English, so you can watch it for yourself if you want.
THE LIFT was my first horror film. My mother was quite nonchalant when it came to stuff that my brother and I weren’t supposed to see; having become a mother at a very young age, she always seemed more like one of us, rather than a parent that laid down the rules. She grew up with us. Dutch cinema at the time was known for its gloomy, harshly realistic sex-and-death films, and we’d watch them all indiscriminately, exploring the world of cinema together. I don’t think there’s a single 1980s film that we didn’t see.
THE LIFT though was one of the very few Dutch horror films, and probably the best one. JAWS had its shark, CHRISTINE had its car, THE LIFT has its lift. What I love about the film, after all these years, is how pure 1980s it is. Watching it is like wandering through the surroundings of my early childhood. I recognize the interiors, the fashion, the brands, the logos, the car models, the gritty neons, the robust electronics, the people. In Holland, everything looks alike, one town is like the other, with the same stores, the same chains, the same architecture. THE LIFT could have been filmed in my own hometown, the actors in it all look familiar, their faces are those of my childhood.
But this of course also made the film even scarier for me. Horror on my own doorstep. The elevators looked exactly like the elevators at my local mall. Elevators were unnerving things to me, anyway; they had the lethal allure of a Venus flytrap. I am what Carl Jung calls an “introverted sensation type”, which means that to me, behind every object there is a different, more mythical object, and the irrational relation between those two objects purely exists in my own mind. To me, the sound of a distant train can be the comforting voice of a friendly giant, or the lone howl of a wind demon. Of course I didn’t know all this as a kid—I just regarded elevators as unpredictable beings that you shouldn’t provoke. The fear of elevators actually is a nice combination of two other fears: claustrophobia and acrophobia, the fear of closed spaces and heights respectively. And I had heard stories, you know. This was before the age of cell phones, when you could get stuck in an elevator without anyone knowing, and die. Anyway, I usually took the stairs.
THE LIFT added an extra fear: that an elevator would become sentient and develop an urge to kill. I love the scene where the protagonist, Felix, a maintenance man, discovers the elevator actually has a pulsating heart, covered with this organic, luminous goo. It’s perfectly executed horror. The elevator’s cables are its muscles, its processor is its nervous system. It can scream. Felix nearly gets killed uncovering all of this, and the actual culprit behind it all, but is saved just in time by his reporter friend, Mieke.
It’s an effective, suspenseful film. There is no evolution in art of course, otherwise we’d now have writers greater than Shakespeare and sculptors better than Michelangelo, but THE LIFT holds up to any modern horror, and surpasses those that try hard to capture that 1980s aesthetic. Here, the creepy synth music is authentic, as are the candy-colored neon lights and the practical special effects.
The director, Dick Maas, would later make a string of commercially very successful films before moving to Hollywood, where he’d direct an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and, much later, a dreadful remake of THE LIFT, starring a then-unknown Naomi Watts. Huub Stapel, who plays Felix, and Willeke van Ammelrooy, his reporter friend Mieke, both went on to have long careers; Van Ammelrooy had the lead role in ANTONIA (1995), which won an Academy Award.
Who though, when I was a wee kid watching this film, could have predicted I’d be telling you about it, here, some 35 years later?
