Antichrist (2009)

Ding. Dong.

“GD Kansas! Again!” scowls Frank, brushing the rain from the brim of his cap.

Ding. Dong.

Frank rings again. He can still see the old guy inside through the window. He’s sitting in an easy chair staring off into space or more likely an unseen TV in the corner.

Ding Dong.

Perhaps the man is deaf? Afraid? Dead?

Ding Dong.

Frank tries one more time, and then dashes back down the path to his ’73 Impala, still purring in the drive. He throws his soggy hat on the dash and beats the steering wheel. Annoyed. The lady from the historical society had told the house was condemned and empty. He dials the radio and looks for something that isn’t static with a sigh. It doesn’t really matter; it had been a long day and he should just find a motel. Frank had been hired to check out the basement of the beaten old house in Freemont, Kansas by the town planning committee who had recently acquired it. They planned to tear it down and replace it with low income housing. So, he’d left a sleeping Flip-Flop behind in Atlanta early, early Monday morning, and had raced 900 or so miles, stopping only for gas and egg salad sandwiches to make it to Freemont at a decent hour. He did. It was a decent enough hour that he’d figured he’d do a little reconnaissance, not expecting someone to be home.

He’d just assume get the investigation over with and race back across six states, to slide back under the sheets with Flip. Instead, he’d prolly have to drive into Lawrence for the night and tackle this thing in the morning.

The old Johnson place was a modified old cottonwood shack dating to the Bleeding Kansas years. The first homestead in this part of the county in fact, set on the uplands where it could look either down on the Kansa River to the north or across the barren prairie on every other side. That made it the perfect lookout point to watch for either parties of escaped slaves (maybe even in the company of John Brown himself) along the Lane Trail to Iowa or perhaps angry bands of slave owners from Missouri looking to recapture their lost property.

According to local legend, the Johnson’s had moved to the Kansas territory in 1858 in order to help establish the Underground Railroad in eastern Kansas. As such, the location would have been a good one, and the local historical society claimed to have documentary evidence both establishing that the Johnson’s built the place and that they were agents of John Brown, a couple of stops north on the railroad from his home base at that time in Osawatomie. That was all well and good. Prolly the house’s infrastructure was that old (Frank would know better after poking around a bit both inside and out) and Mrs. Rosegreen of the historical society had the documents to support all that.

The bigger question was whether or not the Johnson’s had an escape tunnel in the basement. Urban legends abound about all “Underground railroad” locations. The first one is always that it was quite literally underground. And don’t underestimate people’s skewed ideas of history. Frank has even heard it from quite a few old timers that the UGRR was literally a train that drove underground from Charleston to Toronto.

In this case the locals were convinced that in the space of a few months the Johnston’s dug down through their basement, through the dense clay, then one mile north to the banks of the Kansa. Just in case, some one snuck up on their cabin from across the prairie. Not bloody likely.

But local pothunters had torn up the basement floor and believed they had found it. Checking it out as a historical consultant was a quick buck anyway. Not that it was that easy. Nothing ever was, was it? Well, Frank could think of a million reasons why there probably not a tunnel in the old Johnson basement. But on the way to find an Econolodge, Frank mostly stewed about the old man on in the chair who wouldn’t answer the door.

Mrs. Rosegreen was parked in the drive when Frank returned the next morning. Frank was bitching as soon as he pulled up behind her:

“I thought you said the place was empty!” he barked at her as he climbed out of the Chevy.

“What? It is!” she stammered, and Frank suddenly felt bad, and told her of his stop here the night before. She explained that old Mr. Johnson had been stuck in a rest home in Topeka by his remaining family when the house was condemned. Earl Johnson was the great-grandson of Hank and Emma who had built the cabin. Aside from a short stint at Paris Island and Chosin Reservoir with the Marines in the 1950s, Topeka was about as far as he had ever gotten away from Freemont. The eighty something year old went quite against his will; he passed away his first night in the home.

But she is also not too surprised by Frank’s story. Seems the city crew who boarded the place was a bit freaked out as well. They heard some shuffling footsteps in the parlor, strange shadows etc.

Wonderful, Frank scowls, more ghosts. “No, they probably heard some squirrels in the attic, and I was just very tired,” he explains to Mrs. Rosegreen of the ladies historical society, “Let’s just go get this over with.”

She unlocks the door but that’s as far as she goes. But she hands Frank a flashlight and a hardhat. He goes in. It’s creepy. But not as creepy as the old cabin in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009). This cabin had at best, a grumpy old man’s spirit, some mice and possibly a tunnel. Von Trier’s cabin had self-disemboweling foxes, still-born fawns, swarms of ticks and acorns, subterranean zombie crows, and, oh, Willem Dafoe. Shudder. Creepy.

Of course, the craziest thing about Antichrist is that Willem Dafoe (Shadow of the Vampire; Merhige 2000) is not the crazy person. Oh, sure, he’s been Jesus (The Last Temptation of Christ; Scorsese 1988), but even that was controversial. No, here Dafoe is more the victim, an odd triumph in itself. Frank has been a fan of von Trier for years, ever since The Kingdom (1994, 1997) before Stephen King crapped it up for American TV. Von Trier has a knack for the gorgeous, when he wants to film it that way, but also always, always, an eye for the disturbing, albeit sometimes much more subtle or slower to the punch in films like The Five Obstructions (2003), Dancer in the Dark (2000) or Dogville (2003). And of course, the Dogme95 stuff and its ilk have been mentioned in this forum before.

Antichrist in all its unrated pseudo-pornographic glory was released on DVD by criterion on November 9, 2010. It centers around Dafoe and unnamed therapist and his wife heading off to a cabin in the woods to deal with the grief of loosing their toddler son. No more spoilers here.

The Johnson cabin is a mess. Totally looted. Cabinets opened, their contents vomited everywhere. Furniture overturned and holes, of course, torn into every wall looking secret passages or Nazi gold or something. Oh well. It was about to be torn down in a few days anyway, unless Frank found some UGRR evidence to save it. The house had already been deemed not eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, as it had little architectural integrity. Changes and additions by the Johnson family over the last three centuries had altered it far beyond recognizable as a 1850s farmstead; also the recent years of neglect had not been kind either. And, a typical suburban neighborhood had grown up around it. You could no longer see the river valley or the prairie from the second floor windows.

And everything creaked. No wonder people thought they heard stuff. It was pitch black, given the boarded up windows and the shut off power. Frank snaps pictures as he goes and the flash helps a bit lighting up the place. Cobwebs and loose boards everywhere. Frank finds the basement door with the help of luck and the poor flashlight beam and slowly creeps down the rickety stairs to the basement. There in the center of the concrete floor he finds the gaping hole he is looking for, he crouches and pulls back some of the broken concrete slabs. Just as he thought. Just a cistern. Concrete lined also by the look of it. Maybe five or six feet deep and about four across. Not unusual. And it was possible the Johnson’s, if they were UGRR agents, even hid a slave down there sometime. But a cistern is not a tunnel either. Footsteps on upstairs now behind him.

“Get back outside Mrs. Rosegreen! It’s no safe down here!” He yells, “The floor’s all torn up and the ceilings about to cave.” No answer. Anyway the cistern doesn’t look too deep and since he’s come all this way he might as well hop down and make sure there no tunnel leading out of it. With any luck (for the historical society, at least, not the city) they might have left some sort of evidence of a mid nineteenth century fugitive slaves in the bottom when they sealed it off. Footsteps on the stairs now.

“Goddammit, Mrs. Rosegreen!” he yells and jumps down clunking his head on a pipe running under the floor.

Frank winces and shines the beam around in the cavity. He’s getting too old for this. Hissing now. Coming from the pipe. The idiots busted a gas line digging up the floor. That should have been shut off with the other utilities. Good thing he’d used a flashlight and not his Zippo. Footsteps in the basement now. With a gas leak no wonder people are seeing ghosts. That is a reassuring thought as the footsteps reach the edge of the cistern and Frank can make out a shadowy figure above him just as he passes out unconscious.