Rose Red – review

Director: Craig R. Baxley

Release date: 2002

Contains spoilers

Rose Red was a Stephen King penned miniseries that I was aware of when it was released but passed me by and then I just forgot about it. Recently I saw a post on Facebook that suggested the vehicle featured vampiric ghosts and it does but, more, it features a vampiric building – the titular Rose Red.

For those wondering, I have a fondness for vampiric buildings and so to, it seems, does Stephen King. I wrote about the niche sub-genre in a chapter of the Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire and it is fair to say that King has listed a vampiric building film, Burnt Offerings, as an all-time favourite. To me it is clear that this influenced The Shining, in which the Overlook itself is a vampiric building that holds its hungry vampiric ghosts within. The Overlook obviously inspired Rose Red – like the hotel it feeds on psychic energy – and other inspirations would seem to be the film The Haunting (which came from the same source novel as the series The Haunting of Hill House, again interpreted as a vampiric building) and the real-life Winchester Mystery House.

Rose Red circa 2001

The miniseries begins, proper, in 1991 and suburbia. Annie (played young by Kristen Fischer) draws in her room, she starts music by telekinesis. There is an argument about her from outside her locked door. The neighbours across the road had a dog, which is being put down for biting her. The wife insists that he was a good dog and sensed something wrong in her. Annie’s drawing is of their house and, as the arguments rage, she starts scoring lines down the page and, in reality, rocks and boulders start to mysteriously fall from the sky smashing the neighbours' house. It is clear that Annie is causing the phenomena.

Nancy Travis as Joyce

In 2001 Prof. Joyce Reardon (Nancy Travis) is finishing the last lecture of the semester – her subject parapsychology. A young man, Kevin Bollinger (Jimmi Simpson, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter), asks her a question, trying to trip her up about the use of funds for a term-break project – he is a reporter for the student newspaper and has been set up to make her look bad. She fends him off, but she is, indeed, having a weekend paranormal investigation of Rose Red. She describes the house as a dead cell – there has been no reported phenomena for several years. Later she will suggest that she wants to make a psychic muscle twitch.

Melanie Lynskey as Rachel

She is in a relationship with Steve Rimbauer (Matt Keeslar, The Middleman & The Thirst) who owns Rose Red (being the great-Grandson of original owner Ellen Rimbauer (Julia Campbell)). He has not entered the house since he was eight and intends to have it demolished in 6-months. She is gathering a research group of psychics (who she is paying out of her own pocket) including automatic writer Kathy Kramer (Judith Ivey), a post-cognate called Emery Waterman (Matt Ross), telepath and remote viewer Nick Hardaway (Julian Sands), Victor Kandinsky (Kevin Tighe) who is a pre-cognate and Pam Asbury (Emily Deschanel) a psychometric. She really wants Annie (played older by Kimberly J. Brown, Halloween Town, Halloween Town II & III & Vampire Princess Miyu), something her parents are against but, with a high value offered for her attendance, her older sister Rachel AKA Sister (Melanie Lynskey, Castle Rock) secures her presence.

Tsidii Leloka as Sukeena

However it isn’t just for the money – Rachel wants it to get Annie enrolled in an autistic school, as well as psychic Annie is mostly non-verbal autistic – as Annie has shown she wants to attend (making her wishes known through telekinetic activity) and we have seen something calling her, shown in the form of eyes appearing in a reflective surface. This is clearly the house calling to her and so it is not as dead a cell as Joyce claims (and it is likely she knows this). Emery is also getting warning visions, though it is unlikely that is the house as it would want him there. We also get a sense of it not being as dead as claimed when Bollinger tries to get in ahead of the group (and so the psychics have not been there to feed it) and is greeted by a ghost, Sukeena (Tsidii Leloka). Not knowing her spectral nature he follows her and is taken by the house (though survives for some time, it seems, though quite mad).

Annie making contact

As for the house, constructed by John Rimbauer (John Procaccino) for his young bride, Joyce describes it as bad before it was built, with at least three deaths during construction. There was a séance at the house were Ellen was told that if the house kept being built then she would never die (using the mythology around the Winchester Mystery House, where rumour suggested the owner, Sarah Winchester, believed they would die if construction stopped). Ellen continues to have things built onto the house until, at a good age, she vanishes mysteriously but from then on the house seems to grow under its own volition. The count of rooms can change and early on the investigators tie a guide rope and, when leaving the area, find that a wall has appeared with the rope passing through it. Annie removes the obstacle (though whether it was dispelling a shared illusion or an actual wall is unclear).

fangs on show

Rose Red is a gothic pile that looks anachronistic against the modern city it nestles in. The house is described as a vampire and also homes the ghosts of those who died/vanished there (at an estimated count of 23). It likely supports them through the psychic energy it steals – in this case, whilst feeding on all the psychics, it is mainly interested in Annie and Steve – whilst Steve is described as not being psychic at all, his familial link and the visit when he was eight plays into this. We do see Ellen both as a walking cadaver and a ghost (the spirits are shown in a glowing blue often) – whether she is animating her own cadaverous body or it is a spectral form she takes was unclear, but when she is angered she does also manifest large fangs.

ghost in the mirror

The mini-series was interesting and, if nothing else, it seems to underscore the vampiric building/ghost aspect of the Shining and clarify King’s direction of travel. It is very miniseries with characters that are perhaps too larger than life – Emery’s incel like snark is almost caricature, Joyce’s obsessiveness overtakes any other character aspect she may have had and some of the powers/abilities are too overtly strong to allow for subtlety (Annie is pretty much overpowered – telekinesis is one thing but the stones and boulders from the sky are another order of magnitude). There is no slow build up here either. Once at the house the hauntings come in hard and heavy (in fact it is astounding that they make it past a night… and… well not all do). Yet it was a fun enough watch and a vampiric building is always welcome. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK