Use of Tropes: In Fabric

The 2018 Peter Strickland film In Fabric is an outstanding film and one that is described as a (sort of) ghost story. However, I saw elements within it that tie into vampire genre tropes. Whether this has a touch of apophenia on my part, or an unconscious element on the director’s part is almost irrelevant. Looking into this I listened through Strickland’s commentary on the Blu-Ray and whilst he mentioned some influences – notably M R James and Carnival of Souls (1962) – there was notably no espoused connections to vampire genre pieces. Interestingly many (including myself) see a stylistic connection to Susperia (1977), a connection Strickland mentions but denies consciously making. Nonetheless…

Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Sheila

This is a surreal walk through consumerism, through the Department store and a character exploration. The film is also about a haunted red dress – though what is it haunted by? Perhaps it is cursed, though it is the dress itself that is the focus of the film and to the characters unlucky enough to don it.

Luckmoore and Sheila

The first of these buys the dress. She is Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) a bank clerk who, near the head of the film, discovers that her ex-husband is dating again and starts to look at doing the same through personal ads – though her son Vince (Jaygann Ayeh) is less than impressed with the idea. She arranges a date (ultimately, a bad date) with Adonis (Anthony Adjekum) and goes to the Department store Dentley and Soper’s, who are in the January sales period, and is convinced by the mysterious Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed, the Field Guide to Evil) to buy the dress despite the fact that it isn’t what she would normally wear. Strangely it fits, despite the size not being the size she would wear. The dress is the only one like it they have.

sale signs

Let us look at the store workers as they are, very much, part of our trope. I have seen them described as vampire like and they also draw the mind to Susperia. Wearing almost Victorian dresses, the staff are female bar Mr Lundy (Richard Bremmer) and the (almost Renfield like) Pitcroft (Adam Bohman). Lundy seems to have some authority and, as the store opens Lundy kneels and the female staff stand, beckoning the customers in (something that occurs in their almost psychotropic television advert also). This is a surreal extension of Strickland’s experience as a member of staff and the ‘first customer’ greet in TGI-Fridays but could also be tied to “Welcome to my house! Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring!” from Dracula. A quick note that the “sale” signs converts the ‘l’ to two parallel lines bringing to mind trails of blood from a vampire’s bite.

in the dumb waiter

If they are strange in store, with their commercial patois, for example “The hesitation in your voice, soon to be an echo in the recess in the spheres of retail” and “Did the transaction validate your paradigm of consumerism?”, then in the back of the store they are something else. Miss Luckmore, we see, removes her hair to reveal it as a wig, her head bald (the implication being the female staff, at the very least, all are), and this makes her more like a mannequin but also draws Roald Dhal’s the Witches to mind and Count Orlock. Miss Luckmore descends further into the bowels of the store by crouching in a dumb waiter. The mannequin’s and the store staff seem to be interconnected – not only do the staff seem to resemble the mannequins but there is a scene where they are revealed to be more than they seem.

at the window

One of the staff takes a mannequin to dress it and lifts her skirts, sitting over its head in a scene that suggests oral sex. Miss Luckmore strips the underwear from the prone mannequin revealing that there is pubic hair and it begins to menstruate. Miss Luckmore masturbates the mannequin – as Mr Lundy watches from within the shelves, pleasuring himself at the sight, and then she lifts her bloody fingers and tastes the blood on them. It is a strange and surreal scene that did land the film with some controversy with censors. The last thing I want to mention about Miss Luckmore specifically is a scene of her looking out of a window down at the milling consumers waiting to be allowed entrance to the store. At the window she again reminded me of Orlock in the window of his house in Wisborg/Bremen.

the dress on the ceiling

The dress itself, when worn, causes a rash on the breast/chest of the wearer and is able to move of its own volition. It seems to cause disturbing dreams (like the vampire type the mare does) and we also see it seem to attack – including Gwen (Gwendoline Christie), Vince’s older girlfriend, that it seems to smother in her sleep. When placed in a washing machine it causes the machine to break, and also seems to ‘heal’ itself – having been ripped in a dog attack and burned in a fire it reappears none the worse for wear. It lands on a canary cage in the night and the bird is dead in the morning – smothering is mentioned – and seems to cause a box of fresh fruit and veg to rapidly decay. Smothering by a mare, and the nightmares it brings, is often a description for energy vampirism and the causing of vegetation to rot is a trope used in many genre films and also ties to energy vampirism.

Richard Bremmer as Lundy

The dress has the phrase, “You who wear me, will know me” embroidered inside it and there seems to be a definitive connection between Miss Luckmore and the dress (a scene of her rapidly moving in the back of the store matches the movement of the dress in a wardrobe). She also refuses to take the dress back from Sheila and when Sheila sees the dress in the store’s catalogue her reaction is sharp, trying to hide the page (and later ripping the page out and intimately hiding it). The dress is described, in the catalogue, as being arterial red (connecting the dress to blood) and it is revealed that the model of the dress was killed (run over on a zebra crossing), making her the first victim. When the dress finally causes Sheila’s doom the dress ends up in a charity shop and bought for the stag night of washing machine repairman Reg Speaks (Leo Bill) – who is forced to wear it and gets the rash. His fiancé Babs (Hayley Squires) later wears it too.

Reg and Babs

To touch on the dreams a moment – now we have met Babs and Reg. Sheila has a dream of her dead mother but the dream also seems to foreshadow her death. Reg’s dream involves the staff of the store as nurses, giving Babs a caesarean section and his new-born daughter, in the dress, giving him the finger. Babs dreams that she is in the store and is pictured in the catalogue. She gets thinner and thinner (she has body dysmorphia as it stands) as the sizes of dresses seem to get larger and larger. The catalogue is cut apart and placed in a coffin where she is entombed.

The dress

The final thing to mention is the ending, with Miss Luckmore descending in the dumb waiter where it passes cells. In each cell is a victim sat at a sewing machine, creating another dress, the red thread in the machine that same arterial red. It is as though the dress has taken the souls of the victims – perhaps consumerism stole their souls – and has eternally put them to work. There are empty cells also, awaiting new victims.

tasting mannequin blood

So, is it a vampire film? Whilst you could argue a case for energy vampirism, I would say that more it uses, likely unconsciously, tropes. There is, incidentally, a thread of people being placed into ecstatic trance but this is by Reg Speaks as he drones his technical specs around washing machines and this is a take on ASMR. A wonderful and strange film. The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK