The Sixteenth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE SIXTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), written and directed by Osgood Perkins.

Two girls are left behind at a Catholic boarding school after it closes for the winter, one by choice and one because her parents are mysteriously missing. In the night, a demon speaks to one of the girls on a pay phone and seems to take possession of her through her ear. This causes her to kill and decapitate the other girl and two nuns, so as to make use of their heads in a Satanic ritual in the basement.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a paradigmatic instance of a slow burn. Most of the drama in the first half occurs entirely in the subtext of superficially uneventful scenes of the girls going about their days. The music does a lot of work in building tension, even more than in most horror movies, since it doesn’t reflect anything we see on screen or otherwise understand to be happening. It’s as if the score knows what we don’t about the characters and their fates. This clues us into the fact that we are seeing things that will be important later in piecing together the film’s nonlinear narrative. The solution to the puzzle of how the three main timelines relate to each other succeeds in impactfully communicating the main character’s desperate isolation and fractured state of mind. The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a really artful work of horror cinema, if you have the patience for its creeping subtleties. 

Having saved the spoilers for our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme section (which probably would have been a good idea in some earlier entries), we can now reveal that the doppelgänger of this movie is actually more of a reverse doppelgänger. Throughout, the stories of the two girls at the school are interrupted by cutting to a woman who has escaped from a mental institution and is making her way to the same school. This woman is offered a ride at a bus stop by the parents of the girl whom we will see decapitated, several years after this gruesome event. The father decides to offer her a ride because she somehow reminds him of his murdered daughter. This is grimly ironic, since we soon learn that, unbeknownst to the parents, this woman is actually the girl who was possessed and killed their daughter. The woman goes on to murder and decapitate the parents as well in a bid to appease the demon and invite it back into her mind. She does this because the demon has become her only friend, of sorts, given her extreme loneliness following the death of her own parents and her incarceration for the murders. So, since this woman is traveling under an alias when we meet her and looks different from her fifteen year old self, to us she appears to be two different people while in fact being one and the same person—a reverse doppelgänger. Meanwhile, when she is possessed by the demon, years earlier, she becomes a different person who wears the same face, so in this sense a true doppelgänger. The novel twist here is that when an exorcist expels the demon from her, she tearfully says, “Don’t go,” as she actually prefers to be inhabited by another entity, to be not herself. This speaks to the secret desire we might sometimes have for a doppelgänger to come and replace us in our lives so that we can escape to some other, easier reality. For The Blackcoat’s Daughter’s main character, this desire is undoubtedly what initially attracted the demon.