Past Misdeeds: The Guardian (1990)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Chicago Marketing guy Phil (Dwier Brown) and his interior architect wife Kate (Carey Lowell) are on their way up, living the bourgeois dream, such as it is. Phil has just scored a choice new position in Los Angeles, and Kate's pregnant with their first child.

The couple's son Jake is born shortly after they move to LA into a fine house in some kind of comparatively rural looking suburb (any LA experts reading this may hit me, if necessary), and now they're looking for a nanny to take care of the child while Phil's out marketinging (that's the technical term) and Kate decorates interiors. They find a British woman named Camilla (Jenny Seagrove) who seems perfectly suited to the job. Camilla's not even the couple's first choice, but their initial candidate (Theresa Randle) dies in a curious and unfortunate accident.

Outwardly, things go well with Camilla. In truth, strangeness enters the house with her: Phil feels attracted to her in a way that - to his honour - rather seems to creep him out, and he begins to develop insomnia and peculiar dreams circling around babies, a tree and Camilla. Which is only fitting, seeing as Camilla is an evil tree spirit's supernatural druid guardian out to offer little Jake to her tree, like she did many times before with other babies. These generally unspoken of dangers of parenthood really are enough to disabuse one of the thought of ever having children of one's own.

For my tastes, William Friedkin's The Guardian has a reputation among many horror film fans that is decidedly too low. I believe it's The Exorcist's fault. That certified classic is generally seen as the best of the director's few horror films, if not as his best film, period, and any other genre film he directed always will have to compete with it; which is of course patently unfair, but then such is life. To me, The Exorcist never mattered much. I can appreciate the film as a technical achievement but I have no emotional connection to its plot, nor do I find it particularly interesting or frightening, so I'm in a great position to not judge a movie for not being The Exorcist.

However, The Guardian has to jump a different hurdle with me, for it belongs to that dreaded group of movies from the late 80s and early 90s that shows educated rich people living the good life getting betrayed (and hopefully murdered) by the hired help who never heard of the sanctity of family and so on and so forth. I do enjoy some films in this particular sub-genre, but in general, I find its mixture of classism and reactionary thought particularly distasteful.

In this particular case, there's not too much for me to hate about the film's politics, though. Friedkin's approach doesn't seem interested in class as a concept at all, and doesn't do much of the "sacred family" nonsense either; we are rather in the "most parents want to protect their babies" territory that is as innocent as these things go. Additionally, it is rather difficult to feel any actual loathing towards this film's rich couple, or get annoyed at them, for Phil and Kate may be two of the blandest people alive, barely showing themselves able to scratch together enough character traits of any kind for even one person between the two of them. They're also the kind of people progressive enough to hire a nanny who is as coldly creepy as Seagrove's Camilla, so they may be difficult to love but they're not the kind of horror film main characters I'd enjoy seeing suffer.

All this - and I haven't even mentioned how uninspired the film's plotting is - rather sounds as if I am actually sharing the general opinion about The Guardian, but there's one major thing the film does so very well I feel bound to forgive it for any and all flaws it has. The film does weird (or even Weird) just wonderfully right, treating Camilla as a force from an Outside that opens doors to that Outside for everyone she touches. Plus, there's even the suggestion of tree sex.

Where too many US mainstream horror movies (then and now) absolutely try to avoid anything supernatural that can't be systematized and explained, Friedkin's film – I very much suspect thanks to its very British screenwriter, the great Stephen Volk - is very much in the spirit of European horror, thriving on certain elements being illogical, treating its supernatural threat as something turning the rational, sunny world of its protagonists into something stranger and more ambiguous.

Friedkin (and Volk) particularly use images and ideas out of fairy tale and myth here - from the wolf pack that protects the tree and Camilla, to the doom of our heroes' architect neighbour beginning with him watching Camilla bathing in a brook in the woods. The woods themselves (are there even such woods in real-world LA?) do of course belong into the realm of the same kind of imagery, particularly the way even a small detour from a road leads the film's characters from civilization and the rational world they know into the realm of nightmare and fairy-tale.


To use this kind of approach to horror in a film does naturally carry some specific risks beyond just annoying the people who like their attacks of the irrational on the rational more logical. It is, in particular, very easy to land in the realm of the unintentionally funny when one goes for the capital-W Weird. The Guardian's climax with its body painted Camilla with an effects-laden voice, and its heroic fight against a bleeding tree is probably a moment where a lot of people will start to giggle or roll their eyes, and I really can't blame anyone for that; I, on the other hand, am much too delighted by a film actually going to such a peculiar place in its finale to laugh at it