Marianne Dreams

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Ren: Well, I think it’s immediately creepy from the first time she goes int the dream to the house and it’s this flat-looking house on this absolutely deserted plain because she hasn’t drawn anything else, and the wind whipping through the grass, and it definitely has a pretty eerie atmosphere from the beginning.

Escape Into Night – Nostalgia Central Escape Into Night – Nostalgia Central

Marianne looked again. It was difficult to see much of any one of the stones because of the bars and the fence hindering her view. But as she concentrated on one of the humped squat figures with all her attention, she saw suddenly a movement. A dark oval patch, which she had taken to be a hole, disappeared, as a pale eyelid dropped slowly for a moment and then was raised again. And in the dark oval, the ball of an eye swivelled slowly towards the house and remained there, staring with a fixed and unwinking gaze straight, it appeared, at Marianne herself. She shrank away from the window and turned to Mark. ‘One of them looked right at me!’ she said. Ali: Yeah. He definitely seems threatening, because you’ve seen him doing all of these things, but then it seems like the film, as Ren said, was trying to rehabilitate him and position him as being quite nice and caring about her.In comparison to what is shown today this was truly terrifying, and very imaginative. I've never read the book though. Ali: Yeah, I felt like one of the things that I really liked about the book was that it was quite tightly structured. There’s quite a logical progression between the different dreams, and then she draws something else as a consequence of that dream, and then theres another dream and the consequences of what she’s just drawn are revealed. The film’s pretty erratic, in terms of how her drawing is motivated.

Marianne Dreams - Catherine Storr - Google Books Marianne Dreams - Catherine Storr - Google Books

When my sister was 10 she bought a rather battered copy of a book called Marianne Dreams at our school summer fair. A few years later, when she decided it was too young for her, she handed it on to me. I love puzzles – not particularly the kind that have to be solved, like crosswords, but ones that intrigue in the same way as a complex painting or a spider’s web. Marianne Dreams, published in 1958, is that kind of novel. Its plot is driven by mysterious connections – invisible threads that join together people and things in worlds both real and imaginary – and while the story may be resolved at the end of the book, the puzzle remains. There’s some danger in the book, which you don’t see in the film when they come up with the idea of drawing a helicopter that the helicopter will turn out as a horrible winged insect monster.You don’t see a lot of depictions of disabled kids where they are allowed to be crotchety, mean, unreasonable, brave, gutsy, actually-still-children, who have their own agency – and this story gives you two of them (the only other example I can think of is The Fault in Our Stars) Adam: No, I’d never heard of the book. In fact, watching the film I didn’t know it was based on a book, and it was only when I looked up the film that I learnt that it was based on a book — So, in Paperhouse, it’s a similar setup, Anna draws her father and then decides she’s drawn him wrong and scribbles his face out.