Paperhouse (1988)

PAPERHOUSE is sometimes categorized as a children's fantasy film. It's really not.

Bernard Rose (Candyman) adapted it in 1988 from Catherine Storr's 1958 novel Marianne Dreams - the story of a girl who draws a house, falls ill, and finds herself inside her own drawing when she sleeps.

What Rose did with that premise was deliberately strip away the safety net. The father figure Anna draws into existence becomes something genuinely terrifying: blind, violent, wielding a hammer, arriving across an empty landscape with no logic and no mercy.

The score is by Stanley Myers and Hans Zimmer - years before Zimmer's name became synonymous with blockbuster movie scores. (The soundtrack CD is worth seeking out.)

Charlotte Burke plays Anna with a vividness that stays with you. She barely acted on screen again after this, which gives the film an odd, sealed quality - as if it arrived from somewhere, did what it came to do, and left.

Roger Ebert was knocked out by PAPERHOUSE. It never became a mainstream hit. It exists in that particular category of films that were seen by the right people at the right age and never quite let go.

It's less a dark fantasy than a film about what children's nightmares actually feel like from the inside.