Celia: The Australian Childhood-Gothic

Ann Turner’s Celia is filed under horror in most places that file it at all, and the shelving is a lie that turns out to be true. There is no monster in it, in the sense the video shop meant. There is a suburban Melbourne street in 1957, a nine-year-old girl, her grandmother’s funeral, a set of neighbours her father disapproves of, and a rabbit. Everything that happens is procedural, legal, and carried out by adults acting within their rights. By the end it has produced one of the most genuinely disturbing films Australia has made, and it did it without a single supernatural event that the film will vouch for.

Rebecca Smart plays Celia Carmichael, and the performance is the reason the film exists. Smart was about ten and she is in almost every frame, carrying a role that requires her to be watchful, secretive, cruel, wounded and entirely reasonable, often within the same scene. Turner’s camera lives at Smart’s height for most of the running time, which is a decision with consequences: adults enter the frame from above, conversations happen over her head, and the political weather of Australia in 1957 arrives the way weather actually arrives to a child — as something that happens to the things she loves, for reasons nobody will explain.

What a nine-year-old can see of the Cold War

The setting is the Menzies era, with the Petrov business still fresh and the anti-communist temperature high. Celia does not know any of this. What Celia knows is that the Tanners have moved in next door, that Alice Tanner (Victoria Longley) is the most interesting adult she has ever met, that the Tanner children are her friends, and that her father Ray has abruptly forbidden the whole arrangement. The word “communist” passes over her head repeatedly and never lands as a concept. It lands as a rule.

Turner runs a second confiscation alongside the first, and this is the structural stroke that makes the film. Australia in the fifties was fighting an actual rabbit plague, and the state’s response included a ban on keeping rabbits as pets and a myxomatosis campaign of considerable brutality. Celia has a rabbit. His name is Murgatroyd. He is, in the flat legal terms of the day, vermin held in contravention, and men come to take him away.

Two confiscations, then: her friends and her rabbit. Both are removed by adults with authority. Both removals are justified by reasoning she is not offered. And critically — this is Turner’s sharpest move — both are executed by the same man, Celia’s uncle, who is a policeman, and who is therefore the physical embodiment of the state in a nine-year-old’s actual life. The film never asks Celia to understand the politics. It only asks her to notice who keeps turning up in a uniform to take things.

That is a far more sophisticated account of how ideology reaches children than any film with a classroom scene in it. Celia’s radicalisation is complete and she could not name a single thing she believes. She has simply learned the one operative fact available to her: that adults take what they want by force, and the taking is called the law.

The Hobyahs, and Turner’s refusal to mark the border

Celia’s school reader contains “The Hobyahs” — a folk tale, genuinely part of the Victorian school readers of the period, about creatures that come in the night and are driven off, and in the original telling the family’s dog is dismembered for barking a warning. It is a horrific story to hand a small child, and it was handed to hundreds of thousands of them as literature.

The Hobyahs get into Celia’s head, and Turner puts them on screen. Here is the craft decision that makes the film work: she shoots them in exactly the same visual register as everything else. No dream lighting, no ripple dissolve, no reaction shot of Celia waking in bed to tell you where the boundary was. They arrive in the quarry, in the landscape, in the same grain and the same light as the rabbit hutch and the kitchen table.

This is more disciplined than it sounds, because the ordinary way to shoot a child’s imagination is to fence it — to signpost fantasy so the audience stays oriented and comfortable. Turner declines, and the effect is that the film has no privileged vantage point from which to tell you what is real. The Hobyahs are as real as the myxomatosis and the rifle, because to Celia there is no meaningful difference between a creature from her reader and a man from the council: both are things that arrive from the adult world without explanation and remove what she loves.

Turner also gets enormous mileage from the children’s gang. The kids form an alliance, hold ceremonies, run a campaign against a rival, and conduct their politics with a seriousness the adults would find comic. The film does not find it comic. It films the children’s rituals with the same neutral attention it gives the grown-ups’ meetings, and the comparison flatters neither.

The real ancestor is The Spirit of the Beehive

The obvious comparison is Picnic at Hanging Rock, and it is available — both films are Australian, both are about girls and landscape, both decline to explain. It is also the wrong one. Weir’s film is about absence and the sublime. Turner’s is about ownership.

The true ancestor is Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), and the correspondence is almost line for line. A small girl in a politically poisoned country, too young to understand the poison. A piece of imported culture — Erice’s Frankenstein, Turner’s Hobyahs — that gives her a shape to hang her dread on. A rural landscape that the adults use for their business and the child uses for her cosmology. And a father whose politics have made the house cold in a way the child registers as weather. Erice made his under Franco and had to bury the politics deep enough to survive a censor. Turner made hers in a free country and buried them just as deep, because the burial is the technique rather than the necessity.

Forbidden Games (1952) is in the family too — René Clément’s children conducting funerals for animals while the adults conduct a war they will not discuss. Turner’s Celia is what those children grow into by month six.

What separates Celia from both is the ending, and the reason it belongs on the horror shelf after all. Erice’s girl absorbs. Clément’s children mourn. Celia acts. Put her next to Bava’s ghost child or the pair in The Innocents, and the difference is that those children are vessels for something — possession, ghosts, ambiguity. Celia is not a vessel. Celia has a grievance, a correct analysis of her situation, and access to her uncle’s rifle. The horror in Turner’s film is that everything the child does makes sense.

The case against

The film’s reach occasionally exceeds Turner’s control. She is running the anti-communist panic, the rabbit plague, a children’s gang war, a grief story and a folk-horror motif through ninety-odd minutes, and there are stretches where the threads sit next to each other rather than braiding. The adult subplot — Ray’s politics, the Tanner marriage, Alice’s situation — is competently sketched and rarely more, which is partly the point (we are at Celia’s height, and adults are weather) and partly a loss, because Longley is very good and gets less than she can hold.

The film also came and went. It arrived in 1989 into an Australian industry that had spent a decade being sold as Ozploitation abroad and prestige at home, and Celia fit neither pitch — too slow for the first, too nasty for the second. It has been rediscovered several times since, and each rediscovery has had to start by explaining what it is, which is the reliable sign of a film that was mis-shelved on arrival and never re-filed.

Watch it for Rebecca Smart, who does something in the final reel that most adult actors cannot. And watch it as the second half of a double bill with The Spirit of the Beehive, which will tell you more about both films than either does alone.

Spoilers below

The rabbit dies. That is the hinge, and Turner is careful about how she stages it: Murgatroyd’s death is a consequence of a policy, executed by officials, with a form filled in somewhere. Nobody involved has done anything wrong. Celia’s grief has no villain available to it, which is intolerable, so she finds one — her uncle, the man in the uniform who came to the house, who is also the man who broke up her friendship with the Tanners, and who therefore represents in one body every taking she has suffered.

She shoots him. She uses his own rifle, out in the landscape, and the film gives the act no music and no build. It is quick and domestic and it looks like an accident, which is exactly how it is subsequently read. The adults construct an explanation, close the matter, and move on. Celia is nine, and nine-year-olds do not do this sort of thing, so the world simply declines to see what it is looking at — the same refusal to look that has run through the entire film in the other direction.

The final image is the one that earns the horror shelf. Celia is fine. She is composed, unhaunted, entirely intact, and the Hobyahs are gone, because she has stopped needing them. The monsters were a child’s way of storing an anger she had no other container for, and the moment she found a direct use for it they evaporated. Turner ends on a girl who has learned exactly what the adults taught her — that you take what you want, that authority is whoever is holding the rifle, and that if the paperwork is right nobody asks — and who is going to grow up in a country that will keep confirming it. There is no reckoning and no consequence. That is the point. She has been socialised successfully.