The Caretaker
Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom

LA RECENSIONE

The usual bedroom genius, the usual copy-paste, the usual endless slow cooking. Only here, not everyone can do it, our little chemist has fun playing with the shadows.

This Caretaker must be someone perfectly at ease with all the tricks of the uncanny.

Anyway, the haunted ballroom is that of the Overlock hotel, the horror machine where an old orchestra is lost in a melancholic and elusive finesse.

Even though, in truth, the term orchestra is rather misleading. In fact, being a hallucination, the music is only in the head of the hallucinated, in our case, the poor Jack Torrance.

Here's our Jack staging a sort of twenties dream, an unlikely paradigm of elegance where he is clearly out of place. At some point, while listening to one of those crooner songs, someone reveals to him what he always was and will always be.

“Mr Grady, you used to be the caretaker here”

“I beg to differ sir, but you are the caretaker... you have always been”

From this famous scene, where everything is true and nothing is, our haunted record takes its cue. Caretaker does some research on the dance music of the 1920s, sifting through gozzanian attics, damp cellars, narrow back rooms.

Then, revealing the mold stains of Jack's dream, he tears everything he finds to pieces. Our caretaker, who even then, unknowingly, was a corpse, is now finally a ghost.

However, the record is fantastic, like a hallucination of a hallucination…

The airy lightness of the orchestra, wrapped in a muffled whirlwind, enters and exits from distorting mirrors. The impression is that of a magic lantern in reverse.

Disconnected and foggy flickers that sketch out a corroded and gnawed elegance. Sometimes everything implodes, sometimes there’s an almost incongruous grace.

Yet other times it's a kind of distance, a muffled somewhere and sometime. Above it all, a scent of decomposition...

In some moments though, the decaying twenties dream manages to hover in mid-air. Then it feels like being in a kind of mystical and shabby amusement park and you're almost moved.

Then when a new assault sets things straight, you realize that there are only ruins around.

Ah, in English Caretaker means custode...

Trallallà...