Why film­mak­ers can’t resist the lure of lighthouses

To their ear­ly occu­pants, off­shore light­hous­es were as remote and unin­hab­it­able as space. The first of these struc­tures sur­vived just five years. Bat­tered by the rag­ing ele­ments, it col­lapsed in 1703 killing every­one inside. The tragedy echoed through our cul­tur­al con­scious­ness. Edgar Allen Poe’s last known (and unfin­ished) sto­ry is nar­rat­ed by a para­noid light­house keep­er who fears the build­ing will tum­ble around him. These iso­lat­ed and exposed off­shore ​‘rock’ light­hous­es have pro­vid­ed a fer­tile set­ting for mys­ter­ies, weird tales and descents into mad­ness ever since.

Cin­e­ma is unique­ly placed to tell these sto­ries using the very sens­es that make us curi­ous and afraid. We’re hard­wired to react uneasi­ly to their pecu­liar sound­scape, from the howl­ing winds that give the real-life Wolf Rock its name, to bib­li­cal storms and the low-pitch of fog horns. Mar­tin Scors­ese weaves them seam­less­ly into his psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller Shut­ter Island using Ingram Marshall’s omi­nous track, ​‘Fog Tropes’. But even before sound, film could defa­mil­iarise the ocean faster than any nov­el­ist. In 1929, Jean Grémillon’s deep blacks, swirling cam­era and high angles made strange the for­bid­ding ocean in The Light­house Keep­ers. Tak­ing us inside the lantern, the direc­tor cap­tures the hyp­not­ic and hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry pow­er of the turn­ing light.

The endur­ing appeal of the rock light­house lies in the phys­i­cal pres­ence of the build­ings them­selves. ​“There can be few oth­er build­ings designed express­ly to repel, to emphat­i­cal­ly not be seen at close quar­ters,” observes Tom Nan­col­las in his book ​‘Seashak­en Hous­es’. Seen only in our imag­i­na­tions rock light­hous­es are eerie places, soaked in mys­tery and sur­round­ed by death. They sign­post wrecked ships and men drown­ing in icy waters, heads dashed against black rocks or swal­lowed by erupt­ing waves of white spray. No won­der we imag­ine their lone­ly inhab­i­tants go mad.

Film­mak­ers have giv­en life to these unseen build­ings by draw­ing on their con­tra­dic­tions as places of light and dark­ness, safe­ty and dan­ger: a home to crim­i­nals in The Phan­tom Light and a killer in Tow­er of Ter­ror. On screen, their ver­ti­cal archi­tec­ture and con­fined inte­ri­ors have sym­bol­ic mean­ing and dra­mat­ic imper­a­tive. Spi­ral stair­cas­es have long been a visu­al short­cut for con­fu­sion and psy­cho­log­i­cal unrav­el­ling. Scors­ese takes this to extremes at the cli­mac­tic twist of Shut­ter Island. His light­house is a lobot­o­my clin­ic for the crim­i­nal­ly insane.

One hun­dred years ear­li­er, the spi­ral stair­case in Grémillon’s film was the set­ting of a strug­gle between the sane and psy­chot­ic. The light­house keeper’s son is going mad from a dog bite and the cramped inte­ri­or push­es the char­ac­ters into con­flict. The near square aspect ratio of silent cin­e­ma inten­si­fies the claus­tro­pho­bia and the tiny space becomes a trag­ic pres­sure cook­er as they wait out a vio­lent storm. Each cut between the rock and the main­land ampli­fies the dis­tance; a poignant sug­ges­tion of their doomed fate.

With his suf­fo­cat­ing frame and dev­as­tat­ing cuts, Grémil­lon pro­vokes a fear response com­pa­ra­ble to Alfon­so Cuarón’s Grav­i­ty. Both Grémillon’s light­house keep­ers and Cuarón’s astro­nauts are strand­ed in a vast, hos­tile land­scape at the fore­front of human endeav­our. Just as this iso­la­tion breeds insan­i­ty for the light­house keep­ers in Tow­er of Ter­ror and Thun­der Rock, so it does for the astro­nauts in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Dan­ny Boyle’s Sun­shine and James Gray’s Ad Astra. These are sur­vival sto­ries, inter­nal bat­tles of will. ​“Whether sea or space,” writes Nan­col­las, ​“these realms into which we stray are exhil­a­rat­ing because we know we are trespassers.”

It is often said that we know more about out­er space than the ocean. This uncer­tain­ty fuels folk­lore: mys­te­ri­ous crea­tures, haunt­ings and the cru­el hand of God. As build­ings, rock light­hous­es sym­bol­ise man’s mas­tery of the sea, but the expe­ri­ence of those inside betrays vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. In 1900 three keep­ers mys­te­ri­ous­ly van­ished from the Scot­tish island of Eilean Mor. In 1801 a corpse mov­ing in the wind appeared to beck­on the keep­er at Smalls. Light­house his­to­ry is so lit­tered with trag­ic and bizarre sto­ries that ghosts and insan­i­ty became cred­i­ble red-her­rings in Michael Powell’s light­house thriller The Phan­tom Light.

The age of light­house keep­ers is now long passed – the build­ings stand­ing emp­ty and auto­mat­ed – but the exis­ten­tial ques­tions posed by their expe­ri­ence remain rel­e­vant and irre­sistible. In more than 100 years of light­house films these pecu­liar build­ings have pro­vid­ed a con­duit for our angst. The spir­its tor­ment­ing the light­house keep­er in World War Two dra­ma Thun­der Rock inspire him to return home and fight, while in Robert Eggers’ fan­ta­sy-hor­ror The Light­house, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson’s ​“wick­ies” seem pos­sessed by the light.

The remote light­house in Alex Garland’s night­mar­ish sci-fi, Anni­hi­la­tion, becomes the epi­cen­tre of a rad­i­cal envi­ron­men­tal event that res­cues nature from the destruc­tive force of human­i­ty. Gar­land expos­es the most vital issue of our times by thor­ough­ly sub­vert­ing the light­house as an emblem of human mas­tery. Like out­er space, these strange and dis­tant build­ings evoke our most essen­tial ques­tions about God, sci­ence and the super­nat­ur­al. Anx­i­ety about our place in the uni­verse com­pels us to return there.