"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

The Skeleton Key

August 12, 2005

Even though there were only a handful of horror movies that came out in the summer of 2005 I did not bother to see THE SKELETON KEY. And I believe it was a conscious choice. I tended to dislike Kate Hudson in movies and I think I snobbishly assumed her participation meant it was some phony mainstream horror movie for the normies or whatever. Also I think I still (correctly) distrusted screenwriter Ehren Kruger because of SCREAM 3. Being surprised to like THE RING didn’t fully change my opinion of him.

SUMMER 2005Hudson (between Garry Marshall’s RAISING HELEN and the Russo Brothers’ YOU, ME AND DUPREE) plays Caroline Ellis, who quits her job at a New Orleans nursing home, disappointed with how dehumanizing it is, and takes a private hospice gig looking after a stroke victim in a plantation house in Terrebonne Parish. Friendly lawyer Luke (Peter Sarsgaard, K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER) convinces fussy Violet Devereaux (Gena Rowlands following THE NOTEBOOK) to hire her to look after her husband Ben (John Hurt not long after HELLBOY), who is bedridden, doesn’t talk and seems terrified all the time.

I could be totally wrong about this, because I have no New Orleans experience, but I find characters like Violet really condescending toward southerners, the way they speak exclusively in old timey words and sayings. Obviously regional and generational differences exist, but I have trouble believing in someone who will, for example, never refer to her husband’s prescriptions by name or use the word “medicine” because she wants to say “his remedies.” It just seems completely phony to me. To be fair, she is also meant to be condescending toward Caroline, who does comment on it at least once. I got a good laugh when Violet’s already getting on Caroline’s nerves and then starts bragging about how great her garden is.


There are some corny jump scares and things that you’d expect. I think the most effective horror element is the build up of mystery – Ben struggling to say “help me” to Caroline, and then actually crawling out onto the roof trying to escape! – without her knowing what the fuck he’s so afraid of. I wonder if Hurt enjoyed the challenge of playing a character like this? He does eventually talk a little but it’s mostly a non-verbal, always scared role. Maybe it was the first step toward playing his gibberish-spouting character in INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL.

This poster is way better than the shitty DVD cover

The title refers to the key Violet gives Caroline, saying it opens everything in the house. The reasons it’s significant enough to use for the title are that 1) she gets suspicious when she finds out there is one door in the attic that it doesn’t unlock and 2) skeletons are spooky because bones are what’s inside a dead body. Of course she manages to pick the lock and discovers a bunch of weird occult shit belonging to Papa Justify (Ronald McCall, MUTANT SPECIES) and Mama Cecile (Jeryl Prescott, later in VACANCY 2: THE FIRST CUT), servants who worked and lived in the house 90 years ago. Caroline’s best friend Jill (Joy Bryant, BAADASSSSS!) explains that what she found is “a hoodoo room,” and that hoodoo is not a religion like voodoo, it’s magic, and it can’t harm you if you don’t believe in it (which she says she’s doesn’t, but she still clearly wants nothing to do with it).

I did not find this movie scary or its story more than mildly compelling, but there is some subtextual stuff that I was interested in. Violet keeps talking about the history of the white family that owned the place but is always brushing past the servants, who Caroline first finds out about from a photo left in a frame behind a photo with only the white people. Eventually, in the traditional person-who-knows-finally-reveals-the-full-backstory-they’ve-been-secretive-about scene (think Nancy’s mom telling her about Fred Krueger in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET), I realized Violet might be avoiding the topic out of horror movie fear more than the racism I assumed, but it’s ultimately the same result: white people whitewashing past atrocities, vainly trying to deny their resonance through erasure. She fears the hoodoo but definitely understands that Justify and Cecile did nothing wrong and were victims of a vicious hate crime. Her story even goes out of its way to paint the white family as rich assholes who got real drunk at a party and ignored their kids. What sets them off is finding the kids learning about hoodoo from the servants. It’s made explicit that they’re curious, they’re not being indoctrinated, and I like that they’re caught listening to one of Papa Justify’s rituals on a record, an echo through time of parents not wanting their kids listening to That Type of Music.

I’m not saying it’s in the same ballpark, or the same city as the same ballpark, but this reminded me of CANDYMAN even before it occurred to me that it has Black ghosts who come through mirrors. More importantly it’s another movie about a blond white lady who stumbles across a supernatural occurrence that turns out to be tied to a lynching from the racist past, and she has a Black best friend who offers her some insights she wouldn’t necessarily have and brings her to a “bad part of town” that the friend is more afraid of than her (but for superstitious reasons in this case). I think it’s good that telling these types of stories from the white point of view isn’t the default anymore, but I also think there is value in doing it sometimes because those are the people who still need to face this shit.

In the case of CANDYMAN the idea of her being a well-meaning but totally clueless intruder in the projects is the whole point of the story, but that’s not the dynamic we have here. Instead, Caroline is a not-fully-accepted newcomer to a world of white southerners. I guess she’s the younger generation from a more diverse background who makes more progress toward facing the situation as she learns more about what they’re hiding from her and goes out of her way to talk to different people and get more perspectives on it. (Weirdly the great Isaach De Bankole from GHOST DOG appears speaking Creole at a gas station but never is seen again.)

Ultimately the monsters are these two innocent victims from the past, but that makes them (like Candyman) feel a bit like some of the classic movie monsters. They’re to be feared but they’re coming from a sympathetic place. They have a reason to be angry.

I don’t think I ever saw ARLINGTON ROAD, but I believe it started Kruger’s reputation as a twist ending guy. He also did one for REINDEER GAMES and I liked the movie more than the twist, for sure. Here I do like how he ended it – maybe twist isn’t the right word but there are some drastic turns of events that I didn’t see coming and they do add some excitement. Actually I feel confident the ending must be the main reason I’ve heard claims of pretty-goodness about this over the years.

Director Iain Softley started by writing and directing the Stuart Sutcliffe biopic BACKBEAT (1994), then went Hollywood with the ridiculous font of freebased ninetiesness HACKERS (1995). I suppose his most acclaimed was the Henry James adaptation THE WINGS OF THE DOVE (1997) and most mocked was K-PAX (2001), which was followed by this. THE SKELETON KEY was kind of a hit but then he got caught on the post-Harry-Potter young adult fantasy bubble directing INKHEART (2008). So he’s done a couple since then, but none that I’ve heard of enough to consciously avoid like I did this one.

Yeah I guess it turns out I wasn’t missing much, but it doesn’t hurt to know. I’m not ashamed of my new life as a guy who has seen THE SKELETON KEY.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2025 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Reviews, Horror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

15 Responses to “The Skeleton Key”

  1. ARLINGTON ROAD is great! There is a reason why Kruger keeps getting work and it’s motherfucking ARLINGTON ROAD.

    There were probably dozens of conversations in Hollywood that were like:

    “We need a writer.”
    “Well, may I recommend you Ehren Kruger?”
    “Ugh, the guy who wrote SCREAM 3, BROTHERS GRIMM, TRANSFORMERS 2, 3 and 4 and…”
    “No no, he wrote ARLINGTON ROAD!”
    “Hired!”

  2. “ridiculous font of freebased ninetiesness HACKERS (1995)”

    I haven’t been commenting much because my job has eliminated basically all downtime and as stated previously I apparently ignored most of the movies of 2005. But I had to pull and praise this perfect description of one of my favorite guilty pleasure movies. I rented Hackers on VHS for my 11th or 12th birthday (unexpected PG-13 boobs were the hit of my birthday party!), then watched it on the movie channels like a dozen times the next summer. It is such a wonderfully stupid and shiny movie that already felt artificial and fanciful when it came out, and has only become more hilariously ridiculous with age. A steelbook 4K version of Hackers was I think the last blu I bought from Best Buy before the eliminated movies and Tv from their inventory. Remember when people were putting Penn Jillette in acting roles all the time? Weird.

  3. Say what you want about HACKERS, but the soundtrack is great! There are not many electronic music compilations that still hold up as well 30 years ago. They put some surprisingly timeless stuff on there.

  4. What’s Hackers?

    Okay, yeah, I saw it at least six times in the theater and, yes, I was at just the right age to think what I was seeing was incredibly cool and not even a bit ridiculous. I was also at just the right age to be seeing Angelina Jolie for the first time. I don’t regret a second of it.

  5. Remember being deeply unimpressed with “Skeleton Key”, but I’ve heard passably-nice things about the DTV sequel. Kate Hudson, though… aside from the whole nepo thing, not sure how we ended up with her.

    Would be intrigued by a rewatch of Arlington Road, which was definitely something I remembered as a movie pretending to have a twist instead of actually having one. I imagine it was a savage swerve on the page, but when you put it on film, it’s clear what’s going on five minutes in — it’s a credit to everyone involved that it’s still pretty entertaining, and Jeff Bridges gives a really great performance.

    I remember I was hanging out with a nerdy tech guy in prison, and he kept fighting me (way too energetically) about the existence of a Hackers 2. Through a quick googling, I can see that he’s sorta right, at least based on his tortured, complicated explanations — apparently there was a movie with Skeet Ulrich about computer shit that was briefly… accidentally?… branded as Hackers 2? Glad I cleared up that mystery.

  6. I never saw HACKERS back in the day, because I was 18 at the time and thus part of the first generarion of 90s kids who instinctively distrusted being pandered to. I had already seen boobs in general and Angelina Jolie’s boobs specifically by the time I got around to it as a 40-year-old man. I was down for the hilariously performative “How do you do, fellow kids?” 90s-ness of it all, but the camerawork and editing was so weirdly queasy that it honestly made me a little seasick. I’ve only had that sensation one other time, and that was with BATTLEFIELD EARTH and its constant Dutch angles and puke-green color grading. Maybe I’ll take a Dramamine and give it another shot one day.

  7. I would like to point out that ARLINGTON ROAD does not have a twist ending or tries to keep the audience guessing what is really going on. It’s a really straight forward thriller, but a damn great one.

  8. I am also TEAM ARLINGTON ROAD WAS GOOD WHEN I WATCHED IT WHEN IT FIRST CAME OUT.

    Then, again, I kind of liked SKELETON KEY, too. “It is time, Lord!”

  9. Glad to see so much spontaneous love for the 1990s relic that is HACKERS.

  10. Holy shit guys! THE Acid Burn is here!

    @CJ Holden – the soundtrack is an all-timer, it made me pick up The Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation which i listened to endlessly as a teen. It also got me into Underworld and I just put Orbital’s Halcyon On+On on my work playlist. Here’s a crazy only in the 90s thing: Hackers made less than half its budget back in theaters, but the soundtrack was so successful they released TWO more soundtracks with music from and “inspired by” the motion picture!
    For anyone who love’s Prodigy’s track Voodoo People from the movie, there is a kick-ass cover by post-punk hardcore group Refused that fucking SHREDS! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAOGnde6-TY&list=RDZAOGnde6-TY&start_radio=1

    @Glaive Robber – at first I thought the person you were talking to was just confused by the multiple soundtracks, because they literally say “Hackers 2” and “Hackers 3” on the album covers.

    In summation… HACK THE PLANET!!

  11. I miss the time when soundtracks got sequels before the movies! We had a TRAINSPOTTING #2 CD decades before a T2 TRAINSPOTTING movie!

  12. On file sharing services and the like, it was not uncommon to see aforementioned Skeet Ulrich movie TAKEDOWN be labeled HACKERS 2, with Ryan Phillippe’s ANTITRUST as HACKERS 3.

  13. grimgrinningchris

    August 31st, 2025 at 1:15 pm

    I think the eye-tolling southern old-timeyisms are an affectation. Not specific to these characters but to A LOT of people in and around New Orleans, maybe moreso than anywhere else in the south. Having lived there for 4 years in my 20s, I can tell you there is a huge swath of people there that cling for dear life as a major part of their overall identity that they are FROM NEW ORLEANS. I knew plenty of people, even younger middle class people that would use that kind of vernacular… southern overall and plenty very specific to that part of the south. ESPECIALLY when speaking to anyone they knew wasn’t a local or a native just to show how old school New Orleans they were.

  14. I wonder how Arlington Road holds up given where we are in American life and politics in 2025. Would make some interesting discussion on this here websight!

  15. There’s a DTV sequel to this?!

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