Lady in White

(Frank LaLoggia, USA, 1988)

Lady in White was a film that, like many in the late 1980s or early ‘90s, I discovered on VHS; it rapidly filled the bill of ‘cult’ fare. But in an unusual way, since, although displaying many trappings of a horror movie, it is not quite horror (and certainly not ‘80s-style ‘body horror’) in either its method or message.

This mystery tale of childhood begins, in familiar fashion, as a slice of suburban Spielbergiana (wonderful, wide-eyed Lukas Haas in the starring role clinches the echo of Henry Thomas in E.T.), as sifted through a strange nostalgia for early ‘60s (pre-hippie) popular culture. Not forgetting the obligatory references shifted 20 years further back again, to Meet Me in St Louis (1944) for the Halloween mythology, and the glaringly ubiquitous It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

It’s almost a supernatural Stand By Me (1986), with a dead girl rather than a dead boy at the heart of plot and theme. Soon enough, though, it becomes an authentically contemporary take on the indelible Val Lewton productions of the ‘40s, utterly inhabiting a shadow-realm between life and death – and spinning out all the moral-ethical implications of this worldview.

As writer-director Frank LaLoggia recalls it, none of the filmic models I’ve just cited were on his mind when dreaming the film up; he simply conjured the story and its setting (lightly autobiographically-inspired), then followed its unfolding logic. Cinema functioned, no doubt, at a less conscious level of reminiscence for him, as it does for many filmmakers.

The film, while being very skillfully directed, deftly juggling its many narrative elements, also has an amateur/DIY, valiantly patched-together air (particularly in its special effects), which manages – as is sometimes the case with modest budgets coupled with long-term tenacity – to pleasingly juice its oneiric atmosphere and affect. Fun fact: a reference point for LaLoggia and cinematographer Russell Carpenter (who later worked extensively with James Cameron) was Neil Jordan’s fractured fairytale-mash, The Company of Wolves (1984).

On its initial commercial, theatrical release (which didn’t happen in Australia, or indeed in many places), Lady in White didn’t fly – a situation that gave rise, at the time, to a diluted MGM version, these days happily superseded by the inevitable ‘director’s cut’ on DVD/Blu-ray. A future 4K scan may yet greet fans!

Without giving any of its complicated, knotty storyline away, let me just say this: rewatching Lady in White in 2023 revealed to me, not a repressed memory exactly, but a repressed personal association that explains the impact the film made on me circa ’88, and the reason it has lingered in my emotional memory for so long as a powerful sensation.

In 1985 (when I was 25), my mother died of pancreatic cancer – a sudden and swift decline, of which I wasn’t informed until the irreversible point of her already having fallen into a coma. I saw her, in that unconscious state, only on the last day of her life. It was a full year before I could assimilate this reality enough to openly cry over it and mourn her passing.

Lady in White is – as I didn’t consciously register on my first viewing – a film totally obsessed with the figure of the dead mother (multiplied across several, shifting incarnations, including one played by TV’s Soap star Katherine Helmond, who actually reminds me a lot of my Mum). The film enacts its own bringing to consciousness of this fact of the mother’s passing, and its own grieving for it.

LaLoggia’s film thus went straight into my unconscious, bypassing the rational-critical brain, and has dwelt there, relatively undisturbed, for some 35 years. It's doubtless sitting in a self-curated gallery alongside a few other ancient titles whose significance I have yet to consciously recover.

Today, in 2023, LaLoggia is an enthusiastic presence on social media and elsewhere (see his astonishingly well-stuffed archival website link below), endlessly circulating memories of his once-in-a-lifetime ‘maverick’ success with Lady in White, and its continued resonance with fans everywhere. As I wrote this text, he appeared on the new ‘film discussion’ online platform Galerie (USA) to spin the wheel of nostalgia once more. In that live chat, he stated:

I don’t think of Lady as a ‘cult’ film. A ‘cult’ film, to me, seems to mostly be relegated to a smaller group of people than a ‘general’ audience. I believe that Lady continues to be discovered by a much larger audience demographic.

No filmmaker wants to be boxed into a tiny niche …

The rest of LaLoggia’s fairly brief public filmmaking career as director – which amounts to just his previous, somewhat more conventional but quite intriguing horror outing Fear No Evil (1981), and a 1995 telemovie obscurity titled Mother (the director’s workprint, titled The Haunted Heart, can be viewed here) – tends to get left in the shade of all this congratulatory recollection of his sole ‘hit’. There’s a mystery here – or a question, at least – about why he wasn’t able to go on making more films. He says he has several projects ready to go if anybody wants to fund him! A common enough plaint among out-of-work directors, talented or untalented.

Meanwhile, however, LaLoggia seems content with perpetually reliving his sole moment of cult fame under the melancholic ‘dark sun’ of the highly memorable (I can sure vouch for that!) and reasonably unique Lady in White.

© Adrian Martin February 1990 / 13 October 2023