The Nameless On DVD

Five years after a young girl was murdered, with her mother finally seeming to have started to recover, a telephone call once again shatters her existence: “Mummy, it’s me… come and get me”.

Helped by an ex-policeman and a reporter expert in the supernatural, the mother sets out on a desperate search, the search for the terrifying truth laying dormant until now: a group of the occult that rejects its own name, the empirical science of evil, uninhabited desolate houses that conceal things, secrets… A trap of abominable evil.

A truth that spreads its tentacles through time and space, from the horror of the Nazi holocaust to the occult fever in the London of the sixties and up to the present day.

After years of lethargy, the horrific secret is about to be revealed. A number: 106, an abandoned motel. They might manage to find the child. Perhaps she’s alive and can be saved. But the horror is only just beginning…

What really captivated me in Ramsey Campbell’s novel, apart from the terrifying and very original story line, was the treatment given to evil and perversion. In THE NAMELESS, both concepts are developed as real entities, almost alive and able to spread to mankind and take control of it. The way perversity attracts some of the characters in the novel and the fascination that evil wields over them seemed to me, right from the beginning, to be extremely frightening elements.

In a very subtle, almost imperceptible, way, this evil gets out of man’s control and takes control itself. In some way, the perversity mechanism comes to life and goes beyond the will of those who invoked it. Now there is no stopping it. The end could be apocalyptic.

In the novel there were too many disturbing elements to let it escape: a dead child who calls her mother by phone five years later pleading for help. A mother sunk into confusion and desperation. Old abandoned houses. A group of malign people who hide and act in silence. An ancient secret that has remained hidden since its conception in the Nazi extermination camps. Angels; the nameless ones; those who watch and bide their time.

There were more than enough elements for creating fear, the concept of fear, that I had always dreamed of putting on screen: the fear that causes anguish, that disturbs, that persists. There was no doubt; we had to make the film, face up to the truth and take it through to the end. Now it is done. And the horror is just about to start.