| The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer is a prequel to the goose-pimply 2002 TV miniseries Stephen King's Rose Red. In its efforts to "explain" the supernatural events in the earlier project, this made-for-TV chiller is set at the turn of the century, when the stately, sinister Rose Red mansion is constructed by powerful Seattle oil magnate John Brand (Steven Brand) as a wedding present for his timid, submissive young bride, Ellen (Lisa Brenner). At first impressed by her husband's extravagance, Ellen eventually comes to hate and fear John, especially when learning a few unsavory facts about his past. Meanwhile, the mansion seems to be festooned with ghosts, possibly those of the many people close to John Brand who have mysteriously vanished. Can the eerie moanings and manifestations be interpreted as a warning to Ellen that she, too, may some day disappear without a trace? This is the sort of film in
which, after someone exclaims "I'll be damned!," someone else replies, "You already are." The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer originally aired May 12, 2003, on ABC.
At the turn of the century, Ellen Rimbauer, the young bride of Seattle industrialist John Rimbauer, began keeping a remarkable diary. This diary became the secret place where Ellen could confess her anxieties about her new marriage, express her confusion over her emerging sexuality and contemplate the nightmare that her life was becoming. The diary not only follows the development of a girl into womanhood, it follows the construction of the Rimbauer mansion -- called Rose Red -- an enormous home that would be the site of so many horrific and inexplicable tragedies in the years ahead.
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer is a rare document, one that gives us an unusual view of daily life among the aristocracy in the early 1900s, a window into one woman's hidden emotional torment, and a record of the mysterious events at Rose Red that scandalized the society at the time. Edited by Joyce Reardon, Ph.D., as part of her research, the diary was published as preparations were being made by Dr. Reardon to enter Rose Red and fully investigate its disturbing history.
|
Stephen King Movie Index
