In a short amount of time, Mike Flanagan has become one of the most prolific directors working in horror today. After releasing his micro-budget debut feature Absentia in 2011, he followed it up with Oculus in 2013, which went on to get a wide theatrical release. Since then, Flanagan has been hard at work, and he now has not one, not two, but three films slated to come out this year: his passion project Before I Wake, the sequel to the 2014 genre hit Ouija, and Hush, a slick, low-budget horror film he made in secret. In fact, no one even knew of its existence until editing was completed.

The reason for Hush’s secrecy has to do with its approach, which some might consider radical for a horror film aimed towards mainstream audiences. The film takes place over one night at the secluded home of Maddie (Kate Siegel), a deaf-mute author working on her latest novel. Her house is a gorgeous cabin in the woods, but she soon finds herself trapped when a serial killer (John Gallagher Jr.) shows up at her door hoping to make her his next victim. Because Maddie can’t speak the majority of Hush has no dialogue, and the film plays out as a wordless game of cat and mouse between Maddie and her stalker.

With a slim runtime and minimal plot, Hush is a lean, effective, and fun little horror movie. Fans of home invasion films like The Strangers will find plenty to enjoy here, with Flanagan’s efficient direction and editing keeping the tension up thanks to the incredibly tight screenplay (written by both Flanagan and Siegel). In advance of its worldwide release on Netflix, I spoke to Mike Flanagan and Kate Siegel about why the film’s production was so secretive, the challenges of doing a film with little dialogue, and why we should all be excited for Ouija 2.

Hush comes out Friday, April 8th on Netflix.

This film appeared to have come out of nowhere. How did the ball get rolling on this production?

Mike: [Kate and I] had gone out to dinner and were talking about movies we really liked, and the kinds of movies that we wanted to make. We both talked about our mutual admiration for Wait Until Dark and high concept thrillers like that. For years, I’ve wanted to do a movie without dialogue, or mostly without dialogue because I thought it would be a really cool challenge. So we had pretty much figured out what we wanted to do with this at that meal, like before dessert showed up.

I then went to [producers] Jason Blum and Trevor Macy who I had worked with before and pitched them. I said I really want to do this but I think it could be really awesome or it could be a disaster and they kind of agreed. They were nervous about it, so we didn’t tell anybody about it because we didn’t know how it was going come out. If we did kind of announce the movie early, there was a fear that a studio would want to get involved, and they would show up and start messing with it. They’d be like, “Does she have to be deaf?” or “Can’t there be some dialogue throughout this middle section?”

Kate: Or “Can everyone be a teenager?”

Mike: You never know how many different ways this can go bad, so that was another reason why we didn’t want to tell anybody about it. So we wrote the movie in secret, and we shot it without telling anybody what we were doing. We shot it really fast, a three-week shoot, cut it really quickly back in LA, and then looked at the film and said: “I think this is working, now we can start telling people about it!”

This feels like a little bit of a departure compared to Absentia and Oculus. Those films dealt with characters pitted against supernatural forces, but this film is grounded in reality. What made you want to go down this route for your next film?

Mike: I’m certainly not eager to repeat myself as a rule, and I thought this film was going to be a challenge for me on a number of levels. Even just removing dialogue takes away half of your storytelling tools, and I love the pressure of that. For me, it’s about character and suspense, and I think that can be achieved with or without supernatural elements. So there was nothing about it that felt like a departure for me, except for the dialogue angle. That felt like the biggest stretch to me, especially since my earlier movies were, like, 95% dialogue. Letting go of that crutch was really exciting, but also really scary. And I know it’s really tough for Kate too because that’s kind of half of your toolkit as an actor. She was going through the same thing I was.

Kate: At the first glance you think “Great! I don’t have to learn any lines,” but once you get in the intense circumstances, you realize that you can’t make any noise. And you can’t listen, which is what acting really is about. It took away these two things that are the majority of acting. It was very frustrating, but they say when you put a lot of restrictions on creativity often times it will grow to fit the space. You ever see those square watermelons that will grow in a box? It was a lot like that, where at first it was like “This is so uncomfortable!” but then when I watched the movie it ends up feeling like it really pushed my limits in a way that feels successful.

Did you always see yourself playing Maddie?

Kate: Yeah. In the writing stage, I was making jokes like “I don’t want to learn any lines. I hate hearing myself talk on camera,” and whatever insecure, accurate things were coming out of me at the moment. And so because it was such a private, secret project, part of it was, “If we keep this under a certain budget and under the radar then I can probably play Maddie.” One of the thoughts was that, if the studio got their hands on it, then the very first thing they would have done is replace me. I had the support of Mike, Jason, and Trevor in my performance, so they kind of protected me from the Hollywood machine who would have given this role to…

Mike: They would have quadrupled the budget and tried to bring in somebody with a certain amount of foreign sales value.

Kate: I’ll always be grateful for Jason and Trevor for supporting me in the face of people who asked them to do that.

Because there’s no dialogue, you also need to have much more physicality in front of the camera with your performance.

Kate: There were things I loved about it and things that were very frustrating. I learned a lot about acting in the course of this whole movie. With Maddie, who isolates herself and is isolated from the world, you would think that would cause her to be closed in. But there’s something about sign language that is so communicative with the body that kept her so open to the camera. I developed a real intimacy with the camera because it was the only thing I could really listen to and focus on. So where I think there was a certain amount of trepidation and fear in my earlier work about the camera who sees deep in your soul, that’s right in your face in your emotional world, through Hush I learned how to make the camera my best observer and my most trusting friend. That’s something I will take into future projects, knowing that the camera is there to support and trust as opposed to judge and watch.

This is such a lean movie, there’s no fat whatsoever. How important was it in the writing stage to structure things?

Mike: Very important, especially for a movie like this. Our initial outline had it beaten down almost by the minute, where we were like “We know we need the sliding glass door to open by minute 15.” It’s an 83-page script, it’s pretty much a page a minute of a very dense, very weird read. Kate said it reads like a novella more than a script.

Kate: Because you’re getting a lot of internal cues about how the characters are feeling, a lot of cues about what the house looks like, and what you’re seeing at any given moment, which generally speaking you don’t do in a script.

Mike: For this we had to choreograph it on the page. We had to have the layout of the house on the page, [because] we needed to know that house intimately while we were writing.

Kate: As my first feature script it was a boot camp. There’s no room for full dialogue scenes or a lot of exposition to eat up some time before the killer shows up. It was throwing me into the deep end and being like “these are the bones of how you make a narrative story,” and Mike was really generous with his knowledge.

Mike: There’s this thing that happens all the time with young writers where you overwrite dialogue. It’s because you want to get these story points out, but you want it to be conversational. And almost without fail, you can identify a young writer based on how much dialogue they put into the script, how circular the conversations are, and how long it takes to get to the relevant information. The more experienced a writer is, the less important it is to focus on the conversation and the more important it is to get the information out in the most efficient, artistic way possible. And with a script like this it couldn’t really be overwritten, so there was no opportunity for that. This was all about choreography and sound design, which was also scripted. There’s a ton of information about what we wanted the sound design to be in the script.

Kate: The other dialogue scene came in about draft two or three, where we really needed to step away from Maddie for a second.

Did earlier iterations of the script have no dialogue whatsoever?

Mike: There was something really attractive right away about doing a movie with no dialogue. I thought that would have been so fun.

Kate: And in black and white.

Mike: Yeah! We did talk about a black and white version of this.

Kate: We started so artsy.

Mike: It turned out that having no dialogue is not really feasible.

Kate: Or fun to watch. It’s interesting artistically but it’s not exciting.

Mike: There was certain information about who Maddie was and about her situation that, we realized early on, someone needed to say. It would take us five or six pages to get that information out using strictly visual cues, and we just needed someone to say it to set the table so we could pull the dialogue out and let the tension of the movie play out.

Kate: It’s also super cool because part of what Maddie’s deafness and muteness does is bring you into her perspective, and why it’s so specifically terrifying to have this happen to her. And so let’s say when [the other dialogue scene] shows up 60 minutes in, it’s such a weird feeling, and the reason it feels weird is because we haven’t heard anybody talk for about 40 minutes. I love that because it is weird, and when we cut back to Maddie you’re more familiar with what she’s missing out on.

Mike, you edit all of your films. Tell me about your editing process.

Mike: It’s pretty much the same on all of them. I get dailies on set and I’ve got Avid Media Composer on my laptop, so I will do rough cuts and assemblies on set at the monitor in between set ups. I tend to construct the coverage for a scene based on what I need for an edit. There’s really nothing else. I’ve heard my assistant editors describe my footage when it comes in as being like Ikea furniture, in that everything fits together in a specific way and there’s nothing left over. That can be really scary to me, and to a studio in particular because they look at it and say there’s no option to change this. It kind of is what it is, which is one of the only ways you can accomplish [shooting] a movie like Hush in 18 days. It has to be very specific and surgical.

I’m really lucky that they let me keep editing my stuff. It doesn’t happen for everybody, and it almost didn’t happen for me. They weren’t going to let me edit Oculus at first, and I had to actually show them what I wanted to do with it because the editor they hired wasn’t getting it. He was having that Ikea furniture panic where he was saying “I don’t see how this fits.” I had to sit down and actually edit and show them how it works, and they let me do it. But yeah, I think the writing process and everything I do on set are designed to serve me as an editor.

This is a crazy year for you, with three of your movies coming out in 2016. Tell me about Ouija 2, because I was surprised when I heard you were working on a franchise film.

Mike: Everybody was. I was. The thing with Ouija 2 was, it’s through Blumhouse, and I’ve worked with those guys a bunch now. So when they first brought it up to me, my gut reaction was “No way.” Then they said I can do whatever I want and I said, “Really?” I didn’t believe it, so I kind of tentatively moved forward with it, feeling like at any moment they would swoop in and stop me from doing what I wanted to do and then I could just gracefully step away from the movie. But it was irresistible, this idea that I could just do whatever.

So I got to do something really cool that I can’t talk about too much, although I know Blum and everyone’s so happy with the movie they’re going to be screening it for critics well before the release, which is really surprising. We got to do something really unique and unexpected. I think you can pretty much let go of the first movie. Mike Fimognari, who’s been kind of my regular DP, and I got to do things visually on this movie that we never thought we could get away with. So it’s actually a pretty cool and ambitious little movie that I think is hopefully going to really surprise people and defy the expectations that the first movie established.

There’s something off with Darling, Mickey Keating’s latest horror movie (his second in 2015, after unveiling Pod at SXSW). Shooting in black-and-white on a presumably low budget (given its single location and glossy digital sheen), Keating’s film is a combination of familiar elements from psychological horror that never feels genuine in its execution save for the set-up: a young woman (Lauren Ashley Carter, referred to only as “Darling”) gets a new job as a caretaker for a large house in Manhattan, which the owner (Sean Young) claims is the oldest house in the city. But right before the homeowner leaves Darling to care for the house on her own, she also mentions two other pieces of information: the house has a reputation for being haunted, and the previous caretaker jumped from the roof to her death. Darling doesn’t seem to mind, seemingly unfazed by her new boss’ oversights.

With the owner out of the way, Darling turns into a largely one person show for Carter, who goes insane as she picks up on some strange things in the house: a room she can’t enter, a necklace with an upside-down cross, doors opening on their own, and other sorts of things that can only be attributed to unseen, sinister forces. Keating shows an awareness for traits commonly associated with austere, refined horror (rigorously composed shots, an emphasis on mood, and obfuscated character development, to name a few) but he has no idea how to properly implement them. Darling is woefully underdeveloped, with an ominous shot of some scars on her body serving as backstory, and the eventual reveal of Darling as a victim of sexual trauma is more offensive in its laziness than its insensitivity. Keating makes his protagonist nothing more than a victim succumbing to her traumatic past, and by doing so exposes his usage of sexual/physical abuse as a plot device, the sort of behaviour that should be left in the time period Darling tries to emulate.

The offensiveness of Keating’s story might not have been so transparent if everything else didn’t feel so half-baked. A five-chapter structure feels as superfluous as the different typefaces used to introduce each section, but the worst part has to be Keating’s insistence on stroboscopic effects and quick cuts throughout. What might have been an attempt to portray Darling’s fractured mental state turns into an obnoxious and annoying attempt to shock rather than scare, relying on bursts of static over Carter’s screaming face as a way to jolt viewers awake. Carter, looking like a grown-up Wednesday Addams, manages to come out of the film unscathed, doing a fine job acting unhinged while easily carrying the film along on her shoulders. But no matter how magnetic Carter’s presence is in front of the camera, it’s no escape from Keating’s asinine attempt at both a horror film and a character study.

This review was originally published on November 16, 2015 as part of our coverage of the Ithaca International Film Festival.

Pandemic is exactly what it says it is. There is no deceptive setup, no mind-altering plot twist, and no moment where the story’s world suddenly expands to encompass something much more grand and complex. Director John Suits’ infection thriller has none of the disease politics of Contagion or the thematic underpinnings of Blindness. It skews much closer to the raw thrills of something like [REC], sticking to a simple, survival plot, relying on its POV gimmick (the film is shot almost entirely through cameras mounted on the characters’ hazmat suits) and gore money shots for entertainment value. This is an unpretentious B-movie executed with enough competence to keep it out of the Syfy Channel’s late night rotation, but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly compelling.

Lauren (Rachel Nichols) is newly stationed at a compound that serves as a quarantine zone for survivors of an outbreak that has swept across the planet in the near future. The origins of the disease are kept relatively vague, but we’re given plenty of hints at the condition of the outside world through a dose of exposition that opens the film. Our protagonist gets assigned as a doctor to a four-person squad. Their mission is to maneuver a bus across a ravaged Los Angeles to a school, where they must gather any survivors hiding there and pick up whatever supplies they might find. As you might expect, the trip doesn’t exactly go as planned, and the team finds itself stranded amongst diseased monsters.

Standing in the way of the main characters’ survival are the infected hordes. They’re never referred to as “zombies” but they might as well be, if not for their intelligence. There are multiple levels of the virus’ degradation, and depending on where someone falls on that scale, they may have the ability to set traps and use tools, or they may possess superhuman strength and exist in an animalistic, heightened state of awareness. Either way, they’re out to kill anything that moves.

The environment of Pandemic is a post-apocalyptic cityscape that’s all too familiar. Short drive-by montages show signs of a severe societal upheaval; bodies hang from a towering crane, disenfranchised citizens shuffle along the sidewalks, and the walls are covered with ominous messages written in graffiti. The film’s world is grimy and squalid, but the up-close and personal nature of the POV camerawork does little to sell viewers on its authenticity. Clearly showing the limits of its low budget, the key locations are confined to empty interiors and small portions of isolated side streets. The idea of a larger city, teeming with dangers, existing beyond the boundaries of these secluded spaces is almost never grasped with any tangibility, and this is a major blow to the sense of immersion that Pandemic tries to evoke.

When it comes to the compact unit of protagonists, the details aren’t any more inspired. The armed bodyguard of the group (Mekhi Phifer) is gruff and authoritative, full of big talk and more than capable of backing it up with action. He criticizes Lauren for her dangerous indecisiveness and knocks heads with the team’s driver (Alfie Allen), a scrappy ex-con who manufactures a snarky line or hotheaded retort for every occasion. Completing the group of four is a navigator named Denise (Missi Pyle), a warmer presence in comparison to the other two who befriends Lauren. Phony banter between team members is consistent throughout, and the chemistry shared by the actors is nothing more than superficial.

Screenwriter Dustin T. Benson tries to fill out these one-dimensional characters with a series of emotionally contrived backstories, giving almost everyone a missing or dead loved one. The undercurrents of self-doubt and atonement give some weight to the characters’ predicaments, but these redemptive arcs are so tired it’s hard to care about how they play out. As with the setting, these conflicts are far from new, and neither the middling direction nor the serviceable performances are enough to elevate the familiarity to something more nuanced.

However, Pandemic is a film with schlocky roots and instincts, taking more pleasure in its cheesy-looking creatures and bloody encounters than in its tacked on human drama. But a mix of dark settings and shaky POV cinematography makes it difficult to see every moment of action. Only one sequence—which transforms a locker room into a gory obstacle course—stands out as especially riveting. But it’s only one scene in a long string of dull skirmishes and numbingly repetitive jump scares.

When looking for outbreak thrillers, there are a lot of films worse than Pandemic, but this is hardly prime material. The film offers nothing new besides its POV visuals perspective, and even that aspect isn’t terribly memorable. Poor effects and mediocre sound design round out what amounts to a bland, derivative experience.

Almost as long as there has been teen angst, there have been films about teen angst. From Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause  to Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, and including many in between and since, the teen angst film has been a moviemaking staple for six decades, offering insight into what teens go through during each film’s point in time. In most cases only the details change, as higher level themes of disaffection, identity crisis, and peer pressure have been common teen problems for generations. But those details are important, and can drive just how good a film is.

Kill Me Please is set in an affluent section of present-day Rio de Janeiro, where a clique of bored teenage girls finds titillation in a series of murders—murders that happen to be of other teenage girls. Facts are at a minimum but that doesn’t stop the rumor mill from grinding out plenty to quench their morbid fascination. As the body count rises, 15-year-old Bia’s (Valentina Herszage) obsession with the crimes and their victims grows too. Teens are still teens, though, and there is plenty else for them to cope with as they go about their daily high school lives.

The opening scene of Kill Me Please is terrific, showcasing the harrowing demise of a teenage girl whose only crime was walking home alone at night. Panic leads to pursuit, which leads to the girl’s final, fearful gaze into the camera and her piercing, dying screams. Neither the killer nor the girl’s blood is ever shown. The sequence is all atmosphere and adrenaline, recalling the openings of slasher flicks from the 1980s, and it’s an opening that will grab viewers from frame one.

With the opening gambit established, the film settles in, introduces its players—Bia, her girlfriends, her slacker brother João (Bernardo Marinho), her boyfriend Pedro (Vitor Mayer), a few other students—and delves into the daily drama of the young, rich, and beautiful, with diversions into the darker side of life with every new victim.

There are several films that come to mind when considering Kill Me Please. Its horror strains invoke thoughts of Brian de Palma’s Carrie; its beautiful and privileged teens having their lives jolted by death, and how reactions to death vary from teen to teen, harkens to Michael Lehmann’s Heathers; and João Atala’s lush and colorful cinematography calls to mind Benoît Debie’s lens work in Spring Breakers. Unfortunately, this film is nowhere near the level of any of those.

The problems begin early on, when the film doesn’t know when to stop settling in and eventually becomes stuck in a rut. Writer/director da Silveira parts ways with the slasher film motif (and all its promise) to handle things like character development and plot, of which there is very little. The teens’ lives include the expected, like sexual awakening, competitiveness in the athletic arena (handball), petty jealousy, passive/aggressive body shaming, religion, and rival cliques. These are all part of creating, wrestling with, and solving teen angst. The problem is how lifeless the characters are. Kids meant to be regarded as soulful or introspective instead come across as apathetic bores. Even Bia’s growing obsession with the murders never takes on any kind of intensity; it’s only an increased interest.

Because the director never returns to the intensity of his opening sequence, subsequent victims are shown after their demise, not during, or they’re simply talked about (save for a montage of their faces late in the film, only proving the dead were just as beautiful as the living). Some might consider this to be a less is more approach, but that sense is never conveyed. The murders are cold, distant events that lose all gravitas because they are talking points about murders, not the actual murders. The fact that there are adult characters in the film is an interesting and gutsy choice, but it strains credulity as the body count grows since no police ever show up.

Kill Me Please is a gorgeous-looking film that ultimately falls victim to its own narcissism, relying on its aesthetic so heavily that the function of its story is mostly an afterthought. After squandering an excellent beginning, it never recovers to offer a satisfying finished product.

Kill Me Please screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

A tale of love and nightmares, They Look Like People is a haunting, fun, emotionally rich genre piece that gives you plenty to ponder after the closing credits. Filmmaker Perry Blackshear and actors Evan Dumouchel and MacLeod Andrews ran a tiny, DIY production with a crew that consisted mostly of themselves, but they’d have had it no other way. Their goal was simply to make something together, bounce ideas off of each other and strengthen the bond and friendship they already had. In this regard, the project was a complete success. The fact that the movie kicks copious ass is just icing on the cake.

The movie follows Wyatt (Andrews), a disturbed man who foresees an impending war with otherworldly shape-shifters. Teetering on the edge of madness, he stays with his friend Christian (Dumouchel), who’s trying his best to understand Wyatt’s paranoia but struggles to come to terms with his bizarre visions. Confused and pushed to the breaking point, their friendship is put to the test, all leading to a heartstopping moment of truth that will change their lives forever.

I spoke with Perry, Evan and MacLeod during their visit to San Francisco this past February to talk about They Look Like People, which will be available to watch on demand in the coming months. To keep track of the movie, visit theylooklikepeople.com and like their facebook page.

I liked how the film explored mental health. I remember when I was battling depression I’d sometimes think terrible thoughts about my loved ones. It was really weird.
Perry: My friend went through a really tough time and started to think people were spying on him and also that people he loved were evil things pretending to be his loved ones. This friend is now extremely successful and married and is about to have his first kid. There isn’t anything deeply wrong with him, but I think that kind of thing can happen to anybody. It’s scary, man.

Evan: We’ve had a lot of people talking about how they can identify with what’s going on in the film. Maybe not just those kind of thoughts, but any issue you have with a friend. It resonates with people by simply asking them how they would react to a similar experience.

MacLeod: There has been a handful of people who very specifically have had similar circumstances with their friend.

Perry: We guys are really emotionally inept. [laughs] Sometimes when your friend is going through something, you’re just like, “Cool, man. Well…cool.” [laughs]

Evan: “Whoa, that sucks, bro.”

Perry: You can’t just say, “Call me if you have a problem.” There have been times when I’ve missed those kinds of signs. You have to kind of stay with someone. The movie’s about paying close attention to stuff like that.

What’s nice is that your movie is a love story between to guy friends who are very vulnerable. I feel like the media doesn’t really depict men as being vulnerable or needing help enough.
Evan: I would argue Whiplash is a love story between two men! [laughs]

You know what? I interviewed Damien Chazelle and I said that to him. I said that I felt it was a sexual movie, not in the literal sense of Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons being romantic, but in the tone of their relationship. He looked at me like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Evan: I definitely feel like it’s a love story, or at least a way that men can be men with each other that’s not about anything that’s sexually charged. There are a lot of different kinds of love. I think it’s important to explore that.

Perry: I wanted the movie to be about love between humans. People have said “bromance,” but I think it’s that these friends just happen to be guys.

MacLeod: But I think it is specifically about Christian’s experience and how he perceives masculinity; how he approaches women, how he wishes he could.

Talk about the scene where you’re doing judo with Margaret.
Evan: The take you see in the film is the first one. We didn’t know if we had the camera set up or the sound right. She had told us that she was a brown belt in judo, but that’s like someone saying they’re a concert pianist and you’ve never heard them play the piano. We were like, “Cool. She’s probably taken a few judo classes.” She proceeded to dismantle me. Everything you see, like when she asks me if I’m ready, I’m just being real to the experience prior to getting my butt kicked. [laughs] I got the wind actually knocked out of me. That’s all take one.

Perry: Right before she put the rear naked choke on him, she said, “I just did this at a wedding, and the guy passed out.”

How about tapping on her ass? Was that planned?
MacLeod: That’s just what happened. He was trying to tap out.

Evan: Mostly I was fighting for breath.

I was watching the movie in my apartment, and when she did the judo throw I was like, “OOOOHHHHH!!!” My wife asked if I was watching UFC, which I do a lot, but I told her, “No—this dude just got judo thrown on his ass on the fucking grass!”
Perry: Who’s the woman who broke, like, 100 girls’ arms?

Ronda Rousey.
Perry: Margaret used to do judo with her. But yeah, that was the first take, and we didn’t know what was going to happen, so you can actually hear in the footage all of us go, “OH MY GOD!!!”

Evan: Then we did four more takes, and we used the first one anyway. [laughs]

Just sitting with you I can tell you guys make a good team.
Perry: The whole reason I made the movie was to work with these guys. We bought the plane tickets for the movie before I wrote the script, which was a big leap of faith on their part. I told Margaret I was making a movie and it had no script, and she said yes. It was a really tiny crew and very collaborative. It was extremely hard. A lot of times the difficulty on set is navigating the different personalities and millions of logistics, but this movie felt like the four of us together, hiking up a giant mountain. There were no overlords.

MacLeod: I think we’re all sensitive to trying to take responsibility and work harder. If one of us would be tiring out, the others would be like, “I can handle this right now.” We’d kind of clap each other up.

Evan: We could all sense when we needed to be there for each other.

MacLeod: Perry’s been on tons of film sets and has seen everything that can go wrong on them. To us, an important thing was to come out of making this movie and still be friends. Perry presented to us this little constitution of ten laws that ended up being so important. One of them was to try and get eight hours of sleep a night. No drinking. If two of the three people take the other one aside and say, “You’re getting a little grumpy. You need to go have a snickers,” you have to stop and go eat something, no matter what. You start getting angry and short with people, and a lot of times it’s because you’re hungry. All three of us would do that at some point.

Evan: Another really important one was 20-minute naps after meals.

MacLeod: Snack time and nap time.

Perry: It’s basically preschool.

MacLeod: Preschool is kinda genius! It’s the basics of what people need!

That’s going to be the headline of the article, by the way: “Preschool is Kinda Genius.”
Perry: We didn’t have much money, but the equity we had was each other. It was very important to protect that and to make sure we were functioning.

MacLeod: The three of us working together was the point. The movie turned out great, but it was secondary to the process of working together. Protecting the friendship and the process was more important that manipulating each other.

Perry: I have a lot of director friends. On bigger sets, there are a lot of tough decisions to be made about relationships and success. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but our number one priority is to make sure we stick together.

Moving forward, how do you protect that bond? It’s going to get harder.
Perry: One of the biggest things I learned is that there’s more than one way to make a movie. Our way isn’t necessarily the right way, but it worked for us. The Duplass brothers make Hollywood movies, but they have a union crew. Once they set up the set, they get them out on the lawn for a day, and it’s just them and the cinematographer and the actors in a room. They protect the things that matter. We learned the things that are really important to us: the story, the characters, and the relationships. If other stuff started to infringe on those, we’d bring it back to what mattered. Hopefully, we can keep doing that even if things start getting bigger. My favorite thing about moviemaking is making them together, with your crew.

There’s a climactic moment of suspense at the end of the movie involving a paper bag. Regarding what’s underneath the bag: it could have gone one of two ways. I love the way you chose to go. I feel like most movies would go the other way. Was that always the ending, or was there a serious decision to be made about which way you went?
Perry: There was a decision to be made. The ending changed throughout writing the script a lot. Even though it’s a movie about monsters and scary stuff, it ended up being way more personal than we expected. The ending emerged from that.

Evan: I think it speaks to Perry’s use of structure and creating a truth to the answer to both questions. I’m really happy about it. The question exists in people’s minds of whether one or the other could be the case. Each could have been true for somebody, and that’s cool for me to hear.

Perry: We wanted to end in a way that gave some answers to some questions, but left others unanswered.

It’s podcast week here at Way Too Indie as we have not one, not two, but THREE episodes of the Way Too Indiecast for your listening pleasure between now and Friday! With too many special guests to handle this week, we were forced to split them up into a trilogy of movie-talk goodness. From indie up-and-comers to festival programmers to Australian A-list actors (get me, bub?), we’ve got so many amazing interviews from across the entire movie spectrum for you in the coming days that you’d do yourself a disservice to not tune in to your favorite movie podcast EVER!

For today’s show, Bernard is joined by WTI’s own Ananda Dillon to review period-horror breakout The Witch, and we’ll also hear from director Robert Eggers to cap off the conversation. Closing out the show is longtime San Francisco movie-series programmer and organizer Elliot Lavine, whose new series “Hollywood Before the Code: SEX! CRIME!! HORROR!!!” is playing for six consecutive Wednesdays at the Castro Theater starting tomorrow night. It’s an insightful, unapologetic, entertaining conversation with one of the most knowledgeable, charismatic programmers in the country and it’s one true cinephiles won’t want to miss.

Be sure to come back tomorrow night for our interview with the folks behind the new film Eddie the Eagle, out in theaters this Friday. We’ll be chatting it up with director Dexter Fletcher, star Taron Egerton (Kingsman: The Secret Service) and his dashing co-star, the one and only Hugh Jackman! See you then!

Topics

• The Witch (7:34)
• Elliot Lavine (36:30)

Articles Referenced

• The Witch Review
• Robert Eggers Interview

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Robert Eggers‘ The Witch gets under your skin and stays there, making you feel a certain kind of filthy for a good chunk of time (for me, a few days of looking over my shoulder at night and rubbing the back of my neck like a crazy person). Contributing to the film’s noxious effect on the psyche are a litany of major and minor details: the American-gothic allure of the 1630s New England setting; actor Ralph Ineson‘s incomparable, gravelly voice; a collection of the most sinister-looking animals you’ve ever laid your eyes on. (Away, evil bunny! Away!) But the real reason The Witch sticks so tightly to the back of the mind is that it leaves us lost in the fog, uninterested in demystifying the terrible, unsettling, supernatural events we bear witness to. Super-serious horror movies aren’t my preferred branch of the genre but when they work, as Eggers’ film does, I can’t help but bow down as I quiver in my 17th-century boots.

The backdrop of this “New-England Folktale” (as the movie is subtitled) is an isolated farm on the edge of a dark wood where a Puritan family resides and tends to crop. Why anyone would choose to live with an ominous ocean of decrepit-ass trees at their back I don’t know, but in this instance, it was the decision of the family’s patriarch, William (Ineson). After being banished from their plantation community (for unknown reasons), the family needed a new place to make a life for themselves, hence the lonely little farm at the foot of hell’s gates.

With a stern hand and a booming voice, William raises his litter alongside his wife, Katherine (Kate Dickie), who’s scary in a stoic, nun-like way. They’ve got an infant, Samuel, who one day disappears while under the watch of their eldest, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy). While the parents and Thomasin’s younger brother, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw, who has a shining moment that must be seen to be believed), are convinced the newborn to have been taken by wolves, young twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson) have a more twisted theory, that baby Sam was taken by the witch of the wood, who they believe to be none other than their dear older sister. The mischievous tykes’ tall tale would probably fall on deaf ears under normal circumstances, but Samuel’s vanishing has thrown the family into a state of panicked hysteria; suddenly, sweet, sensible Thomasin becomes the family scapegoat. Eggers gives us a glimpse of moldy corn, which may or may not effect your perception of the unfolding events. Curious.

Female repression emerges as the movie’s major theme as Thomasin is poked and prodded into a corner with dubious accusations slung at her by the twins and her own mother. The hatred mistrust spirals out of control when Caleb wanders into the forest and returns one night, naked and not quite himself. The blame’s heaped on Thomasin and even William begins to question his daughter’s virtue. One can only take so much abuse; if they want Thomasin to be the witch so desperately, maybe she should play along.

Eggers’ film is rife with Satanic imagery (the family’s goat is suggestively named “Black Philip”), but the real horror comes from the volcanic family tension and their religiously fueled motivations. The movie’s set in a time when things we now consider supernatural—witches, ghosts, demonic possessions—were strongly accepted part of the natural world. The Puritanical mindset of the time almost acts as a magnifying glass for the subconscious fears of moderns like us: Misogyny is disconcertingly prevalent in today’s society, but discrimination against women was even more extreme in the time of The Witch. Gender inequity is the source of myriad societal fears, anxieties, struggles, and conflicts, and at its core, Eggers’ story digs down to the roots of this enduring friction, particularly in this country. The fact that Thomasin is on the brink of sexual awakening just as her loved ones turn on her adds another layer of richness to the predominantly feminist narrative.

A jump-scare rollercoaster The Witch is not; it’s more like those dead-drop rides that crane you into the sky at an agonizingly slow clip and then plunge you toward the ground when you reach the apex. Moments of subtle, subconscious dread are stacked on top of each other carefully by Eggers until the overwhelmingly tense final act. I was relatively calm during the majority of the film, but I was absolutely frozen in fear for the last twenty minutes or so. The horror is cumulative, and the escalating, asymmetrical shape of Eggers’ story is a nice change of pace for the genre.

Take one look the detailed design of the family’s cabin and the period-accurate costuming and it becomes clear that Eggers’ background in theater production and scenic design is one of his most valuable assets. The textured, ashy, gothic imagery brings Bergman to mind, which speaks for itself. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, costume designer Emma Fryer and composer Mark Korven (whose wailing choral arrangements are absolutely blood-curdling) keep the movie’s production standards high on all fronts, working in concert to make The Witch one of the most put-together, elegant horror productions in recent memory.

The news of yet another horror anthology coming out doesn’t inspire the same amount of excitement as it used to several years ago. The arrival of V/H/S, a fun blend of the anthology gimmick with found footage (the horror subgenre du jour), rejuvenated an interest in multiple directors collaborating on different, loosely connected short films. But now, after two V/H/S sequels, two ABCs of Death films, and with more “anthrillogies” on the way, the format is starting to get a bit tired again. That feeling must have been on the minds of the team behind Southbound, who also made V/H/S. They’ve gone in a different direction from their previous film, creating a more collaborative effort that intertwines Southbound’s five stories on both a narrative and thematic level. While the film can’t escape some of the inevitable issues that always plague these episodic movies, its consistency makes it the best horror anthology to come out since Trick ‘r Treat.

Things start with The Way Out directed by Radio Silence, who handle both the opening and closing stories. As an opening, the short really serves little purpose other than reeling viewers in with a deliberately hidden story that will be revealed in the concluding chapter (cleverly titled The Way In). Two men (Chad Villela & Matt Bettinelli-Olpin) are covered in blood and fleeing after escaping from someone (or something) that has them freaked out. After driving for a while, they notice a large, floating, skeletal demon following them, and despite their best efforts to escape they find themselves stuck in a sort of closed loop (also serving as a hint towards the film’s overall narrative structure). The purposefully vague plot makes this segment easy to forget, but it does a fine job establishing the major elements that run through the rest of the stories: the long stretch of highway in the Californian desert, and themes of regret, guilt and retribution.

Next up is Siren, Roxanne Benjamin’s directorial debut (she worked as a producer on V/H/S). Sadie (Fabianne Therese), Kim (Nathalie Love) and Ava (Hannah Marks) are a touring band whose van breaks down on the highway, and after getting offered a ride by a polite couple to stay at their house for the night Sadie begins noticing something seriously wrong with their hosts. Benjamin’s segment kicks off the strongest stretch of Southbound, with a fun little horror story that has a few devilish twists, along with a grim yet funny ending that segues into the film’s high point. David Bruckner’s Accident opens with Lucas (Mather Zickel) calling 911 to help someone injured in a car accident he caused. Bruckner hits a sort of twisted groove that none of the other films come close to reaching, and does a far better job at creating a sense of mystery that generates intrigue instead of frustration. And Brucker’s hook to the story is simple but effective: Lucas does the right thing, only to discover that he’s within a realm where morals don’t exist. It’s a brilliant short, with a low-key ending that provides the film’s best transition.

Unfortunately, the next story, Patrick Horvath’s Jailbreak, starts a slight downward trajectory due to its half-assed attempts to build out a mythology around the film’s location. Danny (David Yow) comes to one of the small towns along the highway in search of his missing sister, and it amounts to a lot of elements getting introduced without explanation as a way to imply some elaborate, complex supernatural society or system within this stretch of the desert. Horvath’s specificity only breaks the compelling illusion of something sinister in Bruckner’s previous short, suddenly showing there are weird back alleys and tattoo parlours all around. And the final short plays out as a riff on The Strangers before trying to explain what exactly was going on earlier in The Way Out.

But the less successful shorts in Southbound’s latter half don’t tank the film because of the overall thematic and visual through line. It’s hard to make desert locations look bad, and the film’s four directors of photography do a great job enhancing the isolated and dangerous qualities of the barren landscapes these characters can’t find their way out of. Southbound can act like an argument for why anthologies can benefit from a more collaborative effort, because even when one filmmaker might handle a theme or idea in a way that falters, the echoes of the stronger segments still ring through. It’s a big benefit in Southbound’s case, and helps make an increasingly stale format feel refreshing again.

A version of this review was originally published on September 18th, 2015, as part of our coverage of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

An inventive satire about the ever-narrowing relationship between artist and audience, Director’s Cut has a lot of interesting ideas bouncing around inside its twisted, experimental narrative, though on a fundamental level, the movie simply isn’t that compelling. Penn Jillette plays Herbert Blount, a stalker psychopath who donates a ton of money to a crowdfunded horror movie, his reward being on-set access and permission to shoot behind-the-scenes footage. Not content in his role as financier, Blount hatches a plan to take over the movie by replacing the director, stealing the footage, and kidnapping lead actress Missi Pyle to shoot additional scenes. We learn all of this via a director’s commentary provided by Blount over his new version of the hijacked movie, a unique storytelling approach that’s amusing until the schtick grows old about halfway through.

At first, it’s incredibly intriguing to watch the opening credits of the fake movie while listening to Jillette in character as Blount, using his shoddy After Effects skills to cross out director Adam Rifkin’s name and scribble in his own as he drops nuggets of sophomoric moviemaking knowledge in an attempt to give us a peek “behind the scenes.” As a character, Blount is a moderately entertaining take on the entitled fanboy, an heightened representation of the dangers and mild absurity of crowdfunding. Blount’s creepy obsession with Pyle provides most of the movie’s humor, with him trying to pass stalker footage of the actress both out in public and in her hotel room off as new scenes for the movie they “collaborated” on. Jillette’s voice is one of the most recognizable out there, which is a good thing in that it always holds your attention, but a bad thing in that it’s hard to associate what we hear with Blount and not Jillette, the lovable entertainer we’ve associated that voice with for decades.

As the story unfolds and the gimmick loses its luster, Director’s Cut reveals itself to be a sort of bland abduction movie that doesn’t offer any real chills or thrills. It isn’t very disturbing, suspenseful, frightening or even funny. Playing themselves alongside Pyle are Gilbert Gottfried, Nestor Carbonell, Hayes MacArthur, Harry Hamlin and Jillette’s old friend and cohort, Teller. The horror movie they’re “acting” in is generic by design, so all of the interesting stuff is saved for the leads. The movie arguably exists in the found-footage category but doesn’t capture the real-world horror that sub-genre was designed to elicit, mostly due to the fact that the dialogue is a bit too theatrical.

The folks at Red Letter Media created a character called Mr. Plinkett a few years ago who does video reviews of movies while giving us glimpses into his twisted personal life, in which he kidnaps women and murders women and sells homemade pizza rolls via snail mail. It’s a similar concept but works better than Rifkin and Jillette’s movie because it delivers the goods, providing serious film critique underneath all the craziness. Director’s Cut doesn’t offer the raw, fundamental genre joys one would expect from such a wacky project. The idea to make a crowdfunded movie about a demented crowd-funder is fun, but this movie isn’t.

Director’s Cut Slamdance Review Rating:
5/10

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since the New French Extremity—a group of French genre films united by, to put it simply, a lot of disgusting gore—exploded with titles like Frontier(s), Inside, and Sheitan coming out over a short time span. In 2008, the movement reached its peak with Martyrs, Pascal Laugier’s controversial take on martyrdom that had people fleeing for the exits. Martyrs has gained a strong following since it came out, partly because of how it transcends the expectations of an exploitation film. It’s a film that shows women being systematically tortured, but labeling it as “torture porn” would be wrong. Laugier examined the meaning of being a martyr, along with the connection between immense suffering and transcendence through pain. Martyrs stuck out not just because of its gore; it was a philosophical horror film, one with significant ambitions that combined intellectual themes and the kind of horrifying content associated with the lowest common denominator. Even the film’s harshest critics couldn’t deny that Laugier, despite his methods, was trying to say something.

So what happens when US filmmakers take Laugier’s work and adapt it for English-speaking audiences? After several false starts, this new Martyrs has finally come to fruition via the help of directors Kevin and Michael Goetz, The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith, and horror “it” producer Jason Blum. Blumhouse, the production company responsible for the Paranormal Activity and Insidious franchises, is known for its successful approach to making horror films: make a film for a low budget, then have major studios pick up and release them. It’s a successful model because it takes advantage of horror’s self-generating interest (genre films don’t need big stars to attract moviegoers) while providing big profits given the low production cost. That is, in a nutshell, the model behind multiple horror success stories over the past several years, including films like The Purge and Sinister.

Blumhouse has tweaked and perfected a micro-budget machine, and as much as the company can tout its increased creative control or ability to produce outside of the studio system, it’s still a machine. Laugier handled writing and directing duties on the original Martyrs, and it’s obvious that it’s a film with his individual stamp on it. With the remake, the Goetz brothers and Smith transplant Laugier’s work to a format more focused on quick returns and basic thrills, a change that’s like shoving a square peg into a round hole. The set-up is more or less identical to Laugier’s film: Lucie (Troian Bellisario) claims she was kidnapped and tortured by a group of people as a child before escaping, although police found no evidence backing up her story. Fifteen years after escaping, Lucie finally tracks down her kidnappers—a seemingly ordinary couple with two teenage children—and ruthlessly slaughters them in their own home. She calls on Anna (Bailey Noble), her best friend growing up at the orphanage, to help her remove the bodies, although Anna starts doubting Lucie’s sanity given she just gunned down a family without remorse (fair warning: those unfamiliar with either version of Martyrs should stop reading here unless they want to be spoiled).

Since this is a horror movie, Lucie’s claims turn out to be true. The people she killed did, in fact, torture her as a child, and Anna soon discovers they were part of a cult dedicated to creating martyrs in an attempt to understand what lies in the afterlife. Smith’s screenplay, in what some might point to as a true example of what “Americanizing” something means, dumbs things down to make the religious themes impossible to miss, whether it’s having the cult’s leader (Kate Burton) spell everything out or using the image of a woman burning at the stake. At the very least, Smith does try to change things up from Laugier’s original screenplay in the latter half, honing in on Anna and Lucie’s friendship instead of the barbaric plot they’ve become a part of. But that focus only muddles the thematic content that made up the backbone of Laugier’s film, and Smith makes no efforts to adjust the rest of the source material to his changes.

What Martyrs amounts to is a cheap mess, an attempt to adapt a work more focused on ideas into something designed to provide thrills and action, and the clash between the two modes is an ugly one. The Goetz brothers, try as they might to claim they’re doing their own spin on the original, settle into what feels like a shot for shot remake; the punishing final act of Laugier’s film, designed to make its climactic moment of transcendence all the more powerful, gets replaced by a vengeance-fueled firefight instead; the violence gets toned down significantly, a choice that could have worked had it not reeked of the producers trying to ensure they’d get an R rating; and the ending tries to maintain the original’s ambiguity while tying up Anna and Lucie’s storyline in a way that betrays the film’s own themes. Martyrs is nothing more than a complete waste of time, a remake whose own irrelevance dominates every frame. Rather than try to respect the original content beyond its gory surface, Martyrs prefers to trace over its more violent moments, cherry picking what it needs to make something more inclined to entertain than provoke. Unlike Laugier’s unforgettable film, it’s best to forget this version of Martyrs ever happened.

I was doing some research on plot twists in movies and the majority of the lists feature movies that have plot twists that occur at the end. I won’t list them all, but films like The Sixth Sense, Psycho, and Sleepaway Camp are a few examples of films where the surprise comes so late, it makes the viewer reconsider everything that happened before it (and maybe even inspire a re-watch of the film to look for missed clues). In director Adam Schindler‘s new thriller, Intruders, the twist doesn’t want a re-watch, it wants the viewer’s attention as soon as possible, occurring early in the film.

Beth Riesgraf plays Anna, a 20-something young woman living with, and caring for, her sick brother, Conrad (Timothy T. McKinney). Anna is trapped in her own home by acute agoraphobia. But one of the few other people she has contact with is the young man (Rory Culkin) who delivers daily prepared meals to the parentless siblings. When her brother dies, Anna inherits a considerable sum of money, left to her entirely in cash. A trio of thugs (Jack Kesy, Joshua Mikel, and Martin Starr) catch wind of this windfall and attempt to break into the home. But they didn’t account for her agoraphobia keeping her home. While the thieves turn the house upside-down looking for the cash, Anna turns the tables on them and the terrorizers become the terrified.

Early on, Intruders looks as if it’s going to be just another home invasion thriller. After the set-up leaves the protagonist physically trapped (by agoraphobia) and emotionally vulnerable (sad because of her brother’s death), she spends the better part of the rest of the film trying to outwit her attackers while overcoming her own personal issues. It’s pretty comparable to Panic Room in that way.

To get to the twist, one must first tolerate the clichéd first act (although, to be fair, that cliché helps make the twist all the more twisted). It starts out well, but once the dimensionally bereft bad guys appear (the Alpha Male, his weaker brother, and the sadist), Schindler’s direction becomes more of a stale paint-by-numbers. Still, the early going has its bright spots, led by veteran Riesgraf, who gives a terrific performance as the grieving sister and trapped agoraphobe. Another veteran—from the other side of the camera—is set decorator John Gathright, whose eye for detail allows Anna’s house to say a lot about her fragile psyche.

Then the twist happens.

I’ll issue the Spoiler Alert now, since the twist is its selling point. Without it, the film is just another home invasion thriller. In fact, not only does the twist happen early in Intruders, it’s sold about halfway through the trailer as the reason to see the film in the first place. You have now been warned.

The twist is that the basement of Anna’s house is something of an underground prison and torture chamber. It’s complete with retracting stairs to trap people in the basement, an assortment of instruments designed to deliver pain, and a few other unsettling things best not mentioned here. Anna knows her way around all these things, giving her something of a Jekyll/Hyde persona, only softly sinister. It’s a delicious twist, offering the viewer everything from the refreshing sight of a power struggle shifting to the woman’s favor (instead of the man’s), to the relief that the film is not just another home invasion thriller. Riesgraf revs up her performance here, turning out her character’s lifetime of psychological oppression into a measured burn.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is once the twist happens and the viewer’s excitement is ignited about the endless possibilities these turned tables offer. Intruders quickly disintegrates and exposes itself as having no real possibilities. The drop-off is jarring. Once the trio of intruders (and that delivery boy, too) are in the basement, what more is there to do other than have the woman terrorize the men? Once that trick is played the first time, the film can only manage to limp along as home invasion thriller-turned-torture horror. The only maintaining interest is wanting to know why this frightful basement exists. It’s explained, and quite satisfactorily. But that explanation should be the reward; instead, it’s the consolation prize.

Hollywood is a town full of bad ideas. So when a great one comes along but is poorly executed, it’s more than an opportunity missed, it’s an opportunity wasted. With Intruders (previously titled Shut In), director Schindler and screenwriters T.J. Cimfel and David White prove to be another in a long line of filmmakers guilty of being so enamored by the originality of their twist, they simply let that twist try to carry them instead of building a strong showcase around it.

Phil Stevens is the kind of underground, extreme horror filmmaker that we need more of—the kind of filmmaker who places great emphasis on establishing a haunting and memorable atmosphere, and not relying on an overabundance of jump scares. His debut feature film, Flowers isn’t something that I’d classify as being for the faint of heart. Not even remotely. However, there’s a surreal beauty to its grotesqueness that, along with the absence of dialogue, almost forces it into the sub-genre of meditative cinema (which is something scarcely stated about extreme horror films). Though it’s loose in narrative, the general plot of the film focuses on six female spirits (played by Colette Kenny McKenna, Krystle Fitch, Anastasia Blue, Tanya Paoli, Kara A. Christiansen and Makaria Tsapatoris), all recently murdered by the same serial killer (Bryant W. Lohr Sr.), seemingly stuck on the threshold of reality and the afterlife, confined to the labyrinth passageways of a sort of purgatory-esque edifice.

One thing about Flowers on an aesthetic level, is that the location itself is just as much of a character as the six trapped spirits. Stevens seemed intent on building an entire world within one singular structure, and succeeded in doing so by placing great detail in the crafting of a maze-like setting, in which horrifying images are built upon horrifying images, revealing layer after layer of an impenetrable darkness and culminating in a harrowing, cathartic and deeply inspired final sequence. The aforementioned darkness is perpetual, not just in subject matter but in the lighting (or lack thereof) of the intricate production design; even the few scenes that contain ample light are glimpsed only briefly through holes in shadowed walls so that the illuminated visuals are surrounded by black. The claustrophobia felt by the spirits is felt just as powerfully by the viewer.

The complex soundscape is what carries the film, and is restrained not in the sense that it’s seldom utilized but in the sense that it’s composed of fluid, quiet and melancholic waves of subtly disturbing audio (juxtaposing the tragic world that has been created), rather than loud and abrasive noises designed simply to shock the ears. Sometimes certain sounds can produce subjective images in the mind’s visuospatial sketchpad. It’s almost as if Stevens and his crew purposefully fused some of the more dimly lit sequences—in which only outlines of strange and broken shapes can be discerned—with some of the more abstract sounds so that the viewer is free to fill in the blanks of these ambiguous visuals with whatever materializes in their psyche.

There’s no doubt that Flowers exists within its own universe, one in which time is not the same and spirits are able to coexist with their previous physical form during the final moments of their earthly existence. But this is only the case due to the fact that nostalgia and memories are represented as material, whether the women are reflecting back on their past (by conjuring up toy trains and exploring polaroid photographs), their demons (by looking back at sorrowful lives of chemical dependence and issues with body image), or the very moment of their murders. In effect, they become the voyeurs to their own demise.

Ultimately, Flowers is both gorgeous and repulsive, beautiful yet sickening; it’s aptly titled, as flowers can be both lovely, or they can be the pattern of the mattress on which a woman is being disemboweled by a psychotic necrophiliac (as seen in the film). The viewer is dropped into a world that they know they shouldn’t be in, seeing things that they know they shouldn’t be seeing. It’s made all the more painful by the fact that the viewer is aware of what the women in the film aren’t: that they’re desperately attempting to escape a fate that has already befallen them. At one point in the film, the word “defect” can be seen in the background, as in the defect in the machine, the fault in the plan, the fact that no matter how hard they try, there’s no escaping what’s been done.

Very few films out there, both inside and outside the genre of horror, are more effective in making the viewer so hyper-aware of the delicate, organic nature and fragility of the human body.

In the arid landscape of derivative and unoriginal horror movies, the sight of something different can act like discovering a wellspring. Saying that S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk is a wholly original film would be disingenuous. Zahler hasn’t created something new so much as re-arranged what’s already there into a beguiling and (eventually) nasty combination. First and foremost a western, Bone Tomahawk teases its gradual turn to the sadistic and bloody with its opening sequence before settling into its own unique groove. If anything, Zahler has immediately established himself as one to watch in genre filmmaking right now by creating something no one else is doing right now.

The aforementioned opening finds murderers/thieves Purvis (David Arquette) and Buddy (Sid Haig) stumbling on (and desecrating) the burial ground of a group of cave-dwelling cannibals. Cut to 11 days later, where Purvis takes shelter in the small town of Bright Hope, only to get arrested by Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell) and his deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins). But Purvis isn’t aware that the cave dwellers have been tracking him, and overnight they kidnap Purvis, Deputy Nick (Evan Jonigkeit) and town doctor Samantha (Lili Simmons). Hunt and Chicory decide to head out on a rescue mission to bring back Nick and Samantha, bringing two more townsmen with them: Samantha’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson), recovering from a broken leg, and Brooder (Matthew Fox), a handsome gunslinger who claims to have killed more Indians than anyone else in town.

Not that the villains in Bone Tomahawk are Indians, as Zahler is quick to point out through a Native American character who refers to them as “troglodytes.” It might be easy to label the film as a revisionist western given its realism and subversion of genre clichés but, for the most part, it feels like Zahler is just creating his own strange universe within the Wild West. This extends to Zahler’s screenplay, which revels in stylized dialogue that will have fans of Deadwood feeling nostalgic (in this film, “Can you be quiet?” becomes “Is it possible for you to close that aperture?”). Zahler, a novelist making his directorial debut here, has a great sense of humour too, giving his cast plenty of opportunities to revel in his script’s seemingly endless turns of phrase.

It also helps that Zahler has assembled a seriously impressive cast for his first feature. The presence of a familiar face like Kurt Russell as Sheriff Hunt elevates the character significantly, along with the inclusion of character actors in every other major role. Matthew Fox plays directly against type as the ruthlessly pragmatic and vain Brooder, but he sells the role perfectly, looking like he’s thriving on the chance to show off a side of himself that hasn’t really been given the opportunity to shine before. At first, Patrick Wilson looks typecast as yet another portrait of wounded masculinity (this time in a more literal sense), but his casting feels like a subversion of Wilson’s previous roles once he completes his character’s arc. It’s the best role Wilson has had in years, but if an MVP had to be selected out of the cast it would have to be Richard Jenkins. He’s almost unrecognizable as the bearded, oafish Chicory, providing both the comedic relief for the film along with its beating heart once more details emerge about his past. It’s bound to go down as one of the year’s most underrated performances.

But the most surprising thing about Bone Tomahawk isn’t its screenplay or its merging of two genres that usually stay separate; it’s the film’s breathing room that helps the film stand on its own. The 132-minute runtime is a rare sight these days for a low-budget (under $2 million to be precise, an astonishing figure given how good the movie looks) genre movie, but Zahler’s writing skills and his cast make it hard to find a single dull moment. Each scene, no matter how much it might feel like a total non-sequitur or detour from the main narrative, always keeps the focus on character. And, admittedly, this makes the final act’s sudden shift into the grotesque all the more impactful. The less said about Bone Tomahawk’s horror elements the better (it’s best to watch it unfold without knowing anything), but its drastic turn into a bloody gorefest certainly leaves an impression with one of the most brutal death scenes ever put in a film. And Zahler shows his skills as a filmmaker by having this tonal shift work, using the strength of his characters to carry along the change in circumstances. Zahler’s curious approach might not work all the time, and the meshing of two disparate genres doesn’t always come together nicely, but it makes for a fascinating and (mostly) entertaining experience.

I know what it’s like to be laid off; it’s happened to me twice. Finding myself out of work not only forced me to face financial uncertainty, I had the added worry of wondering what the future would hold for my family. It can be harrowing. Such is the fate that faces the small family in Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas’ Hard Labor. But rather than buckle down, the couple instead doubles down, with unexpected results.

Helena (Helena Albergaria) is about to take a big step in her life; she’s ready to rent a storefront and open her own market. When she gets home from closing the deal, she finds her husband Otávio (Marat Descartes) home early from his office job. He isn’t just home early, though—he’s home for good, having been let go by his company. This doesn’t dissuade him from supporting his wife’s endeavor, however. With his help (in between humiliating job interviews), and with their new live-in maid Paula (Naloana Lima) caring for their young daughter, Helena works hard to get her business launched. Like any other small-business owner, she faces challenges that include things like inventory worries, small repairs, and staff management; unlike any other small-business owner, she finds herself facing another challenge—one more supernatural in nature—making the harrowing a little more horrifying.

Hard Labor presents itself as having a blend of drama and horror. While the latter might be a cause for concern for the characters in the film, it certainly isn’t for the viewer. That the film has elements of horror is true only on the most technical of levels. Imagine having the ingredients for an omelet and putting those ingredients on the counter next to the stove, but not making an actual omelet. This is the horror portion of the film; items are present but never properly presented. There is never a sense of foreboding, no moments of anticipation, never a worry something bad will happen when least expected. There are ingredients—a vicious dog, mysterious scratches on a wall, unexplained broken glass, etc.—but they aren’t made into anything worth consuming. The horror is secondary, rendering it as nothing more than a dull distraction.

The film’s primary tale is, at least on the surface, a study of the effect of financial disparity within two unique socioeconomic circles, with Helena as the common ground. One circle is Helena’s house. In one day, roles reverse. Suddenly Helena, despite being a small business owner whose business has yet to open, becomes the breadwinner. This puts something of a strain on her marriage, although the film never takes the bait of relying on gimmicky tropes that trade on traditionally held gender-driven responsibilities. That’s not to say, though, that Otávio isn’t at least a little wounded. He is, but it isn’t played for melodrama.

Also in Helena’s house is Paula. Her employment status is considered “unregistered,” which is about the U.S. equivalent of working under the table. That might play okay for some workers here in the States, but in Brazil, being a registered employee is as much the goal as being employed is. (There’s even a line late in the film that equates being registered with existing as a person.) So, in Helena’s house is the troubled white collar of Otávio, the troubled blue collar (no collar?) of Paula, and the hard-working gray collar of the self-employed matriarch.

The other circle Helena exists in is her business. All the collars there are the same, but there is a clear hierarchy as well as a clear economic divide (as evidenced by an event that should not be spoiled). There’s even a reminder of society’s greater economic concern, as represented by a brief exchange between Helena and a customer when that customer complains about the price of a given item.

These differences—both between and within Helena’s circles—are all exercises in posturing for the deeper story of entitlement Hard Labor tries to tell. There are actions taken by every character, from Helena to the store clerk, that suggest each character thinks of themselves as being entitled to something. The most obvious example is Helena continuing with her business launch (with Otávio’s support) despite the absence of any other steady household income, but other smaller examples fill the story too. And because everyone operates at different economic levels (in both circles), that “something” that everyone thinks they’re entitled to exists on different levels as well.

It’s all very weighty, and while it takes place in another part of the world, the themes are such that they can resonate with any North American of employment age. It’s a shame it’s all presented in the dullest of terms. Like the horror portions of the film, the dramatic portions (read: the rest of the film) are not only devoid of melodrama, they’re devoid of any drama whatsoever, and presented mostly without emotion. It’s Brazilian neorealism at its least interesting, and watching it is akin to watching complete strangers trudge on with the tedium of their lives.

This makes the dullness of the horror aspects that much more frustrating, because at least a few good scares would have injected some energy into the film. With so much to say but lacking an interesting voice with which to say it, Hard Labor is more than just the film’s title; it’s also the film’s viewing experience.

Hard Labor will stream on Fandor and come out in select theaters on Friday, October 30.

In my SXSW review of the dark comedy Nina Forever (from the Blaine Brothers), I take note of the increasing number of sibling filmmakers and the variety of genres into which they have delved. It’s time to add horror to that genre list, and with it add to the list of filmmaking siblings Michael and Shaun Rasmussen, writers and directors of the haunted house indie horror film, The Inhabitants.

Jessica and Dan (Elise Couture and Michael Reed) are a married couple starting a new chapter in their lives: entrepreneurship. A bed and breakfast in the oldest house in New England has become too much for its elderly, widowed owner (Judith Chaffee) to manage, and the couple buy the place with the hopes of restoring it to its past greatness. Something in the house isn’t quite right though. Dan takes a business trip for his day job, leaving Jessica alone to unpack boxes and explore the house and town. And that’s when spirits from the past—dating back to the Salem witch trials—possess the vulnerable wife. When Dan returns, he’s not sure what to make of this woman who used to be his wife. He’s also not sure about a less-than-spiritual secret he uncovers.

“Not sure” is an apt two-word summary for The Inhabitants. It’s a film that’s not sure what it wants to be, with characters who are not sure of who they are, made by filmmakers who not sure about what they are doing.

To say the characters are not sure of who they are is still something of an overstatement; Jessica and Dan have no dimension to them at all. Once they move in, they become the stereotypical new homeowners; she mostly unpacks boxes while he fixes things. At the end of the the day, he wants sex and she’s too tired. By the end of the film, the only other thing we know about them is that he has a day job and she may have had a miscarriage at some point (in one quick scene, she looks longingly at an ultrasound picture she finds in a box). The absence of any backstory turns the characters into nothing more than paper dolls—flat, lifeless beings. The only other character of consequence is the elderly former owner, and while she brings a certain old-lady creepiness to her, even that is presented in the least interesting of ways, with thousand-mile stares and nonsensical muttering.

This can all be forgiven, though, if the story is good or the tension is high or the scares are effective. But none of it is.

The story does have potential. The house dates back to the era of the Salem witch trials, and its original resident was a midwife who was hung for suspicion of being a witch. After her death, children began mysteriously disappearing, creating more suspicion that the house was haunted. Despite the dull presentation of its history (onscreen book/newspaper text, someone reading of said text aloud, or both), this house has 400 years worth of stories to tell to get to the present, and yet it fails to tell any. Instead, it hits the fewest bullet points possible and requires the viewer to fill in the rest of the blanks. But the blanks are too many and too large and what’s presented is a parchment-thin history with no real connection to the present. (This approach also leaves gaping, illogical chasms too numerous to mention here.)

With no characters to care for and no real story to tell, all that remains are the tension and scares, which are also non-existent for the most part. Moments presented to create a mood or set-up a fright range from boring to arduous. Part of that has to do with lumbering direction that confuses “dull” and “suspenseful,” and the other part has to do with the fact there isn’t a single scary moment in the picture. There are moments that attempt to scare, but even the old reliable “jump scare” (which we’d rarely advocate) is nowhere to be found.

What rests at the heart of these accumulated problems is the Rasmussen Brothers simply don’t know what they want this film to be. I counted close to a dozen horror tropes employed here—from the haunted house and the creepy old lady to pseudo-found footage and a random trio of delinquent teens with ill intentions of their own. Several tropes are fine; but when this many are shown they are more noticeable and start getting in the way of themselves. All that remains are a bunch of undeveloped ideas.

There are a few bright spots, including Couture, who is good in the first half (although undermined by her directors in the second half by being given little to do but “wander slowly” and “act possessed”), a few interesting visual moments, and the inclusion of that great antique birthing equipment. I would also be remiss if I didn’t give credit to co-editors Sean Hester and Michael Rasmussen for their work. A lot of low-budget indie films fail to properly edit even the most routine of scenes (think two-person, one-location conversations), let alone the trickier stuff. These guys have strong editing fundamentals which will go a long way.

At its core, The Inhabitants wants to ride the recent trend of throwback horror pictures where mood and atmosphere are the key component to the overall viewing experience, not simply a prerequisite means to a gory end. But too many other horror tropes either distract the Rasmussen Brothers from achieving their true intention, or attempt to distract the viewer from realizing the siblings are not yet skilled enough to create a complete story, populate it with multi-dimensional characters, and commit it all to film.

The slasher film is one of the few types of movies with the honour of having its own deconstruction be just as stale as its own genre. Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson more or less opened and closed the book on self-aware slashers with Scream back in 1996, a film that’s almost two decades old (yes, Scream is now older than today’s average college freshman, but don’t think about it that way). But it wasn’t too long ago that Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard showed that the meta approach still had some life in it with The Cabin in the Woods, although it targeted the horror genre as a whole rather than one specific subgenre. Now, director Todd Strauss-Schulson and writers M.A. Fortin & Joshua John Miller try their hand at lovingly taking down slasher tropes with The Final Girls, a glossy horror/comedy that’s severely lacking in both horror and comedy.

Max (Taissa Farmiga) still hasn’t gotten over the death of her mother Amanda (Malin Akerman), an actress who got her break playing a piece of cannon fodder in the cheesy ‘80s slasher Camp Bloodbath. A tragic car accident took Amanda’s life several years ago, and for Max the film, and her mother’s death scene in it, is more traumatizing than entertaining. But her personal issues don’t matter to Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), the stepbrother of her best friend Gertie (Alia Shawkat). Duncan bribes Max to attend an anniversary screening of Camp Bloodbath and she accepts his offer, taking Gertie and her classmate/romantic interest Max (Alexander Ludwig) along. A freak accident at the screening causes a fire to break out, and Max, Gertie, Duncan, Chris and Chris’ ex-girlfriend Vicki (Nina Dobrev) find themselves literally transported into Camp Bloodbath as they try to escape the theatre. With no idea how to get out of the movie, they decide the best way for them to get back into the real world is to play along, hoping to survive by the time the credits roll.

It’s hard to get a sense of what exactly The Final Girls wants to be. Is it a slasher with meta elements? A deconstruction? A satire? No matter what it is, the fact that it’s aware of its own tropes, formulas and clichés means it has to bring something to the table that’s smarter or better than the old familiars it’s lampooning. But The Final Girls really doesn’t have any ideas, preferring to just plop modern-day characters in a sleazy 1980s slasher and make sitcom-esque jokes about their cultural differences (just wait until you see how these camp counsellors react to an iPhone!). A lot of The Final Girl’s jokes feel lazy, as if the mere mention of a trope will generate laughs because of viewers’ familiarity with it. It’s tame at best, and reminiscent of the way a show like Family Guy will make an obscure pop culture reference both the set-up and punchline to a joke.

That laziness runs throughout The Final Girls, which never bothers to set up any consistency or logic once it enters Camp Bloodbath. The movie within the movie, which looks like your standard piece of ‘80s schlock (based on the fake trailer that opens The Final Girls), becomes a colourful fantasy land once Max and her crew enter it, and their decision to “play along” and let the movie play out doesn’t make much sense. Neither does the ‘80s setting itself, with Camp Bloodbath characters like the dumb, horny “jock” (Adam Devine) playing like a deleted scene from a Judd Apatow movie. And Strauss-Schulson’s style, with the camera whirling and moving all over the place, doesn’t mesh with the visually bland looks of the film(s) he’s taking inspiration from. The camera’s eccentricity is reminiscent of Sam Raimi and The Evil Dead, but its pointless purpose and showiness puts it more in line with Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and American Horror Story.

So it comes as a surprise that The Final Girls’ biggest success is how well it establishes a strong emotional core. For Max, entering Camp Bloodbath gives her another chance to meet her mother, or more accurately her mother’s character Nancy. Max and Nancy’s relationship turns out to be the most captivating part of the film, largely due to the talents of Farmiga and Akerman (especially Akerman, a terrific comedic actress who uses her equally strong dramatic skills effectively here). And the rest of the cast give it their all too, and despite having little material to work with they make The Final Girls watchable. But a game cast can only take things so far, and the tired inconsistency of Strauss-Schulson’s film makes all of its attempts to wink, nod and nudge at the audience ring hollow. The Final Girls isn’t the first film to simultaneously indulge in and upend the rules of horror films, so it’s disappointing to watch it coast along on its own concept rather than try, well, anything remotely interesting or subversive. Films designed to call out its own genre’s traditions shouldn’t feel this safe.

It can’t be entirely coincidental that last year’s breakout horror film, The Babadook, was centered around the frustrating and intimate relationship of a mother and her child and this year’s best horror film—it’s true, I’m putting it in writing—is very similarly themed. In Goodnight Mommy, from Austrian directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz who also wrote the script, instead of a mother wary of her high-strung child, two twin brothers become suspicious of their mother when she returns from plastic surgery with her face in bandages. What The Babadook did so brilliantly was to fluctuate between two horror-mother norms: the mother as savior (think Poltergeist’s Diane Freeling) and the mother as an evil threat (think Carrie’s Margaret White). Goodnight Mommy similarly plays with these horror expectations of mothers but keeps its audience guessing by placing the vantage point in the immature, and therefore unreliable, eyes of two nine-year-old twin boys.

With no sense of what the children’s mother (Susanne Wuest) was like before she arrives back home in full facial bandages, the film is immediately set up for our trust to lie wholly with Elias and Lukas (Elias Schwarz and Lukas Schwarz), a pair of boys who love to roam the woods and fields around their country home, collecting bugs and caring for animals. When their mother returns after surgery—and through an awkward guessing game she plays with the boys it’s revealed she’s a famous TV personality, so it’s likely cosmetic—the boys take the brunt of her sudden mood swings and apparent preferential treatment of one twin over the other. She is volatile and unreasonably strict. When her behavior gets stranger and her temper more intense, the boys—their insatiable curiosity evident—test their mother and track her behavior in an attempt to prove their theory.

The film picks up—and indeed shifts darkly—in its second half when the boys plan, first, to escape the intruder they believe is posing as their mother, and then when that fails, to take action into their own hands to get answers. I’m not going to sugarcoat it, things get squirmy. Even more squirmy because of the constant question of whether or not the violence is or is not deserved. There’s an excellent eleventh-hour reveal that this viewer certainly did not predict and certainly won’t elaborate on. Suffice it to say the film excellently holds focus to divert from the reality of the situation.

The Schwarz brothers carry the film incredibly well for their age and the relatively small amount of dialogue involved. Their constant discomfort at trying first to please their mother and understand her actions, and then at the dawning terror of believing she isn’t who they think, is perfectly conveyed in their nine-year-old fidgeting and wide eyes. They constantly convey that childlike hesitancy in questioning elders or believing a family member could ever be capable of anything but loving behavior. And when things get serious it’s that innocent quality that amplifies the horror of their behavior. It’s so easy for children to be evil in horror films, something we’ve come to expect even, and Fiala and Franz don’t let the boys fall squarely into that space. Their intentions—to get their mother back—are so pure it’s hard not to justify the actions of a pair of scared (and perhaps too imaginative) little boys.

The boys’ imaginations are used throughout the film, often practically as they invent new ways of testing and keeping an eye on their maybe-faux-mother, but also literally in scenes that are revealed to actually be dreams. Normally the use of false-reality sequences in horror films feel like cheap scares, showing supernatural elements in order to trick us into thinking we understand what’s happening, only to be yanked back into the present and be just as confused as ever. But Fiala and Franz use these moments sparingly and add plausibility by making it so easy to believe children have vivid and scary dreams. The effective and limited use of music also gives a sense of realism that enhances the tension and blurs the line between what is real and what isn’t. Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, shooting on 35-milimeter, frames the stoic modern house with its wide windows against the many outdoor scenes of the boys playing in yellow fields, jumping on drying mud, and winding through corn fields and tree-filled forests. The distinction clearly implying the serene safety of the outside versus the cold grey uncertainty of their mother’s home.

At all moments a deftly crafted mystery and with thoughtful scares and the sort of shocks that don’t feel extraneous, Goodnight Mommy is a must-see for anyone who appreciates sustained suspense, and who maybe doesn’t mind a trip to a masseuse after to get all that tension worked out. A repeat viewing feels necessary to watch the film with fresh eyes after the truth is revealed, and if mandatory repeat watching isn’t the mark of a good film, I don’t know what is.

Goodnight Mommy is currently playing in NY, LA, and Austin and will open in additional cities September 25, 2015. 

Seven years ago, Bruce McDonald surprised horror fans with his chamber piece Pontypool, which centered around a radio DJ learning about a zombie breakout happening during his broadcast in the middle of nowhere. It was an inventive and seriously impressive low-budget thriller, one that showed how much imagination can go a long way when it comes to establishing dread and tension. Now, McDonald returns to the genre with Hellions, a low-budget horror film set on Halloween in a small town. It would be unfair to expect Hellions to operate exactly like Pontypool, and McDonald seems intent on making sure he isn’t doing the same thing twice; if Pontypool was all about being low-key, Hellions dives headfirst into the world of fantasy and surrealism. But Hellions is the exact opposite in all the wrong ways: it’s stale, cheesy, amateurish, and an all-around mess—an example of what happens when a filmmaker doesn’t know how to work within their limits.

High schooler Dora (Chloe Rose) is the standard image of the rebellious teen: skipping class with her boyfriend, smoking, drinking, and planning to spend Halloween night partying hard. But a quick follow-up with her doctor (Rossif Sutherland) early in the day brings her some shocking news: she’s four weeks pregnant. Not knowing what to do, and learning it’s only a matter of time before the doctor has to legally inform her mother (Rachel Wilson), Dora decides to stay home for the evening while her mom and little brother go out for some trick-or-treating. Unfortunately, Dora’s planned night of moping around to some bad horror movies gets thrown out of whack when some kids wearing creepy masks begin showing up at her door. The kids’ actions quickly become more aggressive, until one of them decapitates Dora’s boyfriend and demands she give over her unborn baby. Much to Dora’s surprise, her day actually could get worse.

At this point, Hellions goes full-blown surreal and never comes back. Once the army of demon children show up at Dora’s door trying to break in, everything gets transported to some sort of parallel universe where the skies turn red (in order to achieve this look, McDonald shot the majority of Hellions in infrared), and Dora’s pregnancy starts accelerating at a rapid pace. An explanation for all the insanity eventually comes in the form of an exposition-spouting local cop (Robert Patrick), who explains that it’s all part of some demonic ritual to sacrifice a baby on Halloween. That sort of clunky, awkward attempt to fill in the details is just one of many issues with Pascal Trottier’s screenplay, which feels like a textbook definition of the word “lacking.” Despite Chloe Rose giving a capable and convincing performance as Dora, her character amounts to little more than a bloody, screaming horror heroine, and the lack of any characterization puts a severe damper on the rest of the film. Without giving any sense of how Dora might feel about her pregnancy, Hellions feels like a cheap attempt at shock by repeatedly harming children (granted, they’re demon children, but still) and a fetus.

But a lackluster script isn’t what really tanks Hellions; bad writing isn’t exactly a surprise when it comes to the horror genre. The big surprise here is just how awful the film looks. McDonald has been making films for a few decades now, and he’s shown how skillful he can be on a stylistic level in the past, but Hellions is packed with visuals that feel like they’re from an inexperienced straight-to-video director. The infrared look only calls attention to the cheap DV cameras used to shoot the film, along with the fact that most of the nighttime scenes were shot during the daytime. And the use of special effects, like CGI shots of a fetus or exploding pumpkins, are more laughable than anything. It’s a giant disappointment from a filmmaker who can certainly do better, and an even bigger disappointment considering his proficiency within the horror genre in the past. Given the infrared cinematography—which makes this look like an even cheaper version of Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt—it might be best to just consider this a failed experiment and pretend it never happened.

There’s a yummy little narrative twist near the close of The Visit. The fact that it isn’t an earth-shattering or movie-defining cinematic surprise by any stretch is the surest sign of many that filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan has finally gotten his shit together (at least for one movie) after over a decade of sub-par offerings that made him the poster boy for squandered potential. The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable (both modern classics in my book) left audiences reeling with their mind-blowing late revelations, but with his subsequent films his craftsmanship dipped as he scrambled to wow us with his trademark twists (in addition to making two of the most egregiously bad big-budget movies of the last decade, After Earth and The Last Airbender). He hasn’t captured his former glory with his latest small-scale scare machine, but for the first time in a long time, he’s made a movie that simply works.

The story is a modern take on Hansel and Gretel, following teenager Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and her wannabe-rapper pre-teen brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) visiting their maternal grandparents, who they’ve never met, for the first time. Their single mom (the versatile Kathryn Hahn) has been estranged from Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) for years following an ugly incident she doesn’t have the guts to share with the kids yet. Nana and Pop Pop seem a little strange at first, but at the kids’ age, aren’t all elderly people a little weird?

Nothing alarming happens over the first couple of days. Nana’s constantly baking them goodies and Pop Pop keeps himself busy with chores. Becca and Tyler soon discover, however, that Nana isn’t quite herself when the sun goes down. Pop Pop advises them to stay in their bedroom past their 9:30 curfew (bedtime!), but the mischievous Tyler (whose self-dubbed emcee name is “T-Diamond Stylus”) can’t resist peeking out the door when they hear mysterious, violent sounds echoing just beyond it. Seems Nana loses her mind and has a tendency to scurry about the house naked, vomiting and screeching like Gollum tripping on mushrooms.

The glue that holds the movie steady is a simple device; Becca’s an aspiring filmmaker, and she’s making a documentary about the trip and their family history. She’s brought along two DSLRs (manned by she and Tyler), and all the footage we see is ripped straight from the cameras’ memory cards. It’s one of the better found-footage horror movies to come out in recent years because the scenario makes perfect sense and the cameras are oh-so-much better than the grainy camcorders we’re used to characters swinging around. Because Becca’s a film geek, she’s constantly thinking of composition and “cinematic tension,” which basically gives Syamalan an excuse to make the movie look slick while adopting the handheld aesthetic when needed. A smart setup indeed.

Shyamalan wastes no time doling out creepy jump scares. Early on, the kids take the cameras under the porch (a maze of dark, blind corners) to play hide-and-seek. Soon enough, Nana joins the fun. What makes the sequence so scary is the first-person perspective the two cameras; with no establishing shots of any kind, we’re as lost and panicked as the kids are when we notice Nana skittering around on her hands and knees. My favorite scare sees Tyler setting up one of the cameras in the living room secretly. We see the room empty, and then we see Nana across the way, slamming the basement door over and over (in a nice touch, Shyamalan cuts to Becca’s camera in the bedroom as we hear the slamming echo through the house). Back to the living room and Nana slowly walks out of frame. Again, empty room. Then…boom! I saw the scare coming a mile away, and I still all but wet my pants.

Equally balanced with the scares are moments of real humor. This is the funniest movie Shyamalan’s ever made (besides The Happening, I guess), and most of the comedy stems from Oxenbould, who’s a veritable show-stealer. His white-boy rap routine is hilarious (freestyles abound) and he always seems to know how to make a scene funnier. The entire cast is pretty great, and the only thing that threw me a little was Dunagan’s casting. She’s actually quite ravishing at times, which I’m almost positive is unintentional, but nonetheless occasionally distracts from the fact that she’s supposed to be revolting (her flowing silver hair is glorious!). See? I’m distracted just writing about it. In all seriousness, the cast members each strike the perfect chord, and with Shyamalan holding up his end, it makes for a mostly rock-solid horror experience. Mostly.

The scares and laughs work without a hitch, but the dramatic piece of the puzzle doesn’t fit quite right. There are themes of familial anger, regret, and resentment (parental abandonment is a bitch) that leave little to no emotional impression. Throughout, Becca tries to convince Nana and Pop Pop to participate in sit-down interviews for the documentary, but each attempt falls apart when she brings up her mom, a touchy subject that clearly still strikes a chord. The movie stops dead when Tyler tells a long-winded story about a little league football game he lost for his team, a mistake he believes led to their father leaving the family. Every time the movie veered into family-drama territory, I had an immediate itch to get back to the bump-in-the-night stuff punctuated by unexpected laughs.

I mentioned a twist; don’t think about it too much. It comes, and it’s great, but the best stuff is in the lead-up and aftermath. Shyamalan’s working on a smaller scale here than he has in a long, long time, and it seems to be just what the doctor ordered. Unpretentious, scary, and wickedly entertaining, The Visit will, with hope, signal a new, not-shitty period in a fallen filmmaker’s career.

Osgood Perkins’ directorial debut February is the kind of film that’s hard to pin down at first. Primarily taking place at an all-girls’ prep school, it starts off as a sort of teen drama dealing with student drama and a possible pregnancy. At the same time, a second narrative introduces an element of mystery in how it connects to the main storyline at the school. The one thing Perkins seems painfully and obnoxiously intent on is establishing that something sinister is lurking underneath his film’s underexposed surface, with a strand of supernatural horror pulsing just below every scene. Perkins deliberately designs his film to keep the truth hidden, but as each layer peels back it becomes apparent that February is a very, very dumb movie. And it’s all the more insulting because Perkins clearly thinks he’s being clever with his vague dialogue, grating sound design and playfulness with form. There’s nothing wrong with a stupid film, but there is a problem when a stupid film acts like it’s the smartest one in the room.

Split into three sections, each centered around one of the film’s three female protagonists (a choice that’s entirely superfluous, given that each part frequently switches between POVs). The main plot of February focuses on prep school students Rose (Lucy Boynton) and Kat (Kiernan Shipka). It’s winter break at their school, but neither of their parents have shown up. For Rose, it’s not a surprise; she purposely lied about the pick up date to her parents so she could deal with her boyfriend over a pregnancy scare. Kat’s parents, on the other hand, haven’t shown up for some sort of reason. A vague dream sequence alludes to her parents dying in some sort of accident, but how a teenager can hide that fact from her school never gets addressed. The third person in this story is Joan (Emma Roberts), who recently left a hospital and wants to head to the town next to the school. She gets offered a ride from Bill (James Remar) and Linda (Lauren Holly), a religious couple who happen to be headed in the same direction.

Did Perkins just marathon David Lynch and Nicolas Winding Refn movies in order to prepare for his debut? It certainly feels like it, given his liking for overlong pauses in conversations and low, rumbling sounds that only get higher in volume as every exchange keeps going. It’s a cheap attempt to throw some dark undertones over plenty of vague and banal lines of dialogue, lines specifically designed to enhance the aura of mystery. Sometimes, it works; scenes between Joan and Bill early on can feel legitimately menacing because of its ambiguity (it’s hard to tell which one is predator or prey, and Remar and Roberts do a great job at keeping the lines blurred). But Perkins uses this method in almost every scene, which ruins the impact. After getting beaten over the head with “Something’s wrong!” over and over again, it doesn’t take long to stop caring as the tension (quickly) gives way to dullness.

And once Perkins finally shows the hand he’s been keeping close to his chest, it doesn’t come as a big surprise that he was poorly bluffing the entire time. There’s a twist with the Joan storyline in how it fits in with Rose and Kat, but anyone paying a bit of attention to the editing (where loud, sudden flashbacks function as annoying jump scares) should be able to figure the whole thing out before Perkins begins revealing things. The same goes for the supernatural elements that finally creep their way into Kat’s section of the film, but it’s handled so poorly it can feel more like an afterthought than a revelation (the film also has the honour of including one of the lamest exorcism scenes in ages). It isn’t until the very end that Perkins finally brings his main theme to the surface, showing that February is a film about loss, and the desire to find someone (or something) to replace what’s gone. That could have made for an interesting idea when combined with the horror genre; it’s just too bad Perkins decided to dress it all up in a misguided attempt to be clever.

It comes as a bit of a surprise that The Witch, currently heralded as one of the scariest movies of the year since its Sundance debut, isn’t really scary at all. Set in 1600s New England, the film follows a devoutly religious family of Pilgrims as they try to live on their own on a patch of land near a large forest. Everything seems fine until the family’s infant son gets snatched away by an unseen figure from the woods, and it becomes apparent that something seriously evil is trying to destroy this family by making their lives a living hell.

First, the good stuff: Writer/director Robert Eggers, also a former production designer, nails the period look down with his film’s small, distinct setting. And it’s hard to find a weak link in the cast either, with new actress Anya Taylor-Joy exuding a magnetic screen presence as the family’s eldest daughter Thomasin, along with her parents (played by Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie). But Eggers gives up the ghost almost immediately by clearly showing that, yes, supernatural shenanigans are afoot, and by doing so, removes any ambiguity or fear from the proceedings. And rather than try to establish any tension, Eggers prefers to utilize poor jump scares sporadically between artfully composed shots, all of which amounts to little. It’s a suffocating horror film, though not in the way usually useful to horror films, taking itself so seriously it’s hard to enjoy.

Add to all of the aforementioned that a rather poor attempt to weave the subject matter into a sort of commentary on patriarchy and the oppression of women—and boy, I can’t wait for people to sink their teeth into how problematic the film is in this regard—and you have your reasoning as to why The Witch is one of the year’s biggest disappointments. It gets by on its impeccable acting and technical aspects, but nothing can hide that this is a horror film without any horror.

It’s a slow week at the theater, but Bernard, Ananda, and CJ have plenty to talk about on this week’s show! With the recent loss of horror legend Wes Craven, the gang thought it best to pay tribute and share some of their favorite memories of the late, great filmmaker. With TIFF coming up in just a few short days, CJ previews the fest and shares his picks for movies we should look out for and movies we should avoid. Plus, Bernard’s found a few new things to tear his hair out about—Jimmy Kimmel’s recent attack on video gamers, the rise in popularity of movie fan theories—and as always, The Dastardly Dissenter plays therapist. All this, plus our Indie Picks of the Week, on this week’s Way Too Indiecast!

Topics

• Indie Picks of the Week (2:19)
• TIFF Preview (7:13)
• Fan Theories, Kimmel vs Gamers (27:27)
• Remembering Wes Craven (55:20)

WTI Articles Referenced in the Podcast

Colin Geddes Interview
The Attack Review
Ziad Doueiri Interview

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While TIFF is known for its prestige and glamour, it’s also a really, really big festival (nearly 400 features and shorts are playing this year), and thankfully that means there’s room for a lot of fun, insane films. That’s where the Midnight Madness programme comes in. One movie screens every night of the festival at midnight in a packed, 1200+ seat theatre for the most rabid fans of genre films.

The man responsible for all the fun is Colin Geddes, who’s been running Midnight Madness since 1998. But in the last several years, Geddes has expanded his reach to the Vanguard programme, which describes itself as “provocative, sexy…possibly dangerous.” A few examples of films Geddes has helped unveil to the world through these two programmes should give you an idea of his influence and impeccable taste: Cabin Fever, Ong-Bak, Insidious, The Duke of Burgundy, The Raid: Redemption and many, many more.

As someone who got their start at TIFF through Midnight Madness—the first film I ever bought a ticket for was Martyrs, a choice Geddes tells me is like “baptism by fire”—I was more than excited to chat with him about some of the films playing in both programmes this year. Needless to say, any fans of genre films (or anyone looking to seriously expand their horizons) should try to check these films out. You can look at the line-ups for Midnight Madness and Vanguard HERE, along with everything else playing at TIFF this year.

Read on for my interview with Colin Geddes, where he details a handful of films from each programme, gives a glimpse into the behind the scenes of the festival, and tells me what he thinks will be the most talked about film at Midnight Madness this year.

The Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 10th to 20th in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and you can buy individual tickets for films at the festival starting September 6th. To learn more, visit the festival’s website HERE.

I know some people who want to check out Midnight Madness but are afraid of essentially picking a really extreme film. What would be a good film for people to kind of dip their toes into the water this year with Midnight Madness?

What we celebrate with Midnight Madness is that it’s just a wild, crazy, fun ride. The criteria for picking the films is very different from the other programmers because I’m looking for a kind of tone and content. This is the last film people are seeing during the day, so it’s my mission to wake them up. It’s not necessarily always about horror films. It’s about action, thriller, comedy…

I would say that the one that kind of represents the Midnight Madness experience the most might be Takashi Miike’s Yakuza Apocalypse, because it is just a gonzo brain-melter. Something different and crazy happens pretty much every five minutes. It’s a whole bunch of half-baked ideas happening in the film, but that’s kind of the fun of it. Takashi Miike is, in many respects, the godfather of the Midnight Madness programme. No other director has had as many films selected for Midnight Madness, and it looks like we’re actually going to have him here, something he hasn’t done since I think 2000. It’s gonna be nice to have him back.

Yakuza Apocalypse

And what would be a good film for someone who wants to get thrown in the deep end?

On the other end of the spectrum in Midnight Madness, if you want the baptism by fire, go hard or go home, there are two films. The first would be Baskin, which is a descent into hell from Turkey. I’m pretty proud that we have our first entry from Turkey in Midnight Madness this year. This one’s gonna have just as much of an effect on people as Martyrs potentially did. But the other one, which is also really intense but in a fun way, is Hardcore. It’s a Russian-American co-production, and it’s the first POV action film. I can safely say that it’s like the Blair Witch of action films.

Can you talk about the opening and closing films Green Room and The Final Girls? What made you choose them as bookends for the programme this year?

What I strive to do with Midnight Madness is to get underdog films as much as I can. I actually veer away from big studio films. They can be fun and all, but I’d rather showcase a film from Japan or Turkey, somewhere you’re probably not going to see [the film] with that much energy. But then, at the same time, in order to properly champion those films, the programme always benefits by a couple of what you call tentpole films. So, if a newspaper article writes about Patrick Stewart in Green Room, then they’re also going to write about Baskin or Southbound or one of the smaller films. It’s important to have those in the mix, but I’m very selective on what I do. I just felt Green Room was a really sharp, fun thriller.

And with Final Girls, when I do a closing film, it’s a little more tricky just because of the kind of pedigree of premiere status. And it’s harder sometimes to have a world premiere at the end of the festival because that’s when the bulk of the media and the industry have probably left, so it’s hard for me to do a premiere at the end. But when I saw Final Girls the premiere status had already been broken, and I realized “You know what? Closing night!” Thematically, Final Girls is an excellent fit for the final night, and it’s also nice to end the programme on a humourous high.

Green Room

Midnight Madness has established a lot of new filmmakers to audiences over the years. Do you have a particularly fond memory of a filmmaker you helped introduce through Midnight Madness?

I really take pride in being able to introduce audiences to Ong-Bak. Thai Cinema has had a rich history, but it’s a rich history which hasn’t really been known outside of its own country. And literally overnight we were able to introduce the world to the first Thai film star who became internationally recognized. Who knew from when we first screened Ong-Bak that, years later, Tony Jaa would be in a Fast & Furious film? And then repeating the same thing with The Raid: Redemption. I like to take pride that we probably brought the biggest audience anywhere in North America for an Indonesian film.

What can you tell me about Southbound? When you announced it, very little was known about the film.

Southbound is an anthology film, but as opposed to something like V/H/S which had an interlinking episode, in this film, the stories all interlock with one another. It’s kind of seamless, where one story ends and it moves into the beginning of the next story. It does have some of the directors who have done films for V/H/S including the collective Radio Silence and David Bruckner. It also has a female director, Roxanne Benjamin, who’s made a really fun segment. And a female director in Midnight Madness…Even within the guys of the anthology, I’m really proud to be able to do that. There aren’t a lot of female directors working in genre at the moment, but that’s slowly starting to change. To be able to help usher in a new voice into genre is really exciting.

I could ask about every film in the programme, but I’ll ask about one more: I’m really interested in the short film The Chickening, which I guess is the real opening film since it will play before Green Room.

[Laughs] The Chickening came to me from…I got a link from a good friend, but I didn’t take the link seriously. The e-mail sat in my inbox for a couple of weeks before I watched [it]. It’s kind of similar to if you have friends in bands. You’re kind of like “Ugh, here’s their new album, is it gonna be good or bad?” It’s the same with films. When I put The Chickening on my jaw dropped. It is one of the craziest, freakiest, fun things I’ve seen, and in many respects the less said about The Chickening the better. The Chickening is, I think, going to be one of the most talked about films in Midnight Madness, and it’s only 5 minutes long.

The Chickening

Moving on from Midnight Madness to Vanguard now, I feel like Vanguard is a really vital programme in a lot of ways. Aside from genre festivals, I don’t really see many major festivals around the world profiling the kind of in-between genre films that Vanguard shows off.

Yeah, that’s exactly it. In many ways, I can single you out as a poster child of how the TIFF experience goes. Midnight Madness is the gateway drug for people. That’s how it was for me. I stood in line for the first year of Midnight Madness, and after that, I started seeing more films within the festival. People can get kind of intimidated or scared off by art films or foreign films, but everyone can accept a horror film or an action film. But as the audience grows and matures, so do their tastes. And so I really feel that Vanguard is almost the older, cooler sister of Midnight Madness. These are where we can find films that intersect within genre and arthouse. It’s a fun programme to see the people who are taking it to heart. I used to be a Midnight Madness fan, and now I’m a Vanguard fan.

I did want to talk about what might be the most hyped up titles in Vanguard this year, which I’m referring to as TIFF’s power couple: Gaspar Noe’s Love and Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution.

Oh, I’m so glad you caught on to that! I mean Gaspar and Lucile are in many ways cinematic opposites. Whereas Gaspar deals with the extremities, Lucile deals with the intimacies. It’s quite fascinating. I mean Love, there’s not much to be said about Love: It’s a 3D porn film. Or, more appropriately, it’s a love story, and those sequences of physical love are in 3D.

But Evolution is a little bit more of a hard nut to crack because it’s a sublime, body horror, fairy tale mystery. There are no easy answers in this one, but it is beautiful, lush and so engaging. Come and get ready to dive into that film. The imagery is just going to wash over you and slowly get under your skin. When people come out of Evolution they’re going to be talking about it.

Evolution

There are some interesting U.S. indies in Vanguard this year like Missing Girl, which stars Robert Longstreet and Kevin Corrigan, and Oz Perkins’ February.

It’s great because Longstreet is the lead, and it’s so nice to finally see a film that he’s carrying. Missing Girl is a fun, quirky indie. Quirky also works within Vanguard. This is almost a Ghost World-esque thriller in a minor key. It’s got some great performances, and it’s got this likable character who you’re concerned about. It’s a really nice, small, controlled universe. 

And February is a kind of beautiful, sublime horror film. When I sat down and watched the film I wasn’t really sure where it was going, and then there’s a certain point where everything just clicked for me and I was along for the ride. It’s just kind of an awkward coming of age story that takes some very demonic twists.

When you’re programming films, does that moment you’re talking about where everything falls in place kind of entice you? Is that something you seek for when you’re watching things.

Yeah. Personally, for me, I like films where I don’t know where they’re going. I like going down a path that kind of twists and turns. Another example is Demon from Poland. That’s a film that I didn’t know much about. I tracked it down based on the name alone. And it was so rich and rewarding to see a film where I couldn’t predict what the outcome was. It’s also refreshing to see a tale from another part of the world. I’m at the whims of whatever the market gives me, but I try to do as many non-American films as I can. So to be able to discover and put a film from Poland in Vanguard makes me really happy.

Demon

Alex de la Iglesia was last seen in Midnight Madness with Witching and Bitching, and this year he’s in Vanguard with My Great Night. It looks a lot different from Witching and Bitching, but it still looks pretty wild.

It’s totally wild, yeah. This is a film that could have fit in Midnight Madness. There’s a definite madcap energy to it. It’s just about the filming of a New Year’s special in Spain and all the crazy people in the televised special. It’s like a long, drunk, crazy party. It’s as funny as Alex de la Iglesia’s other films. Diana Sanchez—the programmer who selected it—and I had a big talk about it. She was worried that the audience might not recognize some of the cultural references. I was like “No, this is totally going to work.” This is classic Alex, and anyone who’s in for this is totally in for this ride.

I think Midnight Madness and Vanguard have a unique quality compared to other programmes in the fest where you’re kind of the face of these programmes. Throughout the year, when you do this selection process for the programmes, how much of it is you and how much is more of a collaborative process with other people behind the scenes?

Midnight Madness is pretty much carte blanche for me, it’s all of my picks. But Vanguard is a collaborative process with the other programmers. I’ll see something, or they’ll see something, and we’ll meet or discuss whether or not we feel it might fit into Vanguard. A good example of this is Collective Invention from South Korea. I had watched it, and my selections were already full, so I immediately sent it over to our Asian programmer Giovanna Fulvi and said, “You have to see this.” It has the same kind of mad spark of genius we saw with some films at the beginning of the new wave of Korean cinema, like Save the Green Planet or The Foul King. It’s a perfect Vanguard film. She saw it and embraced it, and that’s how it ended up in Vanguard.

Finally, outside of the films in Midnight Madness and Vanguard, what is a film that you personally want to see badly?

High-Rise, Ben Wheatley’s film. I haven’t had a chance to see it. It’s in the Platform section. I’ve read the book, and when Wheatley was here for A Field in England he was telling me what he was going to be doing with the film. I’m so excited to see that one. Hopefully I’ll check it out before the festival. Otherwise I’m just gonna have to skip my duties and run and catch a screening while it’s on.

Anecdotally, I would venture to guess that one of the top three settings for horror movies is the woods. (Haunted houses and school settings would be the other two.) Some of the great films of the genre are set in the woods, including early slasher flick Friday the 13th, indie juggernaut The Blair Witch Project, Whedon wonder The Cabin in the Woods, and personal fave Sleepaway Camp. High school horror might be a metaphor for youth, and a haunted house might represent the violation of a home’s security, but the woods, despite their earthly serenity, are full of actual living critters, so no one can ever know which creature might be up to no good. That’s scary.  The latest horror film to explore the wooded unknown is the Belgian movie Cub, from director/co-writer Jonas Govaerts.

Cub tells the tale of a pack of cub scouts who, led by adults Peter (Stef Aerts) and Kris (Titus De Voogdt), embark on a weekend camping trip in a local forest. As adult scout leaders en route to a campout with young scouts are wont to do, these adults tell the scouts a scary story; this one is the story of Kai, a werewolf who allegedly lives in the woods near where they are camping and has a penchant for killing campers.

One scout who takes the Kai story to heart is Sam (Maurice Luijten), a somewhat troubled 12-year-old whose belief in Kai invites derision from others (especially the adults). This becomes a problem, however, when Sam finds a secret tree house. He also comes face to face with that tree house’s resident, a young, masked feral boy (Gill Eeckelaert) Sam believes to be Kai; no one believes Sam when he recounts his tale, and it’s only when the feral boy’s (supposed) parental guardian starts racking up a body count that things are taken a little more seriously.

It’s time to add another title to the “What Could Have Been” pile. Cub, despite its good intentions and a solid premise, fails to do the one thing a horror film should do: generate terror.

It starts well, with an opening that finds a girl being chased through the woods. Not only is the scene exciting, efficient, and very well shot (by cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis), it fully reveals the feral boy—who looks like a dirty kid in an angry Groot mask—in the first few seconds. It also reveals the diabolical nature of the traps the boy has set throughout the woods. It’s a great way to hook viewers in from the get-go.

This opening gambit is followed by a classic set-up: a group of people (kids, in this case) go carting off into the woods and once they get there, things go wrong. It’s here director Govaerts allows the discovery of evil to gradually unfold, which is reminiscent of early slasher films, where atmosphere and mood (and just enough plot) are allowed to breathe before things accelerate.

Govaerts, however, doesn’t really know how to accelerate the film into that high horror gear. What should be an enthralling sequence of events that alternate from suspenseful to terrifying and back again are instead a scattershot collection of moments separated by rhythmless downtime. And those moments are not frightening; they’re shocking at best and at worst, they’re sadistic incidents played out for nothing more than sadism’s sake.

Be shocked! as an adult brutally abuses a child in a grossly disproportionate response to an event. Be shocked! as a collection of children fall victim to a random act of violence. Be shocked! when a dog is specifically targeted to be the victim of egregious violence, not only in another grossly disproportionate act, but in an act that does nothing to advance the plot or develop a character.

None of this is to say shock is bad; it isn’t. Shock can be fun.  But shock is a horror film’s empty calories—the cheese puffs that might taste good in the moment but offer nothing in the way sustenance; being force-fed too many leaves little more than a tacky residue on the fingers.

The film is not without its positives, including the aforementioned open, some other bright spots including a clever title, considerable creativity in the those diabolical traps set in the woods, and Maurice Luijten as Sam, who calls to mind, at least in appearance, a young River Phoenix.

Unfortunately these things aren’t enough.  Flat characters, gaping plotholes, and inexplicable creative choices combine to be too much for Cub to pull itself out of the death spiral it takes once it peaks as it moves into the second act.

Cub is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Those let down by Joel Edgerton‘s The Gift were probably expecting another movie entirely. While the movie is totally terrifying and will make you leap ten feet off of your seat at least once, this is not the trashy slasher flick the movie’s trailer and marketing would have you believe. It’s much better than that: The Gift is a stalker suspense-thriller with a wicked edge, a thematically rich tale of revenge and domination that engages the mind as it gives you the willies. In short, this movie is legit as hell; pay no mind to the misleading TV spots and ridiculous, punny movie posters.

Edgerton, an Australian screen vet who’s also done his share of screenwriting, makes his directorial debut with The Gift, and it goes swimmingly. In addition to writing and directing, he also stars as Gordo, a socially awkward nerd type who wears ill-fitting pedophile attire. He knows Simon (Jason Bateman) from high school. Simon and his wife Robyn (Rebecca Hall) have just moved back to Simon’s hometown of Los Angeles from Chicago, and Gordo recognizes him at a department store. After a quick bit of uncomfortable small-talk, the couple find they’ve made a new friend as Gordo starts visiting their new home periodically, dropping off little presents for them as housewarming gifts, often when they aren’t home.

Gordo’s infiltration of Simon and Robyn’s life is a slow burn; it starts off as innocuously as Gordo joining them for dinner, but gradually gets out of hand as he starts popping up unexpectedly and peering through their windows. Simon’s creeped out by Gordo’s clingy behavior (though he seems to enjoy making fun of him a little too much), and as his patience grows thin and tensions rise between the old “friends,” Robyn starts to suspect that there’s more to their history than Simon’s letting on. As she slowly uncovers the truth about their past, she begins to realize Simon might not be the man she thought he was. Maybe that’s exactly what Gordo wants. Maybe not.

Like I eluded to before, Edgerton’s film doesn’t rack up a high kill count or even spill much blood. But the danger’s still there; in this story, the truth is sharper than any blade, deadlier than any elaborate Jigsaw contraption. Edgerton keeps the story’s big secret from us for a good long while, and when we finally learn the truth, he blindsides us with an even more devastating blow that’ll make your head spin. Without spoiling too much, I will say that the film bears a strong comparison to Alexandra’s Project, a 2003 psychological thriller from Australia by Rolf de Heer. If you’ve never seen it, give it a go; then you’ll catch my drift.

To talk about the movie’s primary theme would actually spoil a lot, so I’ll just say that Edgerton takes age-old ideas of male ego and explores them elegantly and thoughtfully. Marital trust and honesty colors the story as well, and Bateman and Hall cover all of these themes in one magnificently conceived kitchen scene, a scene that elevates the entire picture above what I could have ever expected. Bateman is brilliantly cast as Simon, a character whose layers get peeled back scene by scene in a steady cascade into madness. Hall and Edgerton are great too, but Bateman gets to flex muscles we rarely get to see in his typical comedic roles, and it’s a pleasant surprise. He’s got an interesting mean streak as an actor that I don’t think has been explored quite as well as Edgerton does here.

The visuals and sound design work in concert to create nail-biting suspense that doesn’t give you room to breathe. The fact that it’s a stalker story actually has an interesting effect on our experience cinematically, as we’re always scanning the frame for Gordo, constantly aware of the characters’ surroundings and the little bumps in the night (and day) that may or may not signal an impending attack. There’s one cheap scare in the whole movie, and it’s delightful. You see it coming from a mile away, but the filmmaking is so good that I guarantee at least a handful of people in the theater will drop their popcorn. This is as solid a debut as a director could hope for, and I eagerly anticipate what Edgerton will cook up next.

Sion Sono is one of my favourite directors working today, and I feel like I need to get that fact out of the way before delving into Tag, which happens to be one of six (!) Sono films coming out in 2015. Much like his fellow countryman and filmmaker Takashi Miike, Sono’s output is prolific and seemingly designed to defy all categories, whether it’s a four-hour epic about cults and upskirt photography (Love Exposure), a grim drama about the Fukushima nuclear disaster (The Land of Hope), a hip-hop gangster musical (Tokyo Tribe), or a gonzo ode to celluloid filmmaking (Why Don’t You Play in Hell?). The point is that, when it comes to Sono, it’s best to expect the unexpected. Tag is yet another insane, baffling whatsit from the cult filmmaker, and it’s amazingly just as strong, original, and entertaining as some of his strongest work.

Going into the plot is a fool’s errand, since the only sensical thing in Tag happens to be its three-part structure. The film opens with a school bus full of Japanese girls going on a trip, with the camera focusing on shy student Mitsuko (Reina Triendl) writing some poetry in her notebook. She drops her pen, and right when she bends down to pick it up a gust of wind slices the bus in half lengthwise, sending the upper torsos of everyone on the bus flying onto the street. Mitsuko survives thanks to bending down at just the right moment, but the gust of wind soon comes back to finish her off. She outruns it, winding up back in her hometown as all of her friends start heading to class for yet another school day. Was Mitsuko dreaming? Was the evil wind real?

Needless to say, things soon get crazier for Mitsuko, and revealing any more of the bloody, surreal highlights in Tag would be a disservice. This is the sort of film that’s ideal for the midnight screening crowd, with so many left turns and howlingly funny spurts of violence, it’ll be difficult not to embrace Sono’s gleeful insanity. And just when things couldn’t get stranger, Sono pulls a Buñuel and recasts his lead character with two other actresses. Mitsuko soon discovers that she’s turned into Keiko (Mariko Shinoda), a bride-to-be, and by the third act, Keiko transforms into marathon runner Izumi (Erina Mano). How these three women link together doesn’t really matter, although Sono does provide an answer by the end. Whether or not it’s a satisfactory answer is beside the point, since this is a film more about the bloody, fast-paced journey than the destination.

The only big problem with Tag that holds it back from being top-tier Sono is its lack of material. Sono wrote the screenplay himself (based off a novel by Yusuke Yamada, although Sono supposedly never read the source material until filming started), and despite running at a pretty lean 85 minutes, there’s a lot of padding. This is especially apparent in the first act, when most of Mitsuko’s scenes wind up being overlong, repetitive montages and/or chase scenes (but, to be fair, Tag pretty much is one long chase sequence). It’s a little concerning to see the film spinning its wheels so much, but Sono’s constant use of drones keep things crackling visually, and there’s always the promise of something new and crazy right around the corner. People can think whatever they want about Sono’s work, but no one can say he’s ever short on ingenuity.

But Tag isn’t just about its irrationally entertaining surface. It might be hard to track during the finale’s shift from action to horror to dystopian sci-fi, but there’s a clear message about claiming one’s own identity and freedom buried under all of the film’s eccentricities. That’s kind of expected from Sono, though, and expecting some sort of emotional resonance from a film that opens with dozens of high schoolers getting sliced in two might be asking for a little too much. Either way, I was thoroughly entertained by Tag and its hyperactive, hyper-violent story. The fact that Sono can still make something this baffling and enjoyable so many films into his career is kind of an achievement in itself.

Tag had its North American premiere on August 3rd at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival. To find out more about the festival, visit http://www.fantasiafestival.com

I am by no means a horror movie junkie. That said, having hit my stride as a teen in the ’80s, the era that ushered in the multiplex boom, VHS rentals, and more cable channels than anyone could possibly need (okay, we needed them all), I watched a fair share of horror movies as a kid. This included the Holy Slasher Trinity (Michael, Jason, and Freddy) on VHS, Universal and Hammer films on UHF, and every B-movie on every channel I could get my hands on, long before the MST3K guys came along. Fortunately, there were more than enough movies around that I could avoid watching those with bugs at their core. I hate bugs. It’s a thing with me. From my youth to yesterday, I deftly avoided watching bug horror. Today, the streak is over thanks to Chad Archibald’s Bite.

Casey (Elma Begovic) is a pretty 20-something bride-to-be who, not too long before her nuptials to Jared (Jordan Gray), takes a bachelorette party trip to Costa Rica with her two best friends Jill and Kirsten (Annette Wozniak and Denise Yuen, respectively). While there, three major things occur: she reveals she’s not too sure she’s ready for marriage (for several reasons), she makes some poor decisions after partying too hard, and she gets bitten by a bug while swimming.

Upon returning home, Casey decides she is going to postpone the wedding. As she musters up the courage to have that talk with Jared, she takes ill, and that illness has some serious symptoms, including a heightened sense of hearing, a festering lesion on her leg, and an inability to keep down any food. As the days pass, Casey’s physical condition worsens, and her psychological condition suffers as a result. Eventually, she wonders exactly what it was that bit her and what that bite still has in store.

The good news (at least for me) is that, while Bite has a plot driven by bugginess, there is very little about it that’s buggy. The better news is that, overall, this is a pretty good film.

I was concerned at first, as the opening minutes of Bite give the impression it is a “found footage” horror film, a tired sub-genre on its last legs. Jill films the better part of the Costa Rica trip for posterity, and their time at the resort is only ever presented through her lens, but once the girls get home, that video is used for reference or flashback purposes only. Amen to that.

Abandoning the homemade footage and moving to a traditional presentation also allows the viewer to be mesmerized by Jeff Maher’s gorgeous cinematography. Horror is a genre that trades in shadows, and getting the right look is key to setting the proper mood. From the beginning of Casey’s demise, there’s a wonderful haze that looms like a pall over the film. As her condition worsens, Maher shifts his grey/blue/green hues to mostly gold. It’s an unsettling juxtaposition between the warm color scheme and the cold events.

The film also relies on the strength of Begovic, who makes her big-screen debut here. Her performance is terrific. Casey is a character dealing with stressors at multiple levels: a mystery illness, an engagement in doubt, and a suffocating future mother-in-law (who also happens to be her landlord) to name a few. Then there is the added complication of going through a horrific physical transformation as a result of that bite. Begovic manages it all wonderfully, but it’s the physical aspects of her performance that show off her talents the most. It’s something that could easily be overplayed, but her physicality is wonderfully subtle. (What’s most noticeable is how well Begovic performs when she’s alone; she has great skill at conveying thought and emotion through simple but effective facial and body movements.)

Other than the landlord-in-law (Lawrene Denkers) being far too much the caricature, the first half of the film is truly suspenseful stuff. The set-up works, Casey’s multi-layered emotional decline is gripping, and her early physical transformation is perfectly measured. I had memories of Honeymoon and Spring while watching the first half of Bite.

That second half, though, is rough. While Maher and Begovic’s respective work shines, the screenplay unravels at a dizzying pace. Dialogue is stilted, small scenes are either unnecessary or inexplicable, and character behavior goes from straining credulity to shattering that credulity completely. Director Archibald, who co-wrote the film with Jayme Laforest, abandons everything that made the first half work so well, spending the second half making plenty of amateur horror movie mistakes. It dampens the overall film, like when a clever little twist in the second half gets lost in all the madness and gore.

Bite might suffer from a shaky second half, but don’t hold that against the entire film.  This is a very good horror movie with enough overall strength—both in the first half as a whole and in Maher and Begovic’s contributions to the second half—to make it very much worth seeking out.

Bite makes its World Premiere on July 29th at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Taking its cues from the likes of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Observance is yet another horror film to come out of Australia, where the genre seems to be having a resurgence as of late. But instead of going down the same classical and metaphorical route as recent Aussie horror triumph The Babadook, Observance prefers to keep its characters and viewers in the dark. There are some bad things rumbling around in the darkness throughout this film, although director/co-writer Joseph Sims-Dennett doesn’t really have much interest in enlightening anyone on what exactly those things are. That’s part of the danger of taking a low-key approach; play it right and people can stay terrified by what isn’t happening, but play it wrong and, well, nothing happens. Observance doesn’t land firmly on either side of those two possibilities. It lands somewhere around the middle, making it a frustrating experience as it delivers some unnerving jolts within a dull narrative.

Parker (Lindsay Farris) needs a lot of money. After a tragic incident leaves him with a broken marriage and a mountain of debt, Parker goes back into his old line of work as a private investigator. His first assignment has him observing a young woman named Tenneal (Stephanie King) in her apartment over several days, a job that sounds easy but gets progressively strange. Parker gets offered a significant amount of money to stay in an abandoned apartment across the street from Tenneal’s place, provided that he never leaves the building and contacts no one except for his superiors to report what’s happening. The apartment turns out to be a nasty, derelict place, with newspaper lining the walls and God knows what decomposing in every dark corner. Parker, thinking about the money, decides to deal with it and get the job done.

But hey, this is a horror movie, so where’s the fun in watching someone just stare at someone all day and night? It’s soon apparent that Parker should really pay more attention to the building he’s in than Tenneal across the street, because some seriously weird stuff starts happening around him. Sims-Dennett doesn’t really care to let anyone know what’s happening, but he really loves pointing out that whatever’s going on isn’t good, whether it’s slowly zooming in on a bloodstain on the apartment floor (courtesy of Tucker cutting his finger on a rusty nail) or showing Tucker’s increasingly deranged nightmares. There’s a small aura of mystery around whatever Tucker has inadvertently made himself a part of, but some hints dropped early on make it easy to get a sense of where things will end up (perhaps the biggest influence here is Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, a comparison that attentive viewers might quickly pick up on). That makes Observance turn into a waiting game.

One of the nice parts of that wait is how, on a technical level, Observance shines. Rodrigo Vidal-Dawson’s cinematography makes Parker’s temporary living space look perfectly unsettling, letting the empty space of the apartment dominate the frame. The sound design also does a good job sustaining the film’s uncomfortable tone, relying on loud bursts of noise and high frequency in a way that’s surprisingly not obnoxious. The cinematography and sound go a long way in making the film’s few outright horrific sequences land effectively, with one moment in particular providing a really nice fright.

The narrative, on the other hand, drops the ball. Sims-Dennett and co-writer Josh Zammit lean heavily on clichés, like the person who tries to warn the protagonist with vague, useless advice (“You don’t understand, it’s an offering!” someone says to Parker when he sees a dead rat, a line that doesn’t really help clear things up). And at a certain point, it’s hard to believe Parker would even bother staying in that place, especially when he starts vomiting black tar (for some reason, this doesn’t really faze Parker that much). Even worse is when the film switches perspectives from Parker to a different character at a pivotal moment, a choice that makes for a rather anticlimactic ending. Observance may fumble quite a bit when judging it in terms of its writing, but as a mood piece, it’s a far more effective film. Putting its clichés and reliance on withholding information for the sake of mystery aside, there are some undeniably creepy moments peppered throughout. That’s certainly worth something, especially within a genre where it’s rare to see that kind of strong handle on tone.

Observance had its world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival on July 19th. To find out more about the festival, visit www.fantasiafestival.com

“My life is a fucking nightmare.” Those are the first words we hear in Felt from Amy (Amy Everson), the traumatized artist at the centre of Jason Banker’s latest film. As she dons an animal costume and wanders the streets of her neighborhood, she talks vaguely about an incident that still haunts her. The specifics of what happened to Amy never get revealed, but the implication of a sexual assault and/or rape is clear. Banker and Everson’s refusal to divulge what Amy went through is part of the film’s detached yet highly subjective mode; this is a story told through Amy’s perspective, and Banker respects that some areas are too difficult to deal with.

Part of that choice might have to do with Felt being a blend of documentary and fiction. Much like Toad Road—Banker’s highly underrated sophomore feature from 2013—Felt gradually weaves a narrative around documentary footage. Banker met Everson at a bar, and as he learned more about her he eventually asked if she wanted to make a film with him (the film has no screenplay, but Everson shares a story credit with Banker). While watching Everson, it’s easy to understand why Banker felt she was a compelling subject; she has a magnetic presence, and the film is as much of a showcase of her as it is of her art. Everson creates costumes and art pieces that can range from the perversely funny (a painting of the infamous Goatse image on a dinner plate) to the downright creepy (a series of unsettling masks, skin-coloured outfits, and underwear with genitalia sewn on it). The costumes are both a reaction and an outlet for Everson; they’re creations inspired by her own experience with sexuality and violence, and by wearing her outfits it gives her a sense of control.

Despite a short 80-minute runtime, Banker takes his time before establishing a narrative. With the help of her roommate, Amy tries to get out of her depression by going to parties, bars and checking out potential dates on OKCupid. Most of Amy’s attempts turn out to be disastrous, like when one of her dates drunkenly explains that roofies are a myth, and most of her interactions only heighten her feelings of living in a hostile, male-dominated environment. Things start changing for the better once Amy meets Roxanne (Roxanne Lauren Knouse) and Kenny (Kentucker Audley). Kenny and Amy start dating, and Roxanne quickly becomes one of Amy’s closest friends.

The docu-fiction approach Banker employs is, for all intents and purposes, a mixed bag. In Toad Road, the blending of real and fake material created a strange, transfixing atmosphere that made the film’s thematic power all the more resonant once it transformed into a more straightforward genre film. In Felt, the style only works intermittently. The set-up, which I presume is made up of most of the nonfiction material, is the strongest part of the film because of how Banker effectively uses the underlying tension of not knowing what’s fact or fiction to emphasize Amy’s feelings of fear and anxiety. And not to knock down Kentucker Audley—I’m a fan of his, and he does a fine job here—but once he shows up the authenticity of Banker’s footage goes away. He arrives around a third of the way in, and his attempts to blend in with the cast of nonprofessionals tends to be stilted. It’s a risk that doesn’t pay off, making it difficult to look at Amy’s relationship to him as anything but suspicious.

But Banker is a filmmaker who, with only two fiction features under his belt, takes plenty of risks. Felt’s finale, a swift and violent one that’s more tragically inevitable than clichéd or predictable, shows just how intelligent of a director Banker is. Yes, the climax delivers on the unspoken promise of blood and gore that “slow burns” tend to give, but Banker deliberately avoids providing a clear motive or explanation for what happens. That choice puts the focus back on Amy, her own experiences, and the cycle of violence that she’s been involuntarily thrown into. If Felt expounded on those themes more successfully, it could have easily become a film more powerful than it is admirable. Early on, there’s a sequence where Amy’s roommate takes her out to a bar with her boyfriend and a potential date for Amy. Amy’s behaviour clearly grates on the two men, and at one point they stare her down with a look of pure anger. In a film filled with disturbing imagery of inhuman masks and costumes, it’s the moments where Banker communicates the real, pervasive threat of misogynistic abuse that provide the most chills.

In Hollywood, anyone can be a star. A random spot-check of TV listings will reveal numerous entries of reality TV shows. What defines “reality” is up for debate, but the M.O. of these shows is the same: point cameras at people willing to make spectacles of themselves and broadcast those spectacles into millions of homes, then watch as the shiniest of those spectacles become famous. Ten minutes into those fifteen minutes of fame, the public forgets what the fuss was in the first place, which marks these shiny spectacles as being famous for, well, being famous.

On the internet, anyone is a critic. Facebook timelines, comments sections, and Twitter feeds are supersaturated with opinions about Hollywood, and thanks to the anonymity the internet provides, those opinions can get downright nasty. The seedier side of the internet is a breeding ground for spreading sex tape footage, hacked selfies, and wardrobe malfunctions like glittery pandemics.

Still, just as the internet needs Hollywood to provide an endless supply of attention-craving narcissists to feed it, Hollywood needs the internet for its perpetual (and free) promotion of said narcissists. This wickedly dysfunctional relationship is at the core of director Martin Owen’s L.A. Slasher.

The film, penned by Owen and four others, tells the tale of a criminal who goes by the self-appointed name “The L.A. Slasher” (voiced by Andy Dick). The Slasher, donned in a white suit and wearing a mask that looks like a face with all its features smoothed down to nothing, is abducting members of the famous-for-being-famous set. As these serial events continue, the Slasher goes from villain to hero in the eyes of the public; the general consensus, as captured by an eager TV news reporter (Abigail Wright) is that the world is better off without these reality-show-hacks, whose fame was achieved not by hard work or even talent, but simply by being famous.

L.A. Slasher wants to be one of those smart, edgy social satires like Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. In fact, there’s a quote from Nightcrawler that is actually quite damning of L.A. Slasher. In Nightcrawler, Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) says, “My motto is if you want to win the lottery you’ve got to make money to get a ticket.” This is what Owen and almost everyone else involved in his picture fail to understand: you have to do the work to get the reward. Even something as luck-driven as the lottery requires some degree of effort to get to that place. Owen never does the work in this film, but he wants the reward. The net result is not a winning ticket, but instead video hate-mail—a film that feels like it was built upon (and fueled by) the comments sections of the internet’s most notorious posts.

Good seeds are there. His victimized characters, all reality show types, are nameless and only identified by their primary characteristic. There is The Stripper (Marissa Lauren), The Teen Mom (Tori Black), The Socialite (Korrina Rico), The Heiress (Elizabeth Morris), The Actress (Mischa Barton), and so on. It isn’t necessarily original (think of the theme song to Gilligan’s Island), but it’s terribly fitting. These characters aren’t supposed to be actual people; they are only supposed to represent the types of people who populate the reality worlds.

That said, the good seeds are washed away by Owen’s inability to develop clever caricatures out of these folks. Instead, he falls back on generating lazy stereotypes, giving his characters nothing to do but take selfies and take to Twitter, both of which would be fine if they photographed or tweeted anything worth paying attention to. Also not worth paying attention is the traditional (read: not social) media. Abigail Wright’s The Reporter is mostly inert, but it’s William Nicol’s CBuzz Host (think TMZ jacked on stimulants) who takes the prize, with bro-dude dialogue and mannerisms that become insufferable before his hair gel dries.

With absolutely no protagonist to care about (including the anti-hero Drug Dealers played by Danny Trejo and Dave Bautista, whose characters are entirely unnecessary and unable to provide the comic relief they were clearly created to provide), all that remains is the villain. All that remains is The Slasher.

Again Owen fails to make the money to buy the lottery ticket. Despite supposedly being motivated by the reality show culture, there are no layers to The Slasher. There is no wondering what makes The Slasher tick. The Slasher, like the other nameless characters in this film, is painted with broad, bland strokes (white suit, creepy mask, obsession with fame), only he’s injected with a baseless hate for a specific celebrity type that feels like Angry Twitter started a GoFundMe campaign to make revenge porn. It’s Bad Guy 101 at its worst: a villain who doesn’t have something weighty to say, only something lengthy.

Owen’s greatest sin, though, is being so enamored with his own direction that he routinely sacrifices narrative flow for the sake of a cool shot or an extended music video-style scene where nothing happens but loud music and dancing. It’s nothing more than artistic preening, saved only by Chase Bowman’s superb cinematography.

L.A. Slasher is quite ironic, really. Owen targets those who have done nothing to gain their fame, but he does so by doing as little as possible. The film isn’t satire; it’s insult disguised as intellect, and once the glossy, music video veneer is stripped away, all that remains is an 85-minute hate tweet.

From watching her atmospheric horror debut, Rebound, it isn’t difficult to tell that Megan Freels Johnston shows promise as a budding director. Unfortunately, the film does suffer from some of the same issues that many contemporary low-budget genre films suffer from. Rebound is at its best when the characters are silent, committed to action, or interacting with their strange and otherworldly environment. The budget only begins to show when the actors actually have to act, when they have to recite lines from the script and converse with one another in order to propel the storyline forward. Clearly the funds in this film went more toward its production, and their appears to be some talent in the directing and editing, but all its major flaws lie within the performances and the shoddy script they are given to work with.

Rebound follows Claire (Ashley James), a young woman who catches her boyfriend cheating on her and then drives away in a hurry, without a particular destination in mind, in hopes of escaping her current living situation and toxic relationships. Essentially, she’d like to start anew and find happiness elsewhere. However, this is a horror film, not a rom-com, so instead of moving forward, Claire’s journey becomes her downward spiral. The atmosphere of her doomed road trip is almost instantly strange. Early on in the film, she enters a stall at a rest-stop and, after only a few moments, begins to hear a pounding at the door. “Got any toilet paper!?” a distraught woman screams repeatedly from the other end of the stall. This is a moment that will most likely catch audiences off guard, as it is so abrupt and darkly humorous—though in an effectively surreal way—that it forces one to call into question the reliability of the narrator.

If only Johnston, as the screenwriter, would have retained that sense of psychological ambiguity throughout the remainder of the film. What follows instead is a regression into the banality of the modern psycho-killer genre. When Claire’s car breaks down along the side of the road in a rather desolate area, she is brought to a small town by Gus (Wes O’Lee) to meet Eddie (Mark Scheibmeir), the creepy and standoff-ish mechanic who she convinces to fix her car free of charge. Eddie, of course, is hiding some secrets of his own, and so violence ensues. Even in the weaker, latter half of the film (in which character motivations become quite confusing), I admire Johnston and her cinematographer, Stephen Tringali, for their confidence as visual storytellers. For instance, they allow the camera to linger on certain images in order to increase the discomfort of their viewers, and succeed in doing so.

Johnston’s writing does show hints of promise, and even effective humor. In one scene Claire enters a nearly deserted bar during the film’s second act and proceeds to declare to the bartender, “I definitely need a large glass of wine.” These moments of subtle comedic relief tend to work well in atmospheric horror and thrillers. The inconsistency of the writing is the real shame here, for this glimmer of effective humor is immediately followed by the awkward and excessively formal line, “I’m so famished.” The improbability and unrealistic verbiage quickly pulls us out of any rapport built by accidentally clever lines.

All in all, Rebound works as an atmospheric experience but fails as an exercise in narrative horror. Any understanding of why the film’s chief characters are behaving the way that they are goes out the window during the third act. Fortunately, the cinematography and score provide the film with a slight audio-visual saving grace, though not enough to render the film recommendable.

With only two features and one short, Rodney Ascher has established himself as a documentarian focused on the communal aspect of horror. His first documentary, the short film The S from Hell, played testimonies by people who were terrified by the 1964 Screen Gems logo at the end of various TV shows. He followed that up with his feature debut Room 237, about people with wild conspiracy theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. With both of these films, Ascher explored how a piece of media could conjure up such strange and specific reactions. What is it about The Shining that makes people speculate so wildly about hidden meaning? Why did a TV logo strike fear into the hearts of so many children? With The Nightmare, Ascher sets his sights on a similar idea, but this time he’s effectively transitioned from niche topics to something far more universal.

The Nightmare isn’t just about scary dreams. Ascher delves into the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, where people find their bodies frozen while some sort of demonic entity (or entities) terrorize them. Each person has their own unique experience getting scared senseless. Sometimes a person might only feel an evil presence around them. Other times shadow people or demonic creatures stand directly over them, looking like they’re moments away from attacking. Ascher’s subjects have a large supply of anecdotes about the times they’ve suffered from sleep paralysis, with some of them so strange it’s hard not to get creeped out.

Ascher doesn’t feel the need to delve into more than what the eight people he profiles tell him. It’s easy to want to hear from a medical professional or a neurologist to learn about what might cause such a horrifying event. Ascher doesn’t really see the need for it. Anyone who’s experienced sleep paralysis knows how vivid they are. Almost all of the interview subjects believe with absolute certainty that what they felt and saw was real, and it’s hard to argue against them. Much like The S from Hell and Room 237, Ascher is more interested in relating these subjective experiences, using filmmaking techniques to place viewers in the same mindset as his subjects.

This is where Ascher takes a big formal departure from his previous works. In Room 237, Ascher only played audio of his interviews over footage of The Shining, and by obsessively poring over sequences frame by frame it made it easy to understand where some of the out there theories were coming from. The Nightmare actually shows the faces of who Ascher interviews, usually shooting them at nighttime in their own bedroom. This is the first half of the film, with the other half dedicated to highly stylistic re-enactments of the different nightmares. The on-camera interviews feel necessary because they give these nightmares an authenticity that makes them all the more unsettling. Hearing about them is one thing; actually seeing the conviction and emotions from everyone as they speak makes it easy to understand why they’re so convinced that what happened to them wasn’t a delusion.

The Nightmare’s second half, where Ascher attempts to remake these stories into something cinematic, is where the film’s problems lie. Cinematographer Bridger Nielson makes these sequences look terrific, along with the talking head interviews, but they’re too cheesy to actually generate something as terrifying as what’s being told. Hearing someone talk about being paralyzed in their bed while large, black orbs start floating towards them sounds creepy, especially with the precise descriptions; seeing an actor cower as two poorly rendered CGI blobs float above them winds up being more of a distraction than a means of accentuating the horror. Dreams come from the imagination, and it might have been better to leave things there than try to represent them on-screen. At the end of the day, nothing will be as scary as what we conjure up in our own minds.

While these re-enactments don’t generate as much fear as simply seeing and hearing the real people tell their story as they experienced it, Ascher does bring up a fascinating idea through these sleek representations. All of them are shot through highly conventional and familiar horror techniques: canted angles, shadows, jump scares, and an ominous score. A scene early on has some people afflicted with sleep paralysis bringing up films like Insidious to show how elements come directly from common imagery associated with sleep paralysis and nightmares (one of the film’s lighter moments comes when one person praises Insidious for how it portrayed nightmares, but still found it to be a disappointment when compared to the real thing). These scenes make it easy to ponder just how much horror films and nightmares feed off each other, how one inspires the other in a sort of strange cyclical pattern.

But Ascher isn’t all about making a thought-provoking documentary on what scares us. The Nightmare obviously wants to scare people, and even though Ascher can be hit or miss on the recreations, he does have a good share of unnerving moments courtesy of his subjects (I’ve avoided explaining too much about them here since it’s no fun to ruin the surprise). At one point someone mentions how episodes began to develop from simply explaining sleep paralysis to a friend. “Kind of like an STD, a sleep transmitted disease,” he says, and that’s where The Nightmare offers something far more wickedly fun than The S from Hell or Room 237. In those films it was easy to watch these groups of people with a bemused detachment. In The Nightmare Ascher suggests that, by watching this film and becoming aware of its subject matter, you might have unwittingly let this phenomenon into your own life. Just try having a good night’s sleep with that idea in your head.

Originally published on April 27, 2015 as part of our Hot Docs coverage.

I don’t know if the indie horror/thriller neighborhood is steadily growing more crowded, or if it is finally getting the kind of recognition it deserves. My guess is that it’s a bit of both. Regardless of how it’s split, an increase in attention and competition equals a demand for filmmakers to bring their A-game; every time a fan buys a ticket or rents a disc, they’re hoping to see the next It Follows or Blue Ruin. The latest resident in the indie horror/thriller neighborhood comes from Canadian director Audrey Cummings: Berkshire County.

The film stars Alysa King as Kylie Winters, a high school girl who finds herself on the wrong end of a raunchy cellphone video. When the video goes viral on the net and in her school, Kylie is the victim of condescending barbs from the girls, misogynistic suggestions from the guys, and physical abuse from her video partner’s girlfriend. Home is no better, as Kylie’s mom has learned through the grapevine about the embarrassing footage. The only thing that gets Kylie a temporary reprieve from the local heat is a Halloween babysitting gig in the country.

But this gig brings another kind of heat, one worse than any social humiliation can offer. While babysitting, Kylie finds herself terrorized by three intruders wearing hideous pig masks. With the adults gone, and police a lifetime away from the rural area, Kylie has to figure out a way to keep herself, and the two small children in her care, alive.

I had high hopes for Berkshire County. It has a well-worn (but always ripe for retelling) sitter in peril plot, a desolate location, a Halloween backdrop, and some very creepy pig masks. The fact that it’s directed by a woman made me even more interested, with female directors recently providing great modern scare-fare as The Babadook (Jennifer Kent), Honeymoon (Leigh Janiak), and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour).

Unfortunately, my hopes were dashed. Berkshire County is a dull and poorly crafted film that begins with something it doesn’t need, ends with something that doesn’t belong, and struggles to make a go of it in between.

Its opening gambit, where Kylie gets into a compromising position that finds its way onto the internet, offers promise. A lot could be done with that thematically, and a lot of potential is there to lead to something interesting. It never happens, and while the set-up hits all the marks, there is no soul to it; the sex, the betrayal, the scorn, and the irate parent are all reflections of very sterile, checkbox filmmaking. Director Cummings and screenwriter Chris Gamble seem interested in the ideas of that opening bit, and they commit those ideas to page and film, but once they move on to the country home the plotline is left stagnant. Once the film is done, it’s easy to question why it was ever there in the first place.

As for the rest of the film, it is mostly made-for-cable fare in terms of quality and execution, with some gore and an overabundance of jump scares thrown in. The antagonists are only as creepy as their masks, but that loses its scary luster after a while (The one exception is the child of the piggy trio, because watching a kid in a pig mask stab someone is eternally unsettling). Kylie, as the heroine, makes some wildly bad choices, which would be forgivable if those bad choices actually led to something exciting.

Berkshire County is uninspired, offering the lowest common denominator of entertainment a film of its genre can. From start to finish, the filmmakers rely on devices they expect the viewer will rely on, rather than drag audiences outside of their comfort zone with fiendish creativity or fresh twists on old takes. I’m rooting for Audrey Cummings. Really I am. Indie film needs more female horror/thriller directors on its landscape. But after this outing, Cummings has ground to make up for in her very crowded, very scrutinized neighborhood.

Berkshire County opens Friday, June 5th in limited release across Canada, with more cities to follow in the coming weeks.

Berkshire County trailer

The ultimate sign of a great movie, to me, is when it follows you home. Like a heated argument with a friend or a flirty chance encounter with a pretty girl, you just can’t stop thinking about it. A great movie occupies your head for days, creeping up on you when you’re doing the dishes, driving to work, or even having sex. David Robert Mitchell‘s It Follows is such a movie, and what makes it even more precious a gem is that it’s a horror movie, and a downright terrifying one at that. I can’t remember the last movie that freaked me out so thoroughly. Great movies stick to the back of your mind; It Follows breathes down the back of your neck.

What is It exactly? Well, it’s a shapeshifting monster that stalks its victims until A) it kills them or B) the hunted has sex with someone, passing the “infection” along. While on paper it seems a clear metaphor for STDs or AIDS (were it made 25 years ago), it’s actually more complex than that. If the monster manages to kill its target, it shifts its focus to the previous one. It’s invisible to everyone but its current and former prey, and the closer it gets, the more fucked up it looks (from afar it could appear to be a normal-looking granny; up close, it could be a rape victim pissing down her own leg). It doesn’t run (thank goodness—I’d have a heart attack) and it doesn’t talk. It just walks toward you perpetually, its destiny to dine on your flesh.

Maika Monroe (The Guest) plays Jay, a pretty girl from the suburbs of Detroit who, after having sex with her new boyfriend in the back of his car, becomes the paranormal stalker’s new mark. Unless she can find someone new to have sex with (it wouldn’t be hard considering she has plenty of admirers to choose from, but she’s got too much self-respect for that), she’ll have to live the rest of her days on the run. Thankfully, she’s got a tight contingent of friends to protect her and help save her from the monster: her sister, Kelly (Lili Sepe); her nerdy best friend, Yara (Olivia Luccardi); and her childhood playmate, Paul (Keir Gilchrist), a puny fellow who’s always had a crush on Jay. Joining them later in the story is Greg (Daniel Zovatto), the hunky guy from across the street. How will they get rid of the demonic lurker? Will Jay sleep with a stranger, Greg, or Paul (with his nerdy-virgin aura, you can’t help but root for him)?

One of the coolest things about the movie is how insular it is, focusing the story squarely on the young leads and their immediate surroundings, letting the rest of the world fall away into nothingness. The kids’ parents are essentially non-entities (except when the monster takes their form), giving the film a nostalgic, urban legend flavor that brought me back to when Are You Afraid of the Dark haunted my dreams on Saturday nights in the ’90s. The nostalgia factor runs even deeper than that: the film seems to exist in a time period that’s a scattered conflation of the past 60 years. The kids watch TV on an old boob tube in a wood-paneled room, and yet Yara runs around with a pink, seashell-shaped smartphone or e-reader of some sort. Mitchell doesn’t seem to want us to be concerned with the story’s time period, leaving it largely ambiguous, which at the same time affords him the liberty to pick and choose props and design aesthetics from any decade he wants, authenticity be damned. As a result the film has a look and feel you can’t really put your finger on, which is a very, very good thing.

It’s hard to pin down the mood Mitchell is able to create, but I wouldn’t say the film is necessarily enigmatic or elusive. What’s going on here is that Mitchell is aiming to evoke and trigger abstract feelings, fears and emotions rather than let plot define the experience. There are several dark themes at play (primarily the dangers of sexual awakening), but they emerge organically. It’s as if we discover them rather than have them fed to us by a heavy-handed screenwriter. The film’s generated so much talk and critical momentum because it bucks convention in so many ways. Trashy jump-scares are nonexistent because the movie doesn’t need them; it’s extremely tense and unsettling all the way through. Most teen horror movies manufacture drama via dissent within the core group, but It Follows‘ characters stay (mostly) supportive and loyal.

The most atypical element of all, though, is the film’s villain, ingenious in its simplicity. It awakens common social and sexual fears on a primal level, acting as a blank canvas for us to project our darkest fears onto. I can remember thinking when I first heard the infectious guitar riff from The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” back in 2003, “How the hell did no one write this until now?” It felt so immediately classic and iconic, and yet it was also brand new. That’s exactly how I feel about the titular “It.” Unique. Terrifying. Elemental. Innovative. It’s the best, most nightmarish horror creation in recent memory.

That’s not taking anything away from Monroe, though, who’s critically instrumental in making the monster so frightening. Some of the film’s scariest moments aren’t when we see the monster itself, but when we see Monroe seeing the monster. She knows how to tell a story with her eyes, the sure sign of a skilled actor. It’s all but undeniable at this point that she’s destined for big things. Sepe plays a great confidant and is a generous on-screen partner for Monroe, never trying to outshine her. (Unfortunately, she won’t get the credit she deserves because her role is so understated.) Gilchrist is incredibly sympathetic and surprisingly winds up becoming the heart of the film.

Like Jim Mickle did in Cold in July, Mitchell uses eerie, ’80s-style synths to emulate the classic soundscape John Carpenter perfected in Halloween. He’s a bit too aggressive with the score at times, though, sometimes bumping up the siren-like synth wails so loud it distracts from rather than supports the imagery. He more effectively ratchets up the film’s overwhelming sense of dread with his camera, occasionally using sweeping 360 degree pans as an opportunity for us to scour the environment for “It” and exacerbate our paranoia. He’s letting us scratch our itch: it makes us feel good momentarily, but he knows it’ll only make things worse in the long run. Though early in his career, Mitchell already seems to be approaching “Master of Horror” status alongside Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, and Guillermo del Toro.

For their follow-up to Resolution, Justin Benson and Aaron S. Moorhead ditch the meta qualities of their debut feature for straight storytelling in Spring. Their film opens with Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) watching his mother succumb to cancer while taking care of her. A bar cook with only one friend in town, and now one enemy after viciously beating up a gang-banger, Evan takes the advice of people around him to leave town and start over. He packs his things, grabs his passport and calls an airline telling them to book a flight for him anywhere out of the country.

Evan winds up in Italy, wandering around until he befriends two British tourists. He follows them to a small, seaside village where he finds work as a farmhand for Angelo (Francesco Carnelutti). Spending his time off exploring the town, Evan meets Louise (a perfectly cast Nadia Hilker), a beautiful, mysterious woman. Evan convinces her to go on a date, and within a short amount of time the two appear to fall madly in love with each other. And then one night Louise wakes up and eats a stray cat outside her apartment.

Yes, Louise isn’t exactly the perfect girl. She’s keeping a dark, bizarre secret from Evan, the specifics of which don’t get revealed until later. Her body changes and transforms into strange, Lovecraftian creatures that she can only hold off by injecting herself with some sort of custom-made medication. Credit to Moorhead and Benson: the reason for Louise’s bizarre, seemingly supernatural affliction is completely original. It also ties directly into the film’s themes of rebirth, moving on and love.

The natural, comedic banter seen in Resolution makes up most of the (surprisingly superior) first half. Lou Taylor Pucci, a chameleonic character actor, gets to show off his skills with a sympathetic leading role, but Nadia Hilker feels like the real discovery in the film. Hilker, a German-born actress with a hard to place accent, possesses the seductive, well-traveled qualities making Nadia captivating presence from the second she shows up. Moorhead and Benson also find a way to work within their low-budget to pull off some inventive shots, presumably using drones or miniature helicopters to swoop through the city’s narrow alleyways and over the gorgeous ocean view.

The problem is that, even with the originality on display, some of it isn’t necessarily good. Once Moorhead and Benson lay everything out, including a fairytale-esque twist on Louise’s condition, the mystery disappears, only to get replaced with something more on-the-nose and messy. It makes the final act — a spur of the moment road trip — come across as hasty, a sort of exhausting sprint to the finish line. And the ending, a nice low-key way to close the film, still feels too abrupt considering the time spent on the build-up beforehand.

But it’s hard to dwell on the problems with Spring, even though they do exist. No one else in the horror genre is really trying the sort of material Moorhead and Benson work with here. Their influences appear vast (a few examples: An American Werewolf in London, Before Sunrise, From Beyond, and Possession), casually mixing genres without fumbling the transitions. There’s plenty to admire about Moorhead and Benson’s work in Spring, just not as much to love. It’s a slight misstep, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

This review was initially published as part of our TIFF 2014 coverage. Spring is available today March 20 in limited theaters and VOD.

Adam MacDonald’s first feature film Backcountry has a quote on its film poster saying that the film “…does for the woods what Jaws did for the ocean.” And while its true the film portrays a truly grisly and terrifying backpacking trip gone wrong, the film surprisingly cautioned me more against the dangers of an uncommunicative relationship than it did the dangers of camping. This was likely an unintentional lesson on MacDonald’s part, but nonetheless adds another dimension to what is a generally slow-building but tension-sustaining survival thriller.

MacDonald understands the way five little words almost always set a film up for a more invested viewing. Place “Based on a true story” at the beginning of any film and viewers are more likely to pay attention, wondering all along the similarities to real life and feeling a deeper connection to the story’s characters because they are based in reality. So while watching Jenn (Missy Peregrym) and Alex (Jeff Roop) embark on a backpacking trip in the woods of Ontario, it’s that much easier to hope for the best for this couple. Things start out normal enough. Jenn and Alex make their way north to the woods where Alex spent his childhood backpacking. Jenn takes a telling quiz in a women’s magazine about her boyfriend. “Does he have a hard time admitting when he’s wrong?” Definitely, she says.

Alex is disappointed upon their arrival at the trailhead to learn from the ranger that the trail he wanted to take Jenn on is closed for the season. They embark on a different trail instead, Alex teasing Jenn right off the bat for the bear spray she brought and a seemingly useless road flare. Clear foreshadowing of course, and its hard to fault MacDonald for this sort of projecting if the viewer has even the vaguest idea of the story before viewing, but unnecessary nevertheless. The two set off on the trail and hit their first bit of unease when another hiker, a cocksure Irish trail guide named Brad (Eric Balfour), charms Jenn into inviting him for dinner. Alex is clearly unhappy about the situation and it makes for a tense evening, especially when the confrontational Brad feels the need to assert his dominance before taking off back on the trail.

Alex leads them off-trail the next day, much to Jenn-the-lawyer’s dismay. Their conversation is light at times, telling at others. Alex sees signs of trouble, a broken twig outside their camp for instance, and chooses to lie to Jenn rather than let her worry. Without giving away too much, the two meet a statistically unlikely but quite terrifying situation when the culmination of all Alex’s bad choices lead to disaster.

MacDonald doesn’t hold back. The transition from camping trip to survival tale is swift and dizzying. Peregrym and Roop shine more in their roles as stressed survivalists than in their chemistry-lacking roles as boyfriend and girlfriend. Whether or not MacDonald, who also wrote the script, meant to paint them as a mismatched couple or not, their lacking communication skills put both of them in danger. If Jenn had been able to communicate her disinterest in camping better; or if Alex had compromised with her by not taking her on a complicated first camping trip; or if Jenn had put her foot down about going off-trail; or if Alex had been honest about the signs of danger he was noticing on the trail, well, let’s say a few conversations would have gone a long way for these two. And this is where MacDonald’s film most resembles a slasher film, where victims somehow prove they “deserve” their fate. Usually it’s in the form of promiscuous sex, here it’s for being uncommunicative with one’s significant other.

But Backcountry does at times feel more like a ’80s slasher film than a true-story survival tale. The scares are long-lasting and shocking, and the end mirrors the fight-to-survive standoff of ’80s horror films. The cinematography does the most to keep the film from falling into any of the camp one associates with that genre, however. Christian Bielz, the film’s cinematographer, is most experienced in reality television and he certainly does a great job of focusing on the sorts of details that allow for mood manipulation, mostly by paying close attention to the telling faces of the characters.

The film is smart to project many possible outcomes for the couple early on, though the movie’s poster hints to some obvious conclusions. There is plenty that can go wrong on a trail, the interesting part of Backcountry is that it is human error that most gets them into trouble, the danger they couldn’t predict just providing another level of horror on top of what they were already experiencing. And this is what will stay most with audiences: 25% of the film’s atrocities are highly unlikely, but the other 75% are entirely the fault of the characters and that means any one of us could find ourselves in the same situation.

Backcountry is in theaters and on VOD Friday, March 20. 

Silly horror movies are awesome. I’m gonna go on record here and say that Ronny Yu’s 2003 horror orgy Freddy vs. Jason is one of my absolute favorites. Yes…I said it! (It feels so good to come clean.) It’s hilarious, fun, and in some ways a precursor to the superhero mash-ups so fashionable in today’s multiplexes. Thoughtful horror movies are awesome, too; Splice, the 2009 film by genre great Vincenzo Natali, is an imaginative “thou shalt not play God” cautionary tale full of wonderful pseudoscience and body horror that, while delectably genre-tastic, has still got a brain about it and poses some interesting ethical quandaries.

David Gelb’s The Lazarus Effect is a medical horror thriller that tries to be dumb fun, but ends up being just plain dumb. It tries to be thoughtful, too, but again: just plain dumb. Not campy enough, not smart enough–this is a movie that paces back and forth, unable to commit to any one direction. It winds up lost in the middle of nowhere, a sort of genre-movie limbo reserved only for the most listless of wares. Legend refers to this mysterious place as “the bargain bin”.

At the center of the film’s plot are married scientists Zoe (Olivia Wilde) and Frank (Mark Duplass), who have discovered the key to waking the dead: they zap some white goop with electricity, spout some vaguely science-sounding nonsense (they might as well be chanting “ooga-booga ooga-booga”), flip some switches and…voila! They bring a dead blind dog back to life (his sight restored, no less)! They call the white goop “the Lazarus serum”, a miracle drug engineered to “bring someone back” from the great beyond. According to the giddy science duo, its purpose is to extend the window surgeons have to resuscitate immediately following a flatline. But let’s be real: this is immortality they’re messing with.

Joining Zoe and Frank in their sparsely-lit, unnecessarily shadowy lab (because horror movie) in the bowels of a fictitious California university are their two assistants, Clay (Evan Peters) and Niko (Donald Glover), and Eva (Sarah Bolger), a college student making a documentary about the team’s breakthrough for a class project (she’s really just there to be our surrogate). The team is left in a state of awe following their canine resurrection, but the dog’s strange behavior–it doesn’t eat, doesn’t want to play, looks clinically miserable–has alarmed Clay, who fears the ol’ pooch could “go Cujo” on them if they’re not careful. When Zoe and Frank bring the dog home (yes, they’re that stupid, and yes, they are also somehow scientists), dog hops on their bed and looms over Zoe as she sleeps. This shot, like the rest of the movie, is meant to evoke, uh…something (laughter, fear, suspense–I dunno), but doesn’t really stimulate anything; the dog stares blankly at Zoe, we stare blankly at the dog staring at Zoe. Crickets.

What follows is a torturously predictable series of events, all of which ape from other, better movies. When the big bad corporation that funds the school confiscates all of the team’s equipment and threatens manufacture the serum for profit, the nerd-squad sneaks into the lab late at night to replicate the experiment and document the process, beating the suits to the punch. An accident occurs during the experiment and one of them dies and…need I go on? Oh alright, alright. For the sake of journalism, I guess. One of them dies during the experiment and is hastily ushered back into the world of the living. But guess what? They don’t come back the same! Now they’re evil! Bwahahaha!

The generic jump-scares and store-brand horror imagery (floating furniture, little girl standing in long hallway, blacked-out “evil eyes”) pile up like shovels of dirt on the movie’s grave, and all the while we’re desperate for a breath of fresh air–a new idea, a kill we haven’t seen before–anything to save us from the blood ‘n’ guts coma we’re slipping into. But alas, the film never breaks loose from convention. Its most earnest attempt is when Zoe and Frank have a theological impasse early in the film about what happens to us at the moment of death. Frank thinks we hallucinate as a result of our brain flooding our body with DMT, Zoe thinks the DMT is meant to usher our soul from this plane to the next. But the debate is essentially only an explanation for the nutty things we see later in the movie rather than real food for thought.

What hurts the most is that Gelb managed to assemble such an exceptional cast. It feels misguided to have a capable funnyman like Glover play a low-key everyman, while Duplass, who plays a great low-key everyman, instead plays a frantic, senseless mad scientist. (Duplass is much better casted in last year’s The One I Love, an excellent sci-fi film you should run to right now if you haven’t seen it.) Wilde doesn’t fit her role either, her slinky charm feeling at odds with Zoe’s violent mental collapse late in the movie.

If you want to have some raucous, childish fun, go watch Freddy vs. Jason, be ready to laugh, and leave pretension at the door. If you fancy a moody chiller that’ll give your brain a little something more to chew on, Splice it up. The Lazarus Effect tries to do what those movies do so well, but gets lost along the way and mucks it all up, leaving us dead cold. The characters in this forgettable piece of horror schlock can “bring back” all the dead dogs and dead people they want; just please, please don’t bring me back. I don’t want to go back.

Julian Richings is one of those actors everyone recognizes, though when asked to name one of his many credits, it’s easy to draw a blank. This isn’t because he isn’t known for his excellent acting abilities, no one without talent could have made their way through so many film and TV projects without it, but when looking at Richings it’s clear he can also attribute some of his success to his unique semblance. With a long and chiseled face, and wiry frame, Richings fits the bill for almost any outsider a writer can dream up. Starring in the sci-fi horror film Ejecta, it would be easy to assume Richings was primarily cast for perhaps his literal alien-like look. And while those staring eyes and smothered nose are well-suited to the film, the majority of the film’s oomph lies in Richings’ delivery, and in fact the film’s most obvious flaw is that unfortunately, Richings isn’t the only one in this film. Otherwise Ejecta is a sharp-looking sci-fi with some jump-able moments, but with some especially embryonic characters.

The film’s director Chad Archibald (who has a host of other low-grade horror under his belt) and Matt Wiele are no strangers to Richings’ talents having worked with him before. Written by Tony Burgess (Pontypool, Septic Man), the film is split into two side by side timelines. The first is video footage of Bill Cassidy (Richings), astronomer and professed alien abductee, as interviewed by Joe Sullivan (Adam Seybold) at his secluded home. Brought to the country-side by Bill, Joe hopes for an inside scoop on the elusive Bill Cassidy and to hear more about his experiences with aliens as well as observe a coronal ejection set to occur that evening. Cassidy tells his abduction story, passionate with the insanity it has left in him, sleep-deprived and PTSD-stricken. Otherwise he says as little as possible, giving Joe long meaningful looks when asked outright questions. A clear ploy to delay until the real action begins. Cut to a dark dungeon-like room with dramatic lighting and large metal chair. Cassidy sits in this chair, locked to it. A couple of soliders taunt him and are quickly silenced by the resident boss-lady, Dr. Tobin (Lisa Houle). With no fanfare and a softly sweet voice that betrays just how sinister she must be, she asks Bill for his cooperation in answering questions about what happened earlier in the evening. Her demeanor giving away that she has no intentions of playing fair.

Thus begins a back and forth between seeing what has just occurred leading up to Cassidy’s capture and imprisonment, and his current state of torture by Dr. Tobin for information. If Richings fits the crazy-scientist style weirdo—or let’s be honest, it fits him—then it would be easy to consider him the most predictable and stock-like of Ejecta’s characters. But no, that top honor goes to Houle as Tobin, whose militant without a cause is the epitome of the unnecessarily angry villain. The film leads toward a slow convergence of its two story-lines—a well-forecasted inevitability—but anyone thinking that the film’s climax will bring with it some insight into the evil Dr. Tobin will be sorely disappointed. Dr. Tobin is the sort of villain who asks at the opening of her interrogation for her subject to cooperate but offers nothing in return. And of course the thing is, if she’d asked nicely, offered some explanation, she might just have gotten the info she wants. She might also have saved our rapidly waning interest.

Once it becomes clear Tobin won’t be cluing us into her own personal motivations for her erratic and crazy behavior (at one point she chooses to shoot one of her own soldiers), we cease to care that she’s doing any of this at all. Our curiosity for what actually happened that evening sustains us through a fair amount of the film, but once the obvious happens it’s hard not to think, “Ok, what else?” Tobin hardly questions Cassidy’s imperviousness to her torture, especially his response to an early device that literally drills holes in his head but doesn’t kill him. Her decision to ignore the obvious is baffling. But then again she has soldiers out exploring (displayed out on the screens in front of her) who report back to her with things like “this goo is inhuman” and “it’s gotta be extraterrestrial.”

Ok, Burgess. We get it. We’re watching an alien film. We sort of got that when you opened the film on Cassidy relaying his abduction story. Tobin seems to be the only one who doesn’t realize she’s very much in the middle of an alien film, however. Constantly she harrows on about “getting answers” but without any revealed motivation, or any revelations into who she works for—other than the usual vague reference to dealing with aliens back in the ’60s—it’s hard to know why she is doing any of this. Considering her quest for alien life, she is especially oblivious when she finally comes in contact with it. I’d say her character is one-dimensional except that would give her even a leg to stand on. She’s not even given especially good dialogue, monologuing at Cassidy for whole scenes and at one point saying, and I quote, “it’s just you, me, and the end of the world” and makes an especially bizarre comment about Cassidy “squealing like a dog, while they stuff you like a pig.” It’s supposed to be a threat, I guess, but I can’t get past the part where dogs don’t squeal, pigs do, in which case maybe a turkey would make for a better metaphor?

The visuals stand out, and were clearly meant to, as though the filmmakers always intended this one to be for snapshots not overall appeal. The music is beyond distracting, a constant techno thumping that starts at 11 and gives itself nowhere to build. The home video recording timeline is at many times very dark and hard to make out. Mostly it’s yet another found-footage style scenario where it’s really hard not to question why someone would be filming when their life is on the line.

There are elements of Ejecta that work, mostly that for at least a little under half the film it manages to pique curiosity and certainly has a florid visual aesthetic, but the distraction of enormous holes in the key characters keeps one from actual enjoyment of the film. If they’d angled to be more of a horror than a sci-fi, it would be easier to forgive. Chris Nolan and his ilk are proving audiences like smarter sci-fi and with something as outdone as alien films, the need is even greater to hold interest. Ejecta orbits close to amusing, but never lands.

In theaters and on VOD Friday Feb. 27th

Despite what you may think, the zombie genre is rife with possibility. Already it’s been used as a backdrop for some seriously inspired comedies (Sean of the Dead, Zombieland, Dead Snow), great horror films (Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later), awesome action (World War Z), and the occasional romance as well (Warm Bodies, Life After Beth). Zombies hover between life and death in a moral grey area that makes for intriguing scenarios—not to mention mindless violence. For all such reasons, it’s easy to be pretty open minded when it comes to zombie films. Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead does indeed bring some new elements into its zombie narrative, but for the most part puts all the familiar elements through the wash, and has just enough camp to call into question how serious it’s really taking itself.

Directed by Aussie filmmaker Kiah Roache-Turner, and co-written with his brother Tristan Roache-Turner, the film’s Australian setting makes its post-apocalyptic premise a strong choice. That they clearly went into Mad Max territory is obvious, but a decision that works for the film’s aesthetic. From the film’s beginning it isn’t entirely clear whether or not we’re meant to feel somber around the events that have apparently recently unfolded. Immediately we’re told, campfire style, a story around one man’s survival when he runs into some zombies in the outback. Without much warning the timeline flips and the film begins again, this time pre-epidemic.

Barry (Jay Gallagher), our protagonist, at home with his wife and daughter enjoy dinner and banter. In her rusted old barn, Barry’s sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey) is holding a gothic-style photo shoot, her subject hanging from a hook. Clearly a certified badass, with the eyeliner to prove it, Brooke snaps away when without much warning her model jerks on her chains, her eyes glazing over and she lashes out, trying to bite Brooke. Brooke’s assistant gets in the way of things and finds herself bit and bloody—and then shortly thereafter zombie-fied—as Brooke climbs into the rafters to escape. Simultaneously, Barry’s daughter wakes him in his room to declare there is someone in the kitchen. He investigates and finds a zombie eating his uncooked meat and he and his wife are forced to violently—and with as much gore as possible, keeping with the norms of the genre—axe the man.

Barry and family jump in the car, but the epidemic appears to be airborne and soon Barry is forced to kill his own wife and daughter. Heavy stuff for the beginnings of a zombie tale. Backwards storytelling and pacing issues aside, the film finds its foothold when Benny (the campfire storyteller), played with sustainable energy by Leon Burchill, joins Barry on his quest to find his sister. Finally we’re given a character who embodies the sort of screwy and preposterous vibe the film’s been hinting at but not committing to.

The most squirm-inducing scenes involve Brooke, taken prisoner by unidentified armed men and experimented on in a small room of chained up zombies by a mad doctor in a hazmat suit. Here’s where the film goes full-blown B-movie with every unsterilized syringe and squirt of blood adding to the cheese. Apparently Brooke (and her brother) are immune to the zombie disease. Later it’s revealed this has to do with their blood type, but in the meantime Brooke endures epidural injections of zombie spinal fluid, theoretically to see at what point she’ll finally turn. Instead, the experimentation has unexpected results.

In the meantime, Barry is making some rather farfetched discoveries of his own. Mainly that the country’s gasoline has suddenly evaporated and that the zombies are actually full of a sort of gas, that not only powers their late night outbursts of attack-energy, but that can be used to fuel a car. Barry, Benny, and a few new guys they pick up, concoct a battle vehicle (the most Mad Max-ian aspect of the film) powered by zombies and reinforced with steel cages. Out they go to find Brooke and keep alive in a world of gas-breathing zombies.

Weirdly what the film ends up doing right is layering on the cheese and emphasizing its blown out visuals which do well to add to the film’s apocalyptic feel. Its more serious moments are a waste, and it shoots itself in the shin slightly at the end when it attempts to invoke some emotion during a final standoff.

There are serious plot holes and missing motivations, and as the zombie genre has matured viewers have begun to expect certain things. Like even the most basic of explanations for the decimation of much of the population. Wyrmwood never attempts to offer any such explanation, and worse never clarifies who its main villains are either. Are they military? Crazy scientist cult? How did they assemble so quickly during the apocalypse and what is the point of their experiments on Brooke when they don’t seem to care at all about a cure?

The film’s biggest twist is certainly one I’ve never seen done before in a zombie film and therefore interesting, but of course is more about plot device than character definition. The action satisfies, the camp could have been layered on a bit more thickly, and the jokes are likely to work best on Australian audiences, but overall Wyrmwood is a fun entry into the growing zombie catalog, though it will never be genre-defining.

Idiot Plot: Any plot containing problems that would be solved instantly if all of the characters were not idiots. (From rogerebert.com)

Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, the writing/directing team behind Body, must have had the Idiot Plot in mind when they made this film. Body starts out innocently enough; friends Holly (Helen Rogers), Mel (Lauren Molina) and Cali (Alexandra Turshen) spend Christmas together at Mel’s parents, bored out of their minds. Cali tells her friends that her rich uncle happens to be away for the holidays, and comes up with the bright idea of driving over to party in his giant, empty mansion. They head off to the house, but after partying for a few hours Holly and Mel discover the house actually isn’t owned by anyone related to Cali (it actually belongs to a rich family Cali used to babysit for). Suddenly the groundskeeper (Larry Fessenden) shows up, and when he tries to stop them from escaping he breaks his neck falling down a flight of stairs.

It’s an interesting set-up, and Berk/Olsen handle the escalation from girls’ night out to manslaughter well. But then the film turns to the question of how its characters will get themselves out of this situation, and things take a sharp nosedive. Cali devises an elaborate, offensively stupid cover-up, and Holly & Mel simply go along with it. It’s obvious that Berk/Olsen want viewers to be shocked by the levels of depravity their characters go to (here’s a hint: if you found Gone Girl offensive in its portrayal of Amy Dunne, your head will fucking explode watching this). None of it really shocks or offends, though. Plenty of time gets spent on establishing the chemistry between the three friends, but as individuals they’re developed through broad strokes. It’s hard to have any reaction to these characters stomping all over morals when they barely register as people. It’s also difficult to believe in a single ounce of this film when the premise is so infuriatingly idiotic.

Granted, it’s not unreasonable for people to act stupidly in extreme situations, but in order to believe what happens in Body you have to assume these three friends never graduated preschool. The asinine situation only makes Berk and Olsen’s motivations transparent. This is a film about shock for shock’s sake. Its only priority is putting something on-screen that will piss people off (or impress die-hard genre fans into giving emphatic responses of “Sick, bro!”). It’s one of those films where its blatant attempts at being egregious wind up making it heinous for all the wrong reasons. The only offensive thing about Body is that it seriously expects people to fall for this shit.

The feel of a horror film is almost more important than the content. And for all the grit and grime the Eli Roth’s of this world have pumped out, there is something truly refreshing in Jennifer Kent’s simplistic and intelligent new Australian horror film The Babadook. Even more refreshing is a distinct lack of gore, cheap frights or action-crazed plot. In an age where most horror films are phoned-in re-hashings of tales already told, The Babadook plays with a nostalgia all can relate to, the adolescent and irrational fear of an unknown evil determined to torment for the sake of tormenting, in an original and satisfying way.

In her directorial début, Kent, who also wrote the film, presents the touching tale of a single mother, Amelia (Essie Davis) at her wit’s end with her high-strung 6-year old Robbie (Daniel Henshall). Scraping by with her job at an elderly care home and being pulled out often to deal with complaints from her son’s school regarding his behavior, her situation is made that much more bleak by the fact that her son is a living reminder of her beloved husband’s untimely death as he was driving her to the hospital to give birth when he was killed. Robbie grates at his mother’s nerves with constant complaining of monsters and a tendency to build homemade weapons.

One night Robbie picks a new book from his bookshelf for his mother to read him before bed. As Amelia reads the darkly drawn story, a macabre and frightening figure presents itself in the pages: “Whether it’s in a word, or in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” Robbie rightly freaks out, and Amelia has to soothe him to get him to calm down. Amelia wonders at the book’s appearance, but when Robbie claims to start seeing the Babadook at home, in the car, and at school she starts to take the book more seriously, shredding it and throwing it into the trash. When it reappears later, she realizes something more sinister is at hand. She goes to the police, thinking perhaps a stalker is threatening her and Robbie, but the dark signs around her imply she and Robbie are on their own.

Kent’s story plays with traditional horror devices of mother-as-protective-hero (à la Poltergeist) and mother-as-threat (à la Carrie), teetering back and forth between both. In this way she challenges the notion that a mother is only as good or as bad as each extreme. Instead Amelia is a refreshingly modern mother. Stressed, under-sexed, lacking sleep and patience and generally trying to raise a child on her own in a world of snobby soccer moms and judgmental school system officials. Like all great horror films, the evil presented represents a part of our own psyches, the kind that feeds off our darkest thoughts, and in this case, Amelia’s own misplaced blame for her husband’s death. When Robbie pushes his cousin out of a treehouse for poking fun of his fatherless-ness or screeches from the backseat of his car for not getting his way, it’s hard not to want to strangle him a bit ourselves.

The Babadook itself is hardly seen—though the pages of the children’s book are plenty frightening in giving it form, thank you designer/illustrator Alexander Juhasz—but Kent affectively holds tension with excellent sound use and an overall dread that plagues every scene. Even the set design, with all the grey and dark blue walls of their home, plenty of dark corners, provides a cloud of gloom and doom mixed into every scene. One would think this small family could solve a few of their problems with a few coats of brightly colored paint. Instead Amelia begs a doctor for sleeping pills to force her son to sleep and give her the much-needed rest she desires. But in a state of exhaustion Amelia becomes even more vulnerable to the dark thoughts already residing in her, as the Babadook urges her to do what both ultimately want: to kill Robbie.

The Babadook holds more scares than any film all year, but more importantly maintains anxiety throughout its entirety (if you watch at home, we highly recommend lights off and sound way up). Kent taps into the horror genre’s ability to provide a platform for women to showcase their psychological versatility. It’s not simply woman as victim or monster. And the fear that keeps children from leaving their bed at night suspicious of what lies underneath, or the fear of what lurks in the dark of our closets at night, or the noises that always seem to come from right behind closed doors, these are the fears that power the Babadook, and indeed the dark side of our own imaginations. The film’s modern ending doesn’t try to neatly soothe our fears, but instead acts as a reminder that darkness never goes away, but can be kept at bay.

The Babadook is available on VOD or in limited theaters today. 

With their late night social lives, sensual eating habits, and lonely existences, vampires are already among the most romantic and mysterious of mythical beings. They’ve been used in plenty of different settings, but Ana Lily Amirpour‘s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night may be the first to harness the ripeness of young love with a vampire, crossed with a black and white western, with a dash of Frank Miller’s nighttime crime scenery. More amazing is that this genre mix is executed in a way that is both artfully quiet and amazingly hip.

Here’s the premise: in the mythical Iranian scum town of Bad City the people fear the local thugs, either working for them or feeding their drug addictions as clientele. In such a town, James Dean-esque Arash (Arash Marandi) is a rare good guy, caring for his junkie father and working hard to afford his gorgeous vintage Thunderbird. At night a girl (Sheila Vand), her eyes rimmed black in eyeliner, covered from head to toe in a hijab, walks in the darkness, following men. One night she encounters Saeed (Dominic Rains), a self-absorbed and dangerous drug dealer who earlier that day took Arash’s beloved car as payment owed by his father for drugs. With nary a word Saeed is seduced by the girl’s dark eyes and lips. He takes her to his extravagant apartment, letting her look around while he indulges in some of his drugs, music pumping, eventually giving her a pathetic sexy dance. And when she does finally come near to him, placing his finger in her mouth seductively, she counters his intentions by cleanly biting off his finger before draining him completely. It’s horrifying, hilarious, and, somehow, heroic.

This is the gritty texture of Amirpour’s film. Shot in crisp black and white, the film’s setting is distinctly more California dust bowl than Iran, which makes sense since it was shot near Bakersfield. Oil pumps grind up and down, sucking black oil out of the ground while the girl drains the city slowly in her own way. And though she speaks quite rarely, the girl appears to be in all other respects aside from her late night diet, a typical, albeit lonely, young woman. She lives alone in an apartment where band posters paper her walls, a disco ball turns overhead, she wears skinny jeans and an oversized french-style striped shirt, and she plays the latest new wave music, dancing by herself in the fashion of a vampire girl yearning for more. At night she has a distinct taste: men, preferably the bad sort. In an especially frightening scene a young street urchin (Milad Eghbali) is stopped by the girl and she threatens him into always being a “good boy,” then takes his skateboard with her.

Thus, one night as she skateboards down a street in Bad City, hijab flowing behind her, the girl encounters Arash for the first time. He’s dejected and high after a bad party. His innocence intrigues her (and those big brown eyes as well) and she takes him home. The romance between the girl and Arash is entirely atmospheric. Amirpour takes her time, allowing the mood, strobing light, and dance-y music of Arash and the girl’s first moment of attraction to wash over viewers. It’s beautiful, and sexy as hell. Marandi is the good-boy-with-an-edge every girl—or vampire girl—dreams of, and he plays Arash with no sense of irony. Vand is an absolute delight, giving off a sweet and vulnerable school girl appeal that changes swiftly with a whiff of fresh blood. But she’s no animalistic vampire, she’s a woman in charge of her desires, as overpowering as they can sometimes be.

Between Arash’s old-fashioned principles, and the girl’s progressive (especially by Iranian ideals) position of power—exemplified by her murder of a man who had just before his death exploited a prostitute before leaving her in the dust penniless—the cultural censure is clear. Amirpour is transparent with her reversals, self-aware even, poking fun by dressing Arash in a Dracula costume when he first meets the girl, assuring her she has nothing to fear.

Lyle Vincent’s cinematography is as wide as any screen comes, capturing minute details in every two-tone high-contrast frame. Produced by Elijah Wood among others (well, he is a DJ and the soundtrack is phenomenal, maybe indie-music insiders really do all know each other), the film is written by Amirpour and one of the few things I might criticize her for is leaning a bit heavily on her visuals. Luckily, said visuals are so impressive they distract from any realizations that not only is dialogue between our romantic leads sparse, it’s almost non-existent, which makes the film’s ending seem slightly drastic, albeit not unsatisfying. My other complaint is a lack of backstory on this elusive and nameless “girl,” but ask and ye shall receive. Amirpour has written a comic book chronicling life in Bad City before the events of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night to be simultaneously released with the film.

With all the charm of Amélie, all the horror of Nosferatu, all the youthful self-awareness of La Nouvelle Vague, and all the atmosphere of a black and white spaghetti western, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night manages to be a strong entry into any of the 6 or 7 genres and sub-genres it fits into. Captivating at every turn, watching the film is like seeing the birth of a trend come into style. Amirpour harnesses the essence of indie filmmaking in her début, showcasing an adroit and enticing talent the likes of which we don’t see every day.

There are some people out there who are willing to do just about anything for stardom: move to Hollywood, work dead-end jobs, endure endless auditions, and even sleep with those in power. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? That’s because it’s the foundation of many stories about chasing the American dream in cinema. And that’s precisely what filmmakers Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer attempt to examine with their latest film Starry Eyes. Or at least that’s where they start. Constant gear shifting makes the pacing feel uneven and the underlying message disjointed despite the intriguing premise.

Sarah (Alexandra Essoe) is an aspiring young actress who is trying to make it big in Hollywood. When she isn’t waiting tables at Big Taters (take a guess at which skimpy wing chain it’s imitating), Sarah auditions for any kind of role she can find. After many failed attempts at landing a gig she finally receives a call-back. Although the lead role in a horror film called The Silent Scream from a declining production company may not be the most glamorous role, she figures beggars can’t be choosers.

The story starts out as a psychological thriller when Sarah’s mental state is in question after multiple breakdowns, but it quickly transitions into psychological terror. During her second audition for the lead part the director demands Sarah to disrobe, something that the original role description never mentioned. Leery at first, Sarah eventually complies in hopes that it proves her dedication to the role. However, this only affords her another round of auditions and this time the stakes grow even higher. Sarah is offered the part as long as she performs a sexual favor for the sleazy producer, forcing her to consider how much she really wants this role. The film would have been better off keeping the focus on this difficult moral dilemma and show the repercussions of selling out. Instead the film spirals off into various directions using the “kitchen sink approach” that generates little impact.

Using a foggy and dreary Los Angeles backdrop, Starry Eyes paints a grim picture of Hollywood and the people who live there. Sarah surrounds herself with the sort of pretentious industry people you always hear about, the kind only concerned about how others can help their careers. Every authoritative figure she crosses is masochistic towards women and takes advantage of her willingness to do whatever it takes to make it in the business. Although this is an exaggerated portrait of the Hollywood system, one can’t help but wonder if there’s at least some truth to it.

It wouldn’t be surprising if horror fans get a little restless halfway through Starry Eyes as a lot of time is dedicated to character development and exposition — perhaps too much time, something not found very often in horror films. But the film more than makes up for it in its final bloody act when shit hits the fan. There’s a sense of overcompensation clearly aimed to please fans of the genre with a sudden abundance of throats slits, nudity, and blood splatter.

Despite a breakout performance from Alexandra Essoe and an excellent pulsating soundtrack, Starry Eyes is mostly a disappointment. What begins as a focused study of how some sell their soul to make it in Hollywood, eventually becomes a broad examination of Los Angeles stereotypes. Neither are particularly original topics, but a narrow scope could have prevented the film from feeling so scattered. Starry Eyes starts off as though it may have something to say about the dark side of fame, but by venturing off into the revenge-slasher arena it proves it has less to say on the subject than originally thought.

Well-suited for its Halloween release, Alexandre Aja‘s (The Hills Have Eyes, High Tension) devilish new film, Horns, is a dark cross-genre film. Highly saturated with the colors of the Pacific Northwest and starring a 5 o’clock shadowed Daniel Radcliffe, the film is based on the novel by Joe Hill (mini-clone and son to Stephen King). With its similar setting and a heavy dose of maniacal absurdity at play, Horns has a tinge of Twin Peaks sensibility to it, but its far-too-fast pace and loosely formed mystery leave it short of such cult status. Overall, with Radcliffe in the lead and solid co-star performances, the film does still manage to intrigue and the imagery of it all will please horror fans looking for a strange Pan’s Labyrinth style scary-fantasy.

Equal parts tragic-romance, dark-comedy, and straight-up horror, Radcliffe plays Ig Perrish, a young man in a dark place after the recent death of his long-time girlfriend Merrin (Juno Temple, seen in flashback). Harassed by the media and questioned by those closest to him, Ig maintains his innocence despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. His lifelong best friend Lee (Max Minghella) is now a lawyer and doing his best to defend Ig during the investigation and trial. After a late-night candlelight vigil is held for Merrin by her grief-besotted father (David Morse), Ig goes on a particularly bad bender, ending up in bed with a trashy old friend, Glenna (Kelli Garner). Adding to the confusion of Ig’s life, he wakes up in her bed the next morning with something worse than an STD — horn tips are making their way out of Ig’s forehead.

After a particularly strange interaction with Glenna, who continues to ask Ig for permission to eat all her donuts, he rushes to the doctor for advice. Instead everyone he interacts with seems to want to tell him all the bad impulses and thoughts they are having. A mother in the waiting room expresses her disdain for her screaming child, the doctor asks permission to crush up some Oxycontin and snort it. Searching for respite at his parent’s home only leads to their own confessions of the grudge they hold against him for putting their lives into uproar and their doubts that he didn’t murder Merrin. Eventually Ig realizes by touching people he can see the bad things they’ve done, and an interaction with his musician brother Terry (Joe Anderson) gives Ig new insight into Merrin’s death, while also helping him realize he can use his new powers to get to the bottom of what happened to her.

As the deceased Merrin, Juno Temple manages to hold up the chemistry between her and Radcliffe in the flashback scenes. But Radcliffe’s best work in the film is definitely when he’s being evil and revenge-driven. His British sarcasm is put to good use, even though he hides the accent quite well. Cinematographer Frederick Elmes is put to great use with the film, creating some truly lovely scenes with color and light in the flashbacks that contrast with the darker present day scenes. A sometime collaborator with David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Charlie Kaufman, he seems to get the magical reality quality these directors love so much. The only artistic note I’m not sure I entirely understand is putting much of the most frightening action in broad daylight. While still brutally gruesome at moments, the tension would have been a bit more dramatic if it had that class horror element to it.

The slight variances from the novel (which I happened to have read) are subtle and sensible, though a fault of translation, especially in horror, is that much of the tension lies within being in the mind of a villain. A perk the novel maintains over the film. The build to the film’s final reveal seems weak. Though the final showdown is formidable enough. The film’s (and to be honest, the book’s) biggest failing has to do with some padding at the end to soften the blow of how much tragedy we’re forced to endure and provide some unnecessary character motivation. It tries to justify some of the death and comes across as insensitive instead. An unnecessary afterthought that no proper horror film would ever ascribe to.

Full of language and grittiness, Horns suffers from what most multi-genre films do, a bit of a scattered personality and an inability to do it all. But the juggling act is still an amusing thing to behold, and all of the devil jokes and imagery are just fun. Those with an appreciation for the macabre and the fantastical will appreciate the strange brew that is Horns.

Horns is out in theaters in the US October 31st, and is currently available to stream via VOD.

If you’re familiar with Dan Stevens, it’s probably with his work on Downton Abbey as the kind-hearted English gentleman Matthew Crawley. Other than that, his career is largely a blank slate, with most of us having no preconceived notions about him as an actor. This absence of expectation is a key ingredient in Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s The Guest, the director-writer duo’s evocative, comic-thriller follow-up to their new-gen horror romp You’re Next, in which Stevens plays a blue-eyed mystery man who we can’t quite pin down. He’s a handsome, polite Kentucky boy with enough charm to make you weak in the knees, but there’s also an intensity, a menace lurking deep inside those unblinking baby blues that’ll make your knees buckle from fright. Try as you might, you can’t unglue your eyes from his, and whether he uses his good looks or his bare hands, one thing’s for sure: he’s a killer.

Things get set in motion in typical horror movie fashion–the ring of a doorbell. Standing at the door is David (Stevens), a freshly-discharged war veteran who’s come to the home of Laura Peterson (Sheila Kelley) to fulfill an oath he made to her dead son Caleb, his former comrade, to tell the family how much Caleb loved them. He speaks to her tenderly, and she’s overwhelmed when she sees David standing next to her son in a photo of their brigade. David only means to pass through their small New Mexico town on his way to Florida, but Laura insists he stay with them for a couple days in Caleb’s old room. With Southern humility and a kind smile, he accepts the offer. “Thank you, ma’am.”

Less trusting of their new guest is Laura’s family. Her husband, Spencer (Leland Orser), fears David may have PTSD. Their introverted teenage son, Luke (Brendan Meyer), feels uncomfortable around him (as he does most people), and their daughter, Anna (Maika Monroe), is the most skeptical of all, dismissing David’s story of how he knew her brother with a laugh.

Despite starting off on shaky ground with the Petersons, David slowly begins to ingratiate himself into their world: He shares late night beers with Spencer, beats up bullies for Luke, and uses his, um….pectoral assets…to get Anna swooning so hard she makes him a mix tape. But as the audience, we have a slightly better sense of David’s true character. Whenever he’s alone, sitting on his fallen comrade’s bed with the lights off, moonlight streaming through the window, he looks soulless, sitting so still, for so long, it’s bone-chilling.

Wingard and Barrett never give us the slightest peek into what’s going on inside David’s head, a brilliant choice that makes the film devilishly fun as we try to decipher what his true intentions are. Many of his actions indicate he’s genuinely here to help the Petersons, but as gruesome acts of violence start popping up around town (the victim’s of which are all tied to the family), we wonder what David’s angle really is.

What’s unique about The Guest is how chameleonic and nimble it is in terms of tone and genre. It’ll make you laugh to tears (Stevens’ bone-dry comedic timing is on-point, holding his icy stare hilariously longer than you expect), and it’ll then slip gracefully into horror/thriller mode, overwhelming you with nerve-racking suspense. It’s an action movie, a parable on PTSD and government neglect of veterans, a Hitchcockian character study (look up Hitch’s first major film, The Lodger), and a loving throwback to ’80s horror (the synths used in the score are the same ones Carpenter used in the Halloween series). This isn’t a mere pastiche, though–it’s more cohesive and well-crafted than that, turning genre conventions upside-down and toying with our expectations.

Who else, I wonder, could have played the seductive, cyborg-like David as well as Stevens? This is the perfect time in the Brit’s career to be playing this particular role. Had someone like, say, Ryan Gosling been cast as David, the mystery would be lost. Gosling has the ability and good looks to play the part no question, but we know the guy too well. We know the type of roles he gravitates to, and his face is too linked with his celebrity to achieve the sense of mystery the role of David requires. Stevens, on the other hand, has never, ever been seen on screen in a role like this. His chiseled physique is intimidating and alluring (he was a tad fluffier on Downton), and from those deadly eyes there is no escape. This is new ground for him, new ground for us, and we can see him as nothing but a wildcard, a monster we’ll never know.

You’re Next was a playful, muscly riff on home invasion horror, as is The Guest. But with their new film, Wingard and Barrett add layers upon layers of flavor to the recipe, whipping homages to The Terminator, Halloween, and The Stepfather together into a deliciously pulpy 99-minute thrill ride. There’s nothing quite like it, and as a great man once said, hold on to your butts: This prolific writer-director dream team has got plenty more in store for us in the coming years. I’m sweating in anticipation.

The Guest trailer

At the end of Nicholas McCarthy’s The Pact, Annie (Caity Lotz) killed the Judas Killer, her crazed uncle responsible for the decapitation of several women over several decades. Annie was ready to move on, but Evil (or, more accurately, film studio economic interest) wasn’t done with her. McCarthy bailed on making a sequel, leaving Dallas Richard Hallam and Patrick Horvath to take over writing and directing duties. Hallam and Horvath aren’t a bad choice; their first film Entrance is a bit of a misfire, but its stubborn dedication to low-key horror made it an admirable failure. That restrained form of filmmaking falls in line with the slow burn quality of McCarthy’s film, except Hallam and Horvath fail to replicate anything close to what made its predecessor effective.

Lotz, doing her best take on Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, doesn’t show up until the halfway mark. The main character this time around is June (Camilla Luddington), a crime scene cleaner, and her police officer boyfriend Daniel (Scott Michael Foster, seen mostly entering or leaving their house). Daniel works on a homicide matching the Judas Killer’s MO, while June suffers from nightmares looking awfully similar to the crime scene. It isn’t until FBI profiler Ballard (Patrick Fischler, unsure whether to ham it up or go method) explains what’s going on that the pieces begin falling into place. June’s biological mother was one of Judas’ victims, making June fearful that the killer’s spirit has latched on to her. June begins experiencing hauntings, and as her nightmares grow in intensity more bodies pile up.

The film’s first half is loosely connected to The Pact, making this story feel retrofitted into a clear attempt at building a VOD franchise. Swap the Judas Killer with any other made up serial psychopath, and no one would notice. That wouldn’t be a bad thing if the storyline had any vitality in it. The murky, ugly cinematography goes well with the film’s plodding narrative, setting up a boring mystery none of the characters look particularly interested in solving. For a brief moment it looks like Hallam and Horvath introduce the idea of June committing these murders in her sleep, but that possibility slowly fades away, acting like a half-assed red herring. It’s lazy writing, giving off the impression that Hallam and Horvath have no clue what they’re trying to do. McCarthy’s script for The Pact, while full of its own issues, looks masterful next to this messy attempt at a sequel.

Once Annie comes back into the picture, The Pact 2 shows a brief flicker of life, the kind of fun familiarity from seeing old characters pop up again. That flicker vanishes once it’s apparent that Hallam and Horvath just want to remake The Pact in 45 minutes. The exact same story beats and plot twists as the first film happen here, only this time applied to June instead of Annie. And by lazily slapping a newer, weaker coat of paint over the old one, The Pact 2 devolves into complete nonsense by its climax, throwing in plot twists just for the sake of it. It’s bad enough that Hallam and Horvath can’t do a good job with their own original story in the sequel; even when directly copying the first film, they still screw it up.

Scares are mostly absent here. Carl Sondrol’s score throws screeching strings and booming percussion over scenes in an attempt to freak viewers out. The score actually hurts the effectiveness of the horror, especially during one sequence involving a shadow. If anything the music signals overcompensation on the filmmakers’ part, that they aren’t confident enough in their abilities to unnerve. That lack of confidence runs throughout The Pact 2. McCarthy’s film certainly showed confidence through its direction; the same can’t be said for Hallam and Horvath. The Pact 2 is an amateur, stale follow-up, an attempt to start another low rent, low quality series of horror films to profit from bored Netflix subscribers. The film’s ending, a warning from one character that “it’s starting again,” all but confirms a third Pact will be on its way if The Pact 2 proves successful enough. That thought alone is scarier than anything in this film.

The Pact 2 trailer

Following a successful opening night at the Mill Valley Film Festival that offered red carpet glamour and a glitzy outdoor celebration, day 2 was all about the festival’s bread and butter: the movies. It started with a pair of meaty arthouse dramas harboring powerhouse performances and ended with a metal god presenting a cult horror classic to cleanse the palate and send us home smiling.

Clouds of Sils Maria and Mr. Turner both star brilliant artists playing…well…brilliant artists. Juliette Binoche stars in the former as an eminently well-respected actress wrestling with her past life, while Timothy Spall grunts and groans as he paints masterpieces in his turn as the eccentric 19th century British painter J.M.W. Turner. Both actors’ performances will stand amongst the best of their respective careers.

But before we get to the heavy stuff, let’s have some fun and talk about our first taste of what’s got to be the weirdest/coolest program at the festival.

Master of Metal, God of Gore

After two films that were rich experiences to say the least (emotionally draining is another way to put it), it was a treat to end the night with the first installment of the festival’s four-part Artists in Residence program, curated by the four members of legendary metal outfit Metallica (who also happen to be local legends). Lead guitarist and horror movie expert Kirk Hammett took to the stage (after a packed autograph session) to introduce one of his favorite horror B-movies, Dracula vs Frankenstein, a cheesy but charming relic from the psychedelic ’70s. An avid collector of horror memorabilia, Hammett discussed with festival Executive Director Mark Fishkin his deep love for scary movies, old and new.

Here’s what Hammett had to say about his obsession with horror:

Stewart Earns Her Stripes

Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria is a serene yet mighty film worthy of its wonderful and universally-adored lead, Juliette Binoche. It’s also one of those rare films that passes the Bechdel test (passed only if a film shows women talking to each other about something other than men) with flying colors: Binoche is paired with rising starlet Kristen Stewart for the majority of the film, and believe me, their conversations are endlessly fascinating, with little help from men at all.

Binoche plays Maria Enders, an actress who made a name for herself as a teenager, playing the role of an office assistant who seduces and emotionally torments her older female boss. Now, decades older, Maria has been asked to be in the play again, this time playing the older woman. With her hip, young assistant Valentine (Stewart), she travels to Sils Maria to rehearse for the part, hiking through the Alps and sipping tea in a beautiful estate as she runs lines over and over, trying to connect with her new role as the old one incessantly tugs at her psyche.

We expect greatness from Binoche, especially with ripe material like this, and she delivers in full. What’s surprising is how excellent a dance partner Stewart is, keeping up with her veteran counterpart beat for beat. Honestly, there are some scenes between the two that I can confidently say Stewart was the best part of. She’s so perceptive and intelligent and compassionate, and it doesn’t hurt that her mellow, under-the-radar vibe fits the role perfectly. Color me impressed.

Growl…Groan…Grumble

Timothy Spall isn’t the prettiest man in the world, but he may be one of the world’s most valuable actors. He plays Romantic British painter J.M.W. Turner, a toad-like, lumbering man who snorts and groans his way through conversations, in Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner. The performance won Spall a best actor award at Cannes, which is no surprise once you see it; it’s positively unpredictable and unforgettable.

Covering the final 25 years or so in the painter’s complex, strange life, the film is a visually stunning portrait of a physically undesirable–but ingenious–man. Cinematographer Dick Pope utilizes some of the prettiest lighting and compositions you’ll see this year to amaze our eyes as Leigh’s patient camera largely sits idle. It’s breathtaking to see Spall’s measured performance framed by such sublime imagery, and I implore you to rush out to theaters to catch Leigh’s latest masterpiece when it hits theaters this Christmas.

That’s it for day 2 of the fest, but stay tuned because we’ve got loads more coverage coming your way from Mill Valley. If you haven’t done so yet (shame on you), check out our coverage of day 1, which includes Hilary Swank and Jason Reitman talking about their new films, The Homesman and Men, Women & Children.

On the subject of David Fincher’s disturbing, fascinating Gone Girl, there are a handful of things of which I am sure, and one thing of which I’m painfully unsure. I’m sure that the film is Fincher at his nastiest and most incisive. It’s a searing, cynical depiction of the ubiquitous media circus that poisons and deludes us daily. It’s an immaculately constructed whodunnit, plays host to some of the most haunting performances of the year, and makes a bold statement about marriage.

Or does it? This is where my uncertainty lies. What is the film saying about marriage, exactly? Is it an indictment on the institution itself? A scathing critique? An extreme, but fundamentally truthful depiction? A misogynist one? Is it saying anything at all?! This is all still rattling around inside my head (Mr. Fincher’s work often has that effect), but to be sure, what’s represented here is marriage (and humanity) at its most horrific.

The film opens and we see a close-up of a husband’s hand on his wife’s pretty head, stroking her beautiful blonde hair. It’s a happy image, but the violent images conjured by the husband’s words as he speaks of “unspooling her brain” to look for answers are a demented contrast. “What have we done to each other?” he quietly wonders in voiceover.

The man is Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a laid-off New York journalist who moved to North Carthage, Missouri with his author wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), to be closer to his parents. One day, Nick comes home to find his wife missing and calls the police. There are signs of a struggle–a shattered glass table, some traces of blood–but nothing conclusive. In fact, something about the crime scene feels odd, though the police can’t put their finger on it.

As Nick gets engulfed in the media firestorm that erupts following Amy’s disappearance (she was the inspiration for her parents’ widely popular children’s book series “Amazing Amy”), we’re shown a series of flashbacks that chronicle the couple’s history before Amy vanished. They were smitten, at first awakening in each other the kind of lustful spontaneity that compels people to have sex in the back of a book store (a compulsion to which Nick and Amy gave in more than once). But as the years went on and they moved to Missouri, they began to drift out of sync. Sex was electric, now it’s routine. Conversations were stimulating, now they’re detached. Nick was supposed to have a job by now, and Amy wasn’t supposed to be so controlling. They expected so much more.

What propels Gone Girl and makes its 149 minutes fly by so quickly is its intricately designed murder-mystery plot, which is so brimming with unreliable narrators, red herrings, and revelations it’s dizzying. When you feel like you’ve got a solid grasp on the characters’ motivations and the facts surrounding Amy’s disappearance, the film throws you for a loop and kicks you in another direction. Gillian Flynn, who wrote the book on which the film is based and adapted it to screen, tells a story that’s entertaining, engrossing, and wickedly funny on the surface, but has a big steaming pile of dark social and psychological commentary bubbling underneath it all.

That brings us back to the thing about Gone Girl I can’t seem to un-stick from my brain: The film’s depiction of marriage. Nick and Amy’s descent from happy Manhattan sweethearts to resentful shells of themselves drowning in the muck of dreary, small-town married life is tragic and unsettling. When people’s hearts are betrayed and love is lost, we’re capable of dreadful, dreadful things. Is modern marriage a deadly trap we fall into that forces us to falsify our identities to please one another? I don’t believe so, but each issue faced by Nick and Amy is informed by indisputable truths about modern marriage. Perhaps there are no grand statements being made about marriage and Flynn’s merely mining our deepest marital fears for entertainment value, but some key moments of abuse (emotional and physical) feel frighteningly poignant.

The absurdity of media and its defamatory nature is conveyed most memorably by Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth’s imagery: We see Nick wearing a strange smile as he poses for photographers in front of his wife’s “missing person” poster; We see him standing at the top of the stairs in his McMansion at night, flickers of camera flashes from the paparazzi outside piercing the darkness and lighting him up in a haunting, ghost-like manner. Every move, every smile, every subtle gesture Nick makes in the public eye is scrutinized, and he soon comes to realize that public perception defines him. Tyler Perry plays Nick’s hotshot lawyer, who further instills in him the importance of this philosophy.

Fincher’s unique gift is his ability to use environments to communicate specifically his characters’ state of mind. When they’re depressed, lost, or their spirit is decayed, he bathes them in nauseating, mustardy light that makes you want to take a shower. He goes to such great lengths to put us in the headspace of his characters that escape simply isn’t an option. The film’s editing is evocative as well, with the terrific opening credits sequence showing glimpses of locations around North Carthage, fading quickly to black a few beats before you’d expect. The timing feels strange and off-putting, signaling the creepiness that lies ahead. Technically, Fincher is at the top of his game here.

Take nothing away from his actors, though; Affleck and Pike’s performances are paramount. Affleck’s sensitivity in his turn as Nick is something of a revelation, and for him to disappear into the role so completely is pretty impressive, especially considering his high-profile celebrity status. Pike’s given a role that explores touchier territory and gets very, very slippery in the film’s final act, but she stays on her feet and finishes brilliantly. I won’t divulge much for fear of spoiling the experience, but it’d be fair to say she runs away with the movie.

But in a way, she’s also done a disservice. The most irksome aspect of the film is that, as a he said/she said marriage story, too much sympathy falls on the “he” side of things. The moral scale is tipped heavily in Nick’s direction, showing Amy in a considerably less favorable light. Almost every character in Gone Girl, man or woman, is a narcissistic, unlikable asshole, so at least there’s equity on that level. I do fear, though, that the film may inadvertently, unnecessarily perpetuate a misogynistic attitude toward women that makes me feel uncomfortable in the worst way, unlike the rest of the film, which makes me feel uncomfortable in the best way.

Gone Girl trailer

The team of director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett made what was one of my favorite films of last year, the stylish, playful, home-invasion thrill ride You’re Next. 2014 is another year, and another home run for the duo as their new film, The Guest, starring Dan Stevens, toys with genre conventions even further, pulling inspiration from films like The Terminator and Halloween and fusing elements from those films with their modern perspective to make something that feels both entirely new and deliciously nostalgic.

Stevens plays a soldier who visits the home of the mourning family of his fallen comrade, befriending them to the point that he’s invited to stay. As random acts of violence begin to pop up around town, the family’s daughter (Maika Monroe) begins to suspect their handsome new guest may be the culprit.

As a big fan, it was a pleasure for me to talk with Adam and Simon about the film’s origins, the key to avoiding genre parody, the challenges and opportunities modern audiences present, Stevens’ attributes as an actor, whether press interviews help them understand their films better or not, and much more.

Simon, correct me if I’m wrong, but did the project start as a more serious, straightforward story?
Simon: It’s hard to say that the project started that way. It was an earlier attempt at the screenplay. I had met Adam and we were friends when I was working on it, but we hadn’t started working together yet. It was a script I’d started on my own, and it wasn’t too long after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, so it was a little more self-serious. I just kind of abandoned it because it didn’t feel right. It felt like I was commenting on a bunch of things that I didn’t have any real personal understanding of, which was kind of a bummer. But it did at its core have a cool idea of this mysterious soldier visiting this family and insinuating himself into their lives. I liked that idea, but I didn’t know how to tell that story. I stopped at about page 30 and kind of forgot about it completely. In late 2012 when we first started talking about this film and Adam was talking about the ’80s genre films that inspired us both to become filmmakers, I realized that that concept combined with that style worked surprisingly well. All of the things that were turning out too serious in that draft would be different if it they were less specific and more entertainment-oriented.

The Guest is a nostalgia film, and movies with similar aims either end up being imitations of the genres they reference or insert themselves as a legitimate entry into the genre. Talk about riding that line and what it takes to avoid being a copycat.
Adam: We were very aware that we didn’t want the film to fall into any kind of parody. I think the secret to achieving that starts with Simon’s screenplay and the emphasis on the characters. The movie’s plot is moved forward by the consistent actions the characters take once they’re established. I feel like another thing we do is take certain elements from things that are clearly cinematic ideas and concepts, some of which you’ve seen before. As a matter of fact, I think most of the things in The Guest, in one way or another, you’ve seen a version of them. But by collecting them and adding a unique perspective to it, I think that’s what creates this new, cohesive atmosphere. It always starts with the characters, but a lot of it has to do with picking what you show and don’t show. If this movie had chosen to show more of David’s background and had a more Hollywood approach to it, suddenly it would be one of those movies, more on-the-nose. We purposefully don’t give you all the information, and we also never let you know what David’s thinking at any point. It allows the audience to fill in those blanks. A lot of the time, giving audiences that space is what creates better movies. Hopefully people will think we’ve done that.

Simon: For me, I think the answer to your question was contained within your question. I’m not interested in pure homage or making pastiche pieces. It’s more about looking at what those films did and figuring out what the current version of that is. It’s looking at the effect they had on me when I first saw them and figuring out something that’s unique but would create that same feeling.

Adam: If you look at filmmakers in their early stages, when they’re in film school or high school, making movies in their backyard, a lot of the first things people do are just straight imitations, you know what I mean? I can’t even count how many people in our generation made Blair Witch knockoffs. That’s worth avoiding because, when you think about it, that’s always the starting point anyway. It’s not necessarily a mature outlook. But if you can find a way to take these tried-and-true methods and integrate it into a new perspective, suddenly you’ve got something.

In your style of filmmaking, you’re playing with audiences’ expectations. Modern audiences carry with them more expectations and have been exposed to more conventions and clichés than any before. Do you view this as a creative opportunity, a big challenge, or both?
Simon: In a way both, but I think one thing that unites Adam and me is that we try to never talk down to our audience. We try to imagine our audience is smarter than us and has seen way more films than we have. We’re trying to really surprise those people. I do think it’s a challenge. I think the internet has made people a lot more aware of clichés and genre conventions because it provides an immediate platform for having those conversations, even though the level of dialogue on the internet isn’t always overly academic. Nonetheless, people are communicating in an intellectual manner about films in an immediate way that was not possible 15 years ago, really. That’s the challenge, but I think the opportunity is for filmmakers like us to try to never repeat ourselves. We didn’t just grow up watching Steven Spielberg movies; we also grew up watching Shin’ya Tsukamoto films and John Woo films and Dario Argento films, and we know what innovations have occurred. We’ve taken our inspiration from a variety of sources.

Adam: I think some of the expectations we’re dealing with in The Guest beyond cinematic tropes are the expectations the audiences feel based on the character of David himself. Once we’ve established the guy is a weird, off-the-wall character and we don’t know what he’s going to do next, the movie kind of plays with that excitement and that expectation you build by putting him in different scenarios. The first time I watched the film in its entirety was the first time I had that kind of realization that the movie becomes almost a series of vignettes of, now that we’ve established this character, let’s see what happens when we put him in these different scenarios. What happens when David goes to a party? What happens when David goes to the high school? I think those are the expectations built based upon the character of David himself.

I think one of the major strengths of the casting of Dan is that people know very little of him aside from his work in Downton Abbey, which was a totally different role for him.
Adam: That’s exactly why we wanted Dan. We wanted the audience to have that opposite expectation when this guy shows up to the door.

Simon: I’ve enjoyed Jason Statham movies intermittently, but imagine how boring The Guest would be if Jason Statham showed up on the doorstep and chomped on a cigar. You’d know exactly where it was headed. It’s more about finding an actor who got the movie’s sensibilities, and Dan had the remarkable talent to transform himself into this role.

Adam: It was always about treading the line of hero and villain. We wanted to take those notions and throw them out the door. To do that, you have to create a charming, likable character, and that takes an intelligent actor to pull that off, and someone who’s really likable as himself. It’s almost a shorthand to the audience whenever he shows up. Clearly there’s something off about him–the film’s called The Guest–but the whole idea is, how far are we going to take that? We wanted to keep you guessing the whole way through.

Dan’s funny as well, and the whole film’s funny. Timing, not just in the humor, but in every aspect of your filmmaking is great; the comedic timing, the scares, holding shots for longer than we think you would, and even the editing. The opening shot of the film and how abruptly you cut to the title card is funny, in a way.
Adam: All of those things have their own reasoning behind them. The close-ups of Dan where we hold on his face the whole time are mostly based on the idea that the audience never knows what Dan’s thinking. It was important to me to give people a chance to project their own thoughts onto it, so that everybody can have their own, subjective experience. Sometimes I hate it when directors cop out when they say, “It’s up to the audience to interpret, blah blah blah.” In this case, it really is true. We don’t know who this guy is even by the end of the film, but we’re not asking you to know who he is. We’re just asking you to enjoy what he’s doing. [laughs]

In the opening itself, we wanted to start the movie in a different context, that maybe this could be a drama about a mourning family. We wanted to play that up. But at the same time, that title with the burst of Nightmare On Elm Street, Halloween emphasizer was kind of saying, there’s definitely something else going on here. Don’t get too antsy for the first 15 minutes if this isn’t your bag, because something’s going to happen. That took a little bit of a process. It wasn’t something that was cooked in from the beginning. Once we edited the film, we looked at it as a team and said, “How do we make sure this movie start as a ‘slow burn’?” as a lack of better phrasing. We wanted to make sure to tell the audience to stick around because things are about to happen.

The film’s soundtrack and score are great. Steve Moore does a fantastic job. A lot of movies that employ ’80s music just kind of go, “Hey guys! Remember this?!” I think your score embraces what’s effective about ’80s soundtracks and scores.
Adam: That’s exactly why we hired Steve Moore to begin with. He’s not using software programs to imitate these sounds; all of his equipment is vintage. As a matter of fact, the first conversation we had was about the soundtrack to Halloween 3, which has some of the best synth textures I’ve ever heard. It turns out, he had a version of the soundtrack, and in the liner notes it had a list of the equipment that John Carpenter and Alan Howarth used, and Steve had tracked down all that equipment. I was like, “Perfect.” It was a metaphor for what we wanted to achieve with the film in general. Like you said, we weren’t trying to parody the genre or do something totally tongue-in-cheek and cute. We wanted something that lived in the vibe of the ’80s. By using all these real instruments, it allowed us to create modern compositions based on the old, and that’s what this movie is. It’s a modern film using all the influences that have come since the ’80s as well, while at the same time achieving this vibe that’s elusive, but it’s there.

I’ve seen and read a few interviews with you guys, and you’re both very thoughtful and passionate about your projects. Through this process that we’re going through right now, the press process in which you’re talking about every aspect of the film and revisiting these thoughts over and over, do you acquire a new perspective on your own work?
Simon: That’s a great question, and we’ve never been asked that before. The answer is absolutely “yes”. The other night, we had our Canadian premiere, which was at the Midnight Madness section at TIFF. Watching that movie with that audience, as soon as it was over I turned to Adam and said, “I think I understand our movie better now!” [laughs] He was like, “Yeah, me too!” But it wasn’t just that we watched with that audience, it’s that we’d just done 12 hours of interviews. We were thinking very analytically, and I noticed all these ideas that I half-had and was never able to fully articulate kind of coalesced. When you were talking to Adam a few minutes ago, I was thinking about how the movie has kind of a slow start so that it can set up that character reality to do absurd things within that. I was wondering, “What if we did that quicker or differently?” I think it was organic to the story and I was having thoughts about that that I hadn’t had before. I never intentionally sat down and said, “The first part of this movie needs to be a drama so that when we shift tone, everyone understands what the reality is.” But when I heard you guys talking, I though that that was something I probably did unconsciously.

Adam: I feel like you never really understand your films until you start seeing them with an audience. You understand your intentions or lack thereof a lot more. Honestly, going in the more entertaining direction we’re going with You’re Next and The Guest as opposed to A Horrible Way to Die, which is more of a straightforward, bummer of a movie, it was in making something more depressing that we started questioning our intentions as filmmakers. It was like, “What are we really getting out of this? Are we saying that we have some sort of insight on being depressed or the futility of existence or whatever?” Ultimately, we realized that our roots come from this place of this love for cinema. We understand movies in a way that’s very passionate, and we wanted to make movies as kids because we enjoyed them. Getting back to those roots is what it’s about. We made You’re Next and The Guest specifically with the idea of, let’s not try to sit in a quiet theater and figure out what the audience is thinking through some sort of psychic means. Let’s actually get a rise out of them while we’re there and let them tell us what they’re thinking during the movie, whether they’re laughing or whatever. We don’t want to stagnate and say, “We just do genre mash-ups.” But that’s where we are now.

Newlywed life is fraught with difficulty as adjusting to life with someone else can make for plenty of stressful situations. At the least, the honeymoon phase can usually be depended upon to be a time of blissful happiness before reality settles. Director Leigh Janiak isn’t quite so generous with her newlywed couple in the backwoods horror Honeymoon. When young couple Paul (Harry Treadaway) and Bea (Rose Leslie) get married they’ve barely just arrived at Bea’s childhood vacation cabin in the woods of Canada before strange things start happening threatening to cut short their marital euphoria.

While well-paced overall, Honeymoon does thickly lay on the ooey-gooey love of its main characters at the start. Setting up a sense of happiness that feels entirely too good to last. That said, Treadaway and Leslie (whom audiences may recognize from HBO’s Game of Thrones) have a light and affective chemistry. As Bea shows off the cabin, reliving the memories of her childhood and sharing this side of her with her new husband, they seem to be a truly well-matched couple. Their first few days are easy enough. A boat ride on the secluded off-season lake, late breakfasts, long walks, and lots and lots of sex. In fact, their inability to keep their hands off each other seems almost too pronounced. Oh, foreshadowing.

As they lie in bed their first night in the cabin, a light shines brightly through their bedroom window, a pulsing noise hinting at something ominous they remain unaware of. It isn’t until the couple decide to walk to the only nearby restaurant one evening that things seem out of sorts. The restaurant’s owner, Will (Ben Huber), immediately demands they leave until he realizes who Bea is,  a childhood friend of his, and by his embrace, a friend who harbored long-time feelings for her. When his wife comes out Will gets irritated, erupting at her. The young couple decides to hightail it out of there, but Bea is distinctly distracted by her old friend’s behavior.

That night Paul’s alarm goes off hours early, causing him to get up and get ready to fish way earlier than he needs to. He realizes his mistake and makes his way back to bed to find that Bea is missing. In a panic he follows her trail to the woods where he finds her naked and in a daze. Shaken by this strange episode, he tries his best to reason with Bea to remember what happened to her. She seems alarmed but not frightened, claiming she must have sleep-walked despite having no previous experience doing so. Paul notices a strange wound on her upper thigh.

From there on out Paul’s paranoia builds, while Bea’s strange behavior increases. Paul’s initial reaction is jealousy, believing Will must have something to do with her late night excursion, and the building tension makes for a distinct unease. Over time Bea shows signs of being very unlike herself, her insatiable lust for Paul giving way to hesitancy and sexual rejection. In a particularly eerie scene Paul walks in on Bea practicing turning him down for sex. Leslie’s performance is subtle, toying with viewers minds as we process what we know of her loving behavior and her sudden uncommunicative demeanor. Their growing divide is as sad as it is tense.

Alas, like many horror films, there seems often to be the moment where the slow suspense gives way to answers, and when shock value is involved, rarely are those answers truly satisfying. Honeymoon doesn’t entirely misstep in its transition to the final reveal, and for once withholding some answers seems to work in the favor of the film’s gruesome ending. But in the same way the film built it’s suspense ever so slowly, so does the gore of the ending draw out so slowly so as to be too uncomfortable. It’s veritably squirm-inducing, and yet not quite satisfying as far as horror goes.

There are definite questions of relationship, identity, and even gender roles implied through the film’s choice of terror and the ways in which Paul and Bea act (Bea being the one to explain to Paul how to fish and hunt), but none of them leave any sort of impression or provoke lasting thoughtfulness. As for the horror elements, while effectively creepy, there are loads of missing explanations that might have pushed the film into exploring those deeper questions better while simultaneously providing a few more answers to its baffled audience.

Part “cabin in the woods” horror, part romantic honeymoon tale, and part sci-fi thriller, Honeymoon’s sweet beginnings give way to gruesome endings that, while terrifying, don’t entirely hit their mark.