Evil Dead (2013)

It wouldn’t do good to pretend that this film can be thoroughly reviewed by someone who never caught up with the notorious 1981 film but the truth is – like most in the screening I found myself in – I’m too young to remember the original The Evil Dead and too overwhelmed with a long list of past classics to have yet seen everything made before I was born. Just know that I’m ignorant and guiltless, like every 20-something.

Apologies dealt with, I enjoyed 2013 Evil Dead. It is a very well made 5-young-adults-go-to-a-cabin-in-the-woods-and-get-hacked-to-bits-by-demons horror film. Sam Raimi obviously saw fit to trust debut feature-length director Fede Alvarez with the reboot of his franchise and Alvarez delivers a spectacularly gory effort with absurd amounts of blood and plenty of opportunities for audiences to laugh at the sight of themselves jumping out of their collective skin.

The editors have the pacing of the scares measured to a science, beginning with innocuous loud noise transitions, progressing to faux tension builds, finally reaching genuine jumps before descending into all out gore at the halfway point and not letting up until everyone’s dead and buried (or are they?). All of this wraps at 91 minutes, a very sensible length and one that you suspect could have been stretched to a pointless 2 hours by most inexperienced directors. Raimi’s original clocked in at a similar 85 minutes and it was perhaps his genre-savvy guidance that prevented the remake from yawning on too far past this marker.

If there is one problem with the film, and it is a fairly big one, it is that Evil Dead offers nothing new to the horror genre or any of its subgenres. It employs the grotesque mutilation realism of a splatter, the soft-loud dynamics of a jump scare flick, the supernatural back-story of a chiller and the faintly ridiculous demon voice of a possession film, but has no unique identity of its own.

This is probably best explained by the fact that this IS a remake, attempting to recreate and pay homage to the spirit of a 32-year-old movie. The thing is: no genre ‘moves with the times’ as fast as horror. And nothing stubbornly holds onto the fears and phobias of a particular era than a remake. Feeling particularly out of date is the sweary male/female voice of the demon as it speaks through the possessed characters. A trope such as this is rooted in the 70s/80s and has suffered too many The Exorcist parodies to be really effective in 2013 as anything other than bait for teenage sniggers.

One nostalgic trick that does hold up is the use of prosthetic special effects, which are terrific. Making notes immediately after leaving the cinema, I wrote “this is one of the few CG-heavy films that won’t alienate you with sheer unbelievability.” Well, I’m happy to report that the makers of Evil Dead painstakingly created the bloody set pieces for real, which is brilliant. I assumed that some particularly horrific moments could only have been achieved by computers. In fact, the reverse is true. Happily, the only way to achieve utterly believable special effects continues to be through the use of the ancient method of models and prosthetics.

Ultimately, Evil Dead is notable only for its high quality production values. It has all the component parts of a classic 20^th century horror and is definitely worth a watch. Unfortunately for its legacy, the recipe was already perfected many years ago and many of the ingredients have far passed their sell by date.

Dark Skies (2013)

When trailers put you off virtually everything, the great thing about resigning yourself to anything is that sometimes something advertised as average tosh might turn out to be genuinely interesting. Step forward Dark Skies whose tag ‘from the producers of Insidious and Sinister’ promises a jumpfest of cheap scares with nothing too substantial in terms of narrative or theme. When the trailer is intercut with title cards that read: “When they come for you… there’s nowhere… you can… hide” alarm bells really start ringing. But like I said, being resigned to having “nowhere to hide” from the prospect of an awful film is a sweet state when the film actually turns out to be quite good.

The horror genre really is something special. When done well, nothing packs a greater punch in the cinema. The best horror films have always spoken in metaphors, exploiting the fears of each passing age and inviting audiences to mock themselves or – even better – shock themselves into recognising what their fears actually are and how their behaviour shapes itself in reaction to those fears.

Dark Skies targets a very traditional subject for its attention, one that stretches way back to The Exorcist (1973) and probably further – paedophobia; that is, fear of children, but more specifically in this case, fear of the maturation of children – fear of encroaching adolescence. Broadly speaking, Dark Skies’ central theme is family and the fear of anything that can undermine the institution of the family. Marital turbulence, unemployment, financial insecurity, house insecurity – all feature in the lives of the doom laden Barrett family. However, all are outstripped by what is by far the biggest concern of parents Daniel and Lacy: the world outside the boundaries of the home and the influences that could be invading and shaping the development of their growing boys, Jesse and Sammy.

The genius of the film is that we empathise at all times with the young couple and never suspect them for the perpetrators of their own nightmare. They are presented as an extraordinarily ordinary middle-American man-and-wife with the hope, dreams, trials and troubles of any family in the developed world. The film does not attack them for over-parenting but instead implicitly hints at a culture, accepted as ordinary, which obsesses over the safety of children – a culture which may be inadvertently damaging the futures of young people by anesthetising their environments.

The invasion of the Barrett home by extra-terrestrials I believe to be a metaphor for Daniel and Lacy’s fear of the influences on their children of things beyond their control. The feared abduction of their children is tantamount to their terror that Jesse and Sammy might one day fly the nest and leave home. The Barretts refuse to accept that their eldest, Jesse’s, new set of interests are a natural side-effect of hitting 13 years of age and instead lash out at his older friend Ratner who is assisting in their son’s exploration of violent computer games and pornography. In fact, Jesse’s one fumbling foray into the world of girls results in no harm, merely light relief and, eventually, an innocent kiss. His night time bike ride home after the incident is gloriously underscored with “Days” by The Drums and stands out sweetly from anything else in the film.

Meanwhile, the domestic-centric view of the world held by his mother Lacy is highlighted in a scene where hundreds of birds all converge on the house in a mass mistake of migration. As the supernatural expert Edwin Pollard, who she later consults, explains, “it isn’t what you want to hear but your case is nothing special”. In fact, many families are invaded by what Pollard terms “the Grays” and most cases end in child abduction. Hmm… He also adds (as a brilliant side note) that there have been rare cases reported where the abductees are eventually returned to their families (which I’m thinking is simply the grown-up child visiting from university during the holidays).

Aside from its excellent web of symbology, for me the film succeeds in building a claustrophobic atmosphere of tenebrous inevitability in which one always feels a storm is just around the corner. In fact, it was this heavy sense of doom that hooked me onto what I’ve explained I believe the film to be about. I linked together the moments of dialogue and the set pieces that it seemed were contributing to the moodiness of the piece and all of a sudden it all became clear.

Now there is plenty about Dark Skies that might convince you that all of this subtext is a happy coincidence or a result of my reading too much into things. After all, the film does aim to be a jumpy ‘boo!’ horror film and, without the padeophobic slant, it is a very silly and very average scarefest in line with the Paranormal Activity fare of the world. Its scary moments aren’t particularly blood-freezing and it would be dishonest to pretend that the film doesn’t fail somewhat on that basis. But it would also be dishonest of me to pretend that I don’t fully believe that its makers really did intend to create a biting satire on society’s exaltation of the nuclear family and its attitude of protecting the perfection of the 2-parents-2-children paradigm at all costs.

‘Cos I’m convinced they did mean it and I liked the message and I liked the film.