It Follows (2015)

The way that many teen horror flicks successfully evoke the claustrophobic landscape of adolescence is mostly a happy accident, a natural byproduct of filmmakers needing to kill time waiting for the next big scare and not putting the effort into fleshing out their characters. It’s a strange thing but it accounts entirely for the genre’s success. Who needs three-dimensional characters when whatever big bad thing coming to get a group of teenagers can be relied upon as a metaphor for all their growing-up problems? Outsource all that messy stuff to a ghoul or a demon or an axe-murderer and it’s satisfying enough just to watch them trying to outrun it.

It Follows knows this. And it knows about the sex = death paradigm of these movies. And it knows about keeping adults out of the whole equation. And it has a load of fun with all of it. These are the rules: “it” is a murderous shape-shifting demon thing that never stops hunting its prey at a glacial pace. It can be outrun, if you fancy trying, but the only way to shake it off is to pass the curse on by having sex. Even then, you’ll still be able to see it, it just won’t be after you. Until it has killed everyone else that came after you in the chain. Then it will be after you.

So you see, some tropes are flipped on their head – sex becomes both a way of transmitting a morbid awareness of death from person to person (‘the curse’) but also the only way to keep death at bay. (For the time being anyway.) It’s like the original 80’s conservative slasher film message (“don’t have sex!”) has been updated for a generation of 21^st Century nihilists. Now the message reads: “there are fun things to do while you’re alive. Just don’t forget that one day you will die.”

The absent parent convention is also played with, and to the same end – adults actually do show up in the film, but only as empty vessels, manifestations of the “it” that follows, essentially reminders from the family tree that time is creeping up at walking pace to sweep us all away eventually.

With It Follows, David Robert Mitchell has purposefully made the film that so many writers and directors stumbled upon in the 1980s. It’s not a revolution in teen horror flicks, just a very well made one. But the film knows this, of course it does. Like its characters’ inability to outrun the inevitable, It Follows examines and rearranges all the clichés of its genre, but it can never escape them. And it doesn’t really want to.

World War Z (2013)

With a troubled stop-start production spanning over 5 years from the initial script stage, through several rewrites, shoots and re-shoots, and finally released last Friday, World War Z is a perfectly OK way to spend 2 hours and a perfectly unnecessary way to spend $200 million on a genre that never needed it.

Brad Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, a former U.N employee drafted back into service when a worldwide zombie pandemic causes general mayhem in every corner of the globe. Thankfully, Pitt does the American leading man thing very well and so his performance is one of very few things gluing this messy film together. The blatant cracks discernable in a project with so many writers and producers become less of a problem as the story progresses. We know we’re rooting for Gerry Lane – barely anything else makes sense – so Pitt’s performance is the one straight arrow we can hang onto.

I can live with the directionless narrative. I’m sure some people involved in the film are devastated with how incoherent World War Z’s story is but I’d rather a film aimed for Hollywood thriller formula and missed than put me to sleep with a gentle lead through tension/release/tension/release. What did kill the film for me was any element of the ‘Action’ genre thrown into the mix, which diluted the sense of threat and dread that a good zombie film can imbue.

Big explosions, plane crashes, helicopter shots of citywide inferno, pacey cutting sequences showing swarms of undead braineaters encroaching on Israel. All looked so expensive to make and yet had so little dramatic impact. I remain unconvinced by sprinting zombies whose presence ensures only that their victims have less time to feel terrified and spend more time being eaten than running away.

The film takes an unexpected turn for the better half an hour from the end when, after another expensive-looking set piece involving an exploding grenade on a commercial flight, Gerry Lane finds himself crash landing next door to a World Heath Organization facility in Cardiff – actual Cardiff, in Wales. From my limited research I understand that at this point, the writing credit switches (for the nth time), this time to long-time Joss Whedon collaborator, Drew Goddard, which might explain why the film suddenly seems to tighten up. The maze of corridors in the WHO facility is the perfect playground for the undead.

Not only does Pitt have to sneak past the infested area to retrieve some *important items* but the zombies have slowed down considerably. Described now as ‘inactive’, they amble around with the traditional clumsy sloth of the zombies in classic horror films and, for the first time, we get to have a few clear 10-second close-ups of the creatures. Not surprisingly, this is the scariest sequence of the film. Ridden with tension and wrapped in a lucid goal-orientated narrative, after nearly 2 hours, World War Z actually begins to get… exciting…

And then it ends.

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.

Stoker (2013)

So generally infantile are trailers in their desperate splurge of what distributors feel are the best moments of a film and so rife are they with conspicuous plot spoilers that I’m sold to any film that uses its minute-long advertising spot to give nothing away about what it might be about, what happens in it or even what genre it might be conveniently placed into.

See I hate trailers. I never post them. But this one is perfect.

Having watched Stoker, I remain somewhat unable to pigeonhole it. Psychological thriller? Dramatic horror? However best to comfortably describe it, the film holds up as one of the most affecting I’ve seen for many months.

Mia Waikowska plays India, an introverted teenager on the cusp of adulthood whose father has recently died in a car crash. Acutely aware of everything her 5 senses deliver and inherently suspicious of everybody around her, India lives with her troubled mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) in their isolated family home. When India’s estranged Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) introduces himself, she finds herself repelled and captivated in equal measure by her new relation as he aids her transition into adulthood.

Stoker is beautifully made, with a directorial touch as delicate as the central character’s super-tuned senses. The care taken in framing each subject is absolutely sublime and the pinpoint symbolism (keys, shoes, locked drawers, trees) is better than Hitchcockian.

Sound design is also very careful and close. Slow egg cracking, squeaking wine glasses and the amalgamation of a digging-spade with heavily played piano keys are about as good as it gets for a micro-sound junkie.

The trio of actors at the heart of the drama play their dysfunctional family with minimal… minimal drama actually, which really suits the piece because under each ice-cold exterior, you can see everyone is boiling. Uncle Charlie has a simmering malevolence, Evelyn is bubbling with grief and jealousy and India is brewing the potential of adulthood, never betraying quite in which direction she is blossoming until the final act.

I suppose you always realise a good film by how necessary everything you see and hear is to the effect it produces. Mysterious gestures, fastidiously-designed montages and complicated sound processes can all seem very gimmicky when used as a smokescreen to deceive audiences by glossing over a film’s shortcomings. But in a film such as this, where every carefully realised element is integral to its nature, the effect is simply stunning.

Maybe I’ve just had too many underwhelming experiences in the cinema of late but when a film completely traverses the alienation of a huge silver screen, beguiles you into its odd little world and then horrifies your sensibilities to the point where it still cloys at your mind 10 days after seeing it – well, that’s something to celebrate.

Let the Right One In (2008)

Photo by Michael Taylor

ODEON, Huddersfield – As charmless, expensive and bland as any links in that giant chain. Yet most Tuesday evenings last winter found me trekking the 1.7 miles out of town past looming gasworks and derelict mills towards the single sacred multiplex in the HD postal area.

On one of the coldest nights of my life, the ‘Film Fan Tuesday’ feature was Let the Right One In. Caught between impossible black-iced pavement and sodium streetlights, I passed no one, finally reaching the cinema just in time. I walked in and sat down as the snowflakes of the first shot invaded the screen. What followed served to laden with doom thoughts of the walk home; never before had I crossed the threshold from pedestrian to film viewer and found the atmosphere on both sides so alike.

Set in a Swedish suburb so dark and cold that barely anyone populates the evening landscapes, the film centres on 12-year-old Oskar, a victim of ritual schoolyard bullying who becomes close friends with Eli, a child vampire.

Vampire characters usually reside comfortably within the realm of fantasy horror, giving filmmakers the opportunity to explore melodramatic folklore and graphic violence, inflicting thrills and chills on a suspecting audience. Let the Right One In ignores that potential in favour of a more ‘social realism’ style of storytelling. Writer John Ajvide Lindqvist and director Tomas Alfredson are concerned with themes such as cruelty, loyalty and innocence as seen from the perspective of a pre-adolescent boy. At its heart, the film is a tender love story. There just happens to be a vampire involved.

Cinematography is key in creating the sense of intimacy needed. Soft light reduces shadow in many scenes, leaving room for Alfredson’s expressive shallow focus to draw the eye over wide shots to different points of interest over time. Slow camera movement gives us this time, enhancing the realism whilst playing with what we are allowed to see. None of these are obvious choices for a film that leans into the horror genre but they are what give it character and style.

The choreography of hands cannot be underestimated either. A constant visual motif throughout, they are used as a reliable means of discerning Oskar and Eli’s emotions.

As Alfredson explains ‘it’s very hard to lie with the hands’. The first time Eli touches Oskar is to take hold of his hand while insisting he hit back against the bullies. Later they communicate through the wall that separates their bedrooms using morse code to tap out messages.

As a powerful supernatural being, Eli offers Oskar strength and support. In return, Oskar gives Eli the chance to experience the things her condition has stolen from her – childhood and innocent love. They bond over a Rubik’s Cube, a puzzle that confuses Eli until Oskar tells her ‘Just twist it’ – an ironic instruction given the neck that Eli has broken in the previous scene to score her latest meal.

Perhaps the most successful use of the vampiric component of the story is its juxtaposition with the hard reality of bullying. While Eli is clearly tortured by her thirst for blood and the violence it necessitates (sobbing after each kill), Oskar’s tormentors choose to make his life a living freezing hell. Listening to the director/writer’s commentary on the DVD, it is clear whose evils the makers are more prone to forgive.

So considering the sympathetic portrayal of the film’s ‘monster’ and the plot’s revolution around love rather than gore, why was I so hyper-aware on my walk back through the night after leaving the cinema? Well, the weather certainly helped. Alfredson’s evocation of dark Scandinavian nights becomes easy to appreciate during Britain’s coldest winter for 30 years. Too cold for most people to bother going out in, it is easy to believe Eli and her helper Hakan can commit their gruesome deeds unnoticed on the fringes of populated areas. And it’s the fringes you have to navigate when your hilly northern town plonks its only cinema down in a location convenient only for cars to reach. It’s not ideal but, in the context of this particular experience, it’s perfect.