10th August 2009

Eight Unsung Horror Films Of the 21st Century

So, ten years of new talent at FrightFest, some of which they and we have fostered and watched grow into vibrant screen talents – directors and screenwriters and producers -- of which the genre has been so rightly proud since the year 2000: Chris Smith, Adam Green, Joe Lynch, Ti West, Simon Rumley, James Moran, Chris Sivertson, Dave Payne…the list is as long as is it reassuring. Theirs are films to be, and ones which are, rightly celebrated; as good an indication as any of why we should be happy and proud of FrightFest and everything it propagates and stands for within our industry.

Amen.

But for every ‘Hatchet’, ‘Wrong Turn 2’ and ‘Severance’, pictures embraced by horror fans and the public at large, there are those which somehow slip by. They slip by the audiences for which stuff like the ‘Saw’ franchise is catnip and they slip by us. By us, I mean the committed horror fan, the fan whose best endeavours are often undone by simply too much of the aforementioned catnip and its millions of dollars of marketing money for us to be able to wade through and finally find those elusive blood red gemstones.

This list is not eight films that are definitive, exhaustive of everything released in the last decade, and it is certainly not eight films representative of anything that hasn’t been released in the last decade (and there a myriad examples of these, sadly, most which I am unable to expand upon). It is eight films, unsung, for whatever reason, be it exposure, apathy or simple disparity of taste in your humble correspondent, in the years since FrightFest opened its soiled, blood-caked doors to the fear-hungry sadists of the general public. That’s you. And me.

Devin Faraci, in a recent, typically incisive piece at the excellent chud.com:

http://www.chud.com/articles/articles/19627/1/CHUD-QUICK-LIST-6-REASONS-WHY-HORROR-FANS-MAKE-THE-BEST-FILM-FANS/Page1.html

noted that horror fans represent the best type of fans, precisely because of their embracing of the odd, the eccentric, the different and the “other”. At a time when even ‘arthouse’ cinema is struggling against a subtitled-phobic public in finding its breakout hits, this openness is a testament to the horror community’s passion and indicative of their commitment to plain decent, honest filmmaking, marginal or compromised as it may be by either budget or industry indifference.

(As a caveat, the lack of foreign language titles in this list isn’t the pessimism (or negligence on my part!) it might seem: it’s simply because, buoyed by the likes of Park, Haneke, Nakata, Miike, Aja, Balaguero, Plaza and their illustrious peers, 21st century foreign-language genre titles have, over last decade, enjoyed celebration and success as unexpectedly wide-reaching as it has been welcome. I could, however, just as easily have compiled a list comprising ‘Into the Mirror’, most of ‘6 Stories To Keep You Awake’ series, ‘Running On Karma’, ‘Kairo’, ‘Kontroll’, ‘Rojo Sangre’, ‘Sexy Killer’. ‘Romasanta’, and ‘Forklift Driver Klaus’…this last one is completely and utterly awe inspiring.)

'The Woods’: I recently discussed the faint irony of Lucky McKee’s name when it came to his burgeoning filmmaking career. After the strong and lauded ‘May’, he hit a stumbling block with this equally robust follow-up, which had initially been in a legal tussle to protect its title against the challenge from a film that became known to the world as M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Village’, a picture vastly inferior to McKee’s lyrical, bucolic gem.

Clutching the dark, delinquent and very disparate spells of ‘Suspiria’, ‘Black Narcissus’ and, yes, ‘Reform School Girls’ to its quite remarkable heart, this beautiful widescreen chiller follows the travails of the misfit Heather as she begins a new life at an unconventional public girls’ school deep in the titular woods. These woods, it transpires, have played host for over a hundred years to a coven of witches. Which is never a good thing.

Boasting vivacious performances, not least from Patricia Clarkson (who’ll pop up again in this list) as the sensual and foreboding headmistress, and sharing, with Mike Mendez’s terrific ‘The Convent’, a canny and iconic appreciation of the delicately charged girl group ditties of Lesley Gore, it’s a picture of huge atmosphere, genuine unease and sensitive, stylish cinema craft.

It also features the best use of Bruce Campbell since Sam Raimi took his friends to, as fate would have it, the woods. Not for McKee the galling hyuck-hyuck persona in which this irony-clad folk hero of modern horror has clothed himself. As Heather’s down-trodden but sincere and dignified father, McKee allows Campbell to demonstrate a wonderful capability for pure, rather charming, character acting. Would that many more directors do the same as this performer seasons very nicely indeed in his advancing years. Anything to avoid ‘My Name Is Still Bruce’.

‘The Roost’: Ti West's tautly constructed picture is a grim tale of endurance and hordes of winged beasties, bookended by a kitsch, pitch-perfect Tom Noonan in a recall of a 50s-style horror host with sinister bite. With stunning sound design that renders moments seriously unnerving and with a deceptive pace that’s by turns absurd, chilling and thrillingly tense, it's a ferociously strong first film from West. Perhaps that’s no surprise since, aside from West’s innate cinematic sense, the film was shepherded to the screen by the great and hugely experienced Larry Fessenden (see below), and the dark, throwback thrills are exactly how those of a certain age used to imagine grungy horror pictures to be just before the age they were allowed to see them. Fresh, lean and packed with genuine dread, this immaculately scored creature feature is modest, single-minded and obviously shot very cheaply yet is still one of the finest debut pictures to ever play Frightfest.

‘Cherry Falls’: A slight cheat by a few months this one, I think, but since no list of this sort seems complete without some kind of passionate ‘slasher apologism’ and Adam Green’s ‘Hatchet’ has been so widely acclaimed as to be rightfully ineligible for this list, it falls to me to find a suitably overlooked substitute in a sub-genre which, second only to tort**e p*rn, has resiliently endeared itself to mainstream audiences. It was either this or ‘Carver’. Or ‘Scream Bloody Murder’. Or ‘Sickle’….

Geoffrey Wright is a filmmaker whose curious lack of mainstream success might be attributable to anything else except his demonstrable vibrancy of vision and wicked sense of mayhem, two facets so finely exhibited in the unforgettable ‘Romper Stomper’, his contemporary retelling of ‘Macbeth’ (with ‘Terminator Salvation’ star Sam Worthington) and this late entry in the post-modern, and more importantly post-‘Scream’ slasher stakes. Ironically, it’s a picture whose heart is more firmly rooted in the 1980s than many of the snarky stalker films that came in the immediate wake of Kevin Williamson’s sharp-witted paean to the potential perils of pop-culture promiscuity.

With a smart cast of plucky, relatively known genre names -- Brittany Murphy, Jay Mohr and Michael Beihn -- and a shameless nerve that only begins with that wisecrack title, it’s less a deconstruction of the genre than a brutal Larry Cohen-esque satire of an entire era, complete with the most wonderfully insane resolution to a murder-mystery plot since ‘Sleepaway Camp’.

‘Wendigo’: Larry Fessenden is a force to be reckoned with. From his own micro-budget beginnings in sharp, philosophically minded, Casavettes-inspired horrors like ‘Habit’ and ‘No Telling’ (two contemporary New York takes on classic horror paradigms, vampire and Frankenstein, which are as much festering visions of a literal Hell’s Kitchen as Abel Ferrara’s ‘Driller Killer’ and ‘The Addiction’) to his fostering of new talents like Ti Wet and Greg Mc, his economy of vision and commitment to a simple, evocative ideas is both masterful and inspirational.

‘Wendigo’ sees Jake Weber, wife Patricia Clarkson and son Erik Per Sullivan -- the wonderfully odd looking young chap from ‘Malcolm In The Middle’ who seems like he’ll grow up to be another Jackie Earle Haley -- holidaying in snow-blown upstate New York where, legend has it, a mythical Wendigo (a beast that’s part deer, part forest and all ferociousness) lurks.

As Clive Barker and Bernard Rose did with short story ‘The Forbidden’ and its cinematic adaptation ‘Candyman’ a decade earlier, Fessenden delves into the very heart of horror, the myth of folklore, the iconoclasm of fear, and asks what it takes for that icon, be it beast or bogeyman, to survive in a modern age where everything is accessible, knowledge is a mouse-click away and fear and superstition have been dispelled by reason, rationale, technology and science. Out in these wintery wilds, there is none of the latter two products of modern civilisation on which to rely. The journey that follows, complete with a terrific Quay Brothers /Jan Svankmeyer-style stop-motion monster, is as neat and nihilistic as anything from Val Lewton’s glory days as a producer at RKO.

‘Dead End’: a tempestuous family in a car on their way to grandma’s for Christmas Day, at night, on a road that never seems to end. One by one, they disappear. Come the climax, it’s a story that’s been told a time or two (once again even, of sorts, in this very list). But the fiendish simplicity with which French filmmakers Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa set their film up, construct their characters and the genuinely palpable sense of dread in many of the set piece scares is something supremely satisfying in this age of tepid, drawn out suspense and cacophonous, f/x heavy punchlines.

Like all of the best independent horror, its lack of budget can’t affect a sharp, deeply affectionate yarn anchored by terrific performances of characters shot through with smart mouths and withering personal relationships. Each time someone dies, it’s a personality, not simply an actor who kicks that particular bucket with such sadistic glee. Genre favourites Ray Wise and Lyn Shaye excel as the parents with the hilariously pestilent relationship and right up until the admittedly familiar close-out, it’s a terrifically paced and truly anxiety-filled ride.

‘The Gravedancers’: Mike Mendez’s first two pictures were pure entertainment: the hyper-kinetic, neon outrageousness of ‘The Convent’ was an excuse to tell great dick jokes, tool Adrienne Barbeau up with a righteously blazing shotgun and play Lesley Gore to really sublime effect; while the punk-grunge of ‘Killers’ was an excuse to make terrific use of Iron Butterfly’s ‘In A Gadda Da Vida’ in the guise of a pretty lean and mean home invasion thriller.

With ‘The Gravedancers’, though, Mendez stepped up as a filmmaker to both watch and eagerly anticipate as well as have enormous amounts of fun with. While suffering from similar deficiencies of script as parts of his previous films and a misjudged final onslaught of middling CGI, Mendez takes this archetypical tale of paranormal investigators unearthing a rather obnoxious spook and, with just a nominal budget at his disposal, creates some authentically terrifying sequences of inspired suspense and horror.

A barrage of cunningly orchestrated sound and vision, ‘The Gravedancers’ feels, for an independent film gone straight to DVD, legitimately cinematic. Mendez not only draws upon the expected ‘Poltergeist’, ‘The Haunting’ and the vastly underrated ‘Legend Of Hell House’ (not to mention Kevin S. Tenney’s guilty pleasure ‘Witchtrap’), but he taps into the diabolically suspenseful ‘ticking clock’ device so famously used in ‘Curse Of The Demon’, and this year by Sam Raimi in ‘Drag Me To Hell’. Indeed, Mendez has delighted in making a picture that’s so packed with energy and vitality, it’s a spiritual cousin to the ‘Evil Dead’ director’s brand of gleeful mayhem.

‘The Lost’: Even disregarding ‘May’ or ‘The Woods’, as a producer, Lucky McKee more than proved his artistic smarts, and proved his nose for new talent when he acted as godfather to his regular editor Chris Sivertson’s first picture as director with ‘The Lost’. Despite faltering with his follow-up, the Lindsey Lohan oddity “I Know Who Killed Me” (memorably and expertly defended by Frighfester Alex Kidd as, in fact, a sleazy giallo throwback) Severtson hit a home ruin out of the gate with his powerful debut.

It’s a picture -- from a Jack Ketchum novel about an unhinged would-be stud/rebel whose life suddenly unravels in a spring-loaded spiral of reckless, incomprehensible violence -- which raised the bar for McKee, his peers and any up and coming indie tyro to uncompromising levels of audacity.

With its rapturous, roving camerawork and vigorous improvisational acting style, ‘The Lost’ is remorseless puck rock picture-making in the key of Altman and Scorsese. Its meticulously pitched insouciance is everything Matthew Bright and Chuck Pirello’s comparatively vapid serial killer shockers are too concerned with post-modern quirk and easy sleaze to contemplate. Mark Senter leads an intrepid cast of little-to-unknowns who sear the screen with their raw energy and astonishing immediacy. This immediacy of the casual sadist is far more disturbing than any makeshift marquee murderer, something Sivertson and his creative team understand the terrifying ramifications of all too well. The result is one of the most unsettling depictions of youthful ennui to grace the screen since ‘Badlands’: ‘Natural Born Killers’ be damned.

‘Skeleton Key’: the only studio horror picture on the list and one which receives short shrift for, I believe, one reason: Ehren Kruger. A maverick scribe and motivational success story for aspiring writers when his first script became the acclaimed ‘Arlington Road’, Kruger saw blots form on his copybook with the (wrongly) perceived derivative post-Tarantino/Scot Rosenberg of ‘Reindeer Games’ and the bland westernising of ‘The Ring’ and its admittedly rather limp sequel. It’s a point of view compounded by for-hire jobs on the bland ‘Blood & Chocolate’ and declining series instalments of ‘Scream’ and more recently ‘Transformers’. While not the Brett Ratner of genre screenwriting, he’s perhaps the Peter Hayams: dependable, structurally sound and roundly obvious.

But then nestling in the midst of these, there’s this little number.

True, cries of further derivativeness are likely to go undefended here, as a number of supernatural touchstones make up this peculiarly spicy southern gumbo. ‘I Walked With A Zombie’ is mashed up alongside ‘Angel Heart’ and ‘Night Of The Eagle’ then sprinkled with a heady blend of William M. Gaines’ spicy E.C. guignol and sadistic irony. It’s put together with the lustre of a Freddie Francis Hammer pot boiler, which is perhaps no surprise seeing as, at the helm is a British director, Iain Softley, a normally sensitive director of character pieces, here using none of the idiosyncratic poetry directors like Neil Jordan or Alan Parker have brought to Brit-in-Hollywood genre assignments. No, this here is full-bloodied nonsense of the most absurdly entertaining and luridly gothic variety, brought to life by, importantly, actors who, if they don’t give a damn, are charismatic enough that it doesn’t show through the creaks and cracks of the doom laden tale.

Dark Castle pictures (until their upcoming future camp cult jaw-dropper ‘Orphan’), have their eyes only nominally on twisted horror, more often betraying the cartoonish satirical playground of a middle-American audience-friendly franchise filled with mostly cheap scares; short on character and atmosphere and long on narrative convolution and splattery punchlines. ‘Skeleton Key’, though, while ostensibly cut from the same cloth (Dark Castle’s ‘The Reaping’ follows a similar narrative trajectory, substituting acts of God for acts of voodoo) plays its tale of a desperately bed-ridden plantation owner (John Hurt), his wife (Gina Rowlands), lawyer (Peter Sarsgaard) and his perky new nurse (Kate Hudson) for the most part as pure weird atmosphere and colloquial unease. There’s little levity as Hudson’s is inexorably drawn into the fetid grey mists of this Louisiana bayou and its tragic history, cut off from salvation at each turn of the narrative screw until an ending so wickedly simple and inevitable and diabolical, you can almost forgive the head-slapping multiple convolutions of the entire enterprise.

Where something like ‘Gothika’ just proved to be a brash, glossy, Hollywood whodunit, ‘Skeleton Key’ is a grim bird indeed: convincingly constructed and devilishly committed to its duplicitous dénouement.

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