Hello! Happy Halloween… well… I’m writing this on the night itself, so you probably won’t read it until at least the day after…. hey ho. I’d been hoping to do another Halloween Marathon this year, but life, as the saying goes, gets in the way sometimes. This month we had my very much non-horror-loving Mum staying over for a bit and on top of that, we have been plagued with illness. It’s been a carnival of coughing, a festival of fevers, a theatre of, um, thickness. In fact, given some of the Cronengbergian body horror here, scary movies have been somewhat surplus to requirements.
First, I got T-boned by a kidney problem which put me on my back for much of September and early October, then Mrs GG contracted the dreaded Covid, at which point I managed to detach the top of my thumb with a kitchen knife while preparing her a meal, and then with the dull inevitability of another Tory leadership contest, I too caught a dose of the Coronavirus. I don’t know about you, but despite the fact that the media aren’t paying it much heed (understandably given the cheap Channel Five soap opera that is British politics at the moment), it seems to me that we might be heading for another lockdown.
Anyway, suffice it to say, there have been one or two barriers to enjoying some horror so far this month. Despite that, lovely readers, I do have a few reviews for you.
So far, we’ve enjoyed (to varying degrees):
- Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
- Men (2022)
- The Blair Witch Project (1999)
- REC (2007)
- REC 2 (2009)
- Dolores Claiborne (1995)
- Friday 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
- Event Horizon (1997)
- Triangle (2009)
- The Devil’s Advocate (1997)
I’m going to race through these as if a season-appropriate nutcase in a mask was chasing me, but having spent a lot of time in my sick bed recently reading other sites’ Halloween recommendations, I’m hoping that you’ll at least find something different here.
I will also spread these out for you across a few separate posts, starting tonight with the first two movies on the list… one of which I enjoyed a great deal.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, despite being 15 rated in the UK, is just scary enough that tweens and teens are likely to get more from it than adults. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s not going to keep you awake at night. At the time of writing, you can find this on BBC iPlayer in the UK.
It centres around the neat concept of a book that reads you, written originally by an abused child whose vengeful ghost now stalks the gang of young protagonists. What that means in practice is that their nightmares come to life, not unlike the premise of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but with considerably less gore.
This is a film with a fantastic pedigree, directed by André Øvredal who made the excellent Troll Hunter in 2010 as well as The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016). The former is bags of fun, the second is genuinely unsettling, and either one would be a fantastic watch at this time of year. On top of that, Guillermo Del Toro has a writing credit on Scary Stories… he’s horror royalty at this point.
Being critical, one has to admit that the monster confrontations ultimately all come down to being chased down a hallway… but then many a good nightmare boils down to that. It’s one of the most fun movies we’ve seen this year, akin to something like Trick ‘r’ Treat or maybe one of the Conjuring-type movies. A ghost train, then. Ideal for Halloween, really.
Men was a disappointment. A big disappointment. Alex Garland is hit-and-miss for me as a director. His standout work for me – by far – is Annihilation (2018), which tilts into Lovecraftian SF horror successfully and demands a rewatch. Ex Machina was good but predictable and Devs ultimately disappeared up its own metaphysical fundament. That’s a sense of final disappointment that Men shares. Frankly, I’m not sure this is a project that Garland – or any man – should have taken on.
It has promise as a ‘me too’ horror movie and has an exceptional cast in Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear. As well as the men of the title, it deals with similar themes to the excellent The Night House (2020). Both films feature exceptional female leads who should be much bigger stars at this point. It’s frustrating that they’re not and similarly frustrating that when you have an actor of Buckley’s calibre in a film dealing with these themes, she’s not given more to do.
The gimmick of the movie (given away in the trailers) is that after Buckley’s character flees a traumatic event at home, all the males in her holiday village are played by Kinnear, the fair implication being that we men are fundamentally all the same and all pose a threat to women, consciously or otherwise. It’s the Atwood thing again: “men are scared that women will laugh at them, women are scared that men will kill them.”
That’s a concept that someone like Atwood can explore brilliantly. It’s a concept that bands like IDLES and singers like Courtney Barnett have directly referenced in their songs. Here, it becomes a ham-fisted excuse for a sub-par episode of League of Gentleman with a frankly ridiculous attempt at gross-out gore in the climax. It’s easily Garland’s worst film.
The worst offence though (and I’m far from the only reviewer to say this, but it bears repeating) is that if you’re trying to deal with the inherent horror of men and their (intentional or unintentional) violence, then the female protagonist needs to be the loudest, clearest voice in the story. Especially if you’re casting an actor with the cachet of Buckley. I’ll be reviewing The Devil’s Advocate later in this series, and it’s not a great film either, really, but it works best when the horror is sold through Charlize Theron’s performance in that film. Here, throughout the climax, Buckley just stands watching as the Kinnear monster does its (ridiculous) thing. She’s literally given nothing to do. Where Theron becomes an audience surrogate, Buckley (the protagonist, for heaven’s sake) feels like a bit player. In other words, in a film about the horror of men, the men completely dominate and the woman is essentially forgotten about. It’s embarrassing.
Some of the early scenes show promise, although one which could have been particularly good is undercut by some truly woeful CGI.
That’s all for now folks… come back tomorrow for some found footage horror of varying vintage. Cheerio!
