Horror

Don’t Breathe: He’s Just a Blind Guy. How Scary Can He Be?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dylan Minnette and Jane Levy are in over their head in the thriller "Don't Breathe"

At one point in Jurassic Park, Sam Neill attempts to evade a T-rex by hiding in plain sight. His theory—supported by years of paleontologic research—is that the dinosaur’s visual acuity is based on movement, so it won’t detect him if he stands stock still. It’s a riveting scene (most scenes in Jurassic Park are), forgoing the kineticism of the typical chase (“must go faster”) in favor of terrifying immobility. Don’t Breathe, the taut and accomplished new chiller from Fede Alvarez, essentially extends this concept to feature-length. It’s a horror movie that bottles the genre’s rushing adrenaline and redirects it inward; here, rather than running away, the only way the characters can escape the monster is by being very, very quiet.

That monster—the film’s tyrannosaur, if you will—is Stephen Lang, the grizzled television actor who briefly lit up the big screen in 2009, with colorful parts in Public Enemies, The Men Who Stare at Goats, and (most memorably) Avatar. In the latter, he played a bloodthirsty warmonger named Miles Quaritch; his heavy in Don’t Breathe makes Quaritch seem positively pacifistic. Here, he portrays an unnamed, solitary Iraq war veteran who owns a modest two-story home, a surly rottweiler, and an even surlier disposition. As soon as you see him in the cold open dragging a bloody body down a deserted street—an ill-advised flash-forward that dilutes the movie’s considerable tension—you can see the darkness in his soul. Read More

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The Conjuring 2: The Kids Are All Right, Until the Demon Shows Up

Jeremy BeckReviews
Vera Farmiga is haunted by demons in "The Conjuring 2"

Everything undead is alive again in The Conjuring 2, a skillfully constructed dispensary of the heebie-jeebies. Directed by the 21st century’s preeminent purveyor of nightmares, James Wan (Saw, Insidious), it’s a methodical exercise in modern horror, with all of the required elements: a haunted house, a possessed child, jolt-scares, intrepid investigators, and shadowy things that go bump in the night. There’s not a whole lot new to see in this dark, foreboding film, but in horror, familiarity can breed fear as well as contempt. When coming face-to-face with The Conjuring 2‘s predictability, you may be inclined to roll your eyes, but then, you may be too afraid to open them in the first place.

The original Conjuring didn’t reboot the horror genre so much as reinvigorate it, reminding viewers that scary movies can be patient and legitimately disturbing rather than just loud and schlocky. It also demonstrated just how effective a director Wan can be. Having traded in the vulgar sadism of Saw for something more contemplative, he proved to be a master of the slow build, wringing tension from ostensibly mundane images and objects. The Conjuring was horror as negative space, turning the absence of incident into its own clammy terror. By the time Lili Taylor chose to play a seemingly innocent game called “hide and clap” with her young son, I practically needed a ventilator. Read More

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The Witch: A Puritanical Walk in the Wicked Woods

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in "The Witch"

Early in The Witch, Robert Eggers’s sly and skillful horror film, a man goes hunting with his 12-year-old son. They’re searching for game in the midst of a dark, ominous wood, but they also find time for some standard-issue father-son bonding. Only it isn’t quite standard-issue; when the man, William (Ralph Ineson), cautions the boy, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), against the dangers of sleeping too late, he solemnly intones, “The devil holds fast your eyelids.” That delectable piece of diction encapsulates The Witch‘s dual preoccupations. It’s a movie about the danger of religious fervor, but it’s also about communication—what people say (and don’t say), and, more importantly, how they say it. As the adage goes, the devil is in the dialogue.

The Witch, which takes place in the 17th century, purports to base its tale of literal and allegorical horror on actual period sources. To that end, the characters speak largely in early-modern English, which means there are a great many thous, haths, and dosts. (Even the film’s marketing materials get in on the act, treating the title’s W as consecutive V’s.) This requires a small act of translation on the part of the audience—not unlike when listening to Shakespeare, you have to actively puzzle out the characters’ speech, rather than simply absorbing it. This assumes that you can hear it; the film’s sound design picks up the rustling of branches and the bleating of animals, often compelling you to strain your ears to comprehend every flavorful morsel of colonial argot. Read More

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Crimson Peak: A Haunted House, Bleeding and Beautiful

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mia Wasikowska enters a haunted house in Guillermo del Toro's "Crimson Peak"

Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak is a frivolous, ravishing movie that invites a referendum on the very pleasures of moviegoing. This frustrating and satisfying film, which del Toro directed from a script he wrote with Matthew Robbins, is destined to divide audiences, not because it will elicit disputes over its quality, but because appreciation of it hinges entirely on the vagaries of subjective taste. Narrative purists who prioritize plotting and screenwriting above all else will doubtless be vexed by the clumsiness of its dialogue and the banality of its story. Formalists, however, will take rapture in its splendorous visuals and in the lush refinement of del Toro’s craft. It is, in binary terms, either a terrible good movie or a magnificent bad movie.

Let’s begin with the bad. From a storytelling standpoint, Crimson Peak is disappointingly rote, if not entirely dull. Set aside its fantastical prologue—in which a child is visited by the ghost of her newly dead mother, a black phantasm with spindly fingers who whispers gravely, “Beware of Crimson Peak”—and you might mistake it for a lavish period costume drama (if admittedly the first costume drama ever to take place in Buffalo). The year is 1891, and the object of attraction is the amusingly named Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska, persuasive as ever), the peculiar daughter of a pompous aristocrat, Carter (Deadwood‘s Jim Beaver). Edith is a bit like Cinderella without the wicked stepsiblings; she is mocked by the gentry for her oddness, even though she does draw the admiration of a handsome doctor (Charlie Hunnam, who headlined del Toro’s Pacific Rim). A classic Jane Austen heroine, Edith is unlucky in love but spirited in life, and she brazenly channels her energy into the masculine pursuit of fiction writing. Read More

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The Visit: Nice to Meet You, Grandma. Could You Put Down the Knife?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Grandma goes crazy in M. Night Shyamalan's "The Visit"

The Visit, a chintzy tale of low-budget horror, is the best movie M. Night Shyamalan has made in over a decade. This, of course, is hardly extravagant praise. But while Shyamalan, the cinematic-wunderkind-turned-critical-punching-bag, has helmed his share of recent misfires, those failings suffered less from a lack of artistic talent than a poor sense of scale. Certainly, his recent output—Lady in the Water, The Happening, After Earth—could charitably be deemed “not good”, but all three of those films had their minor virtues, particularly their director’s gift for nifty camerawork and provocative imagery. (Even the misbegotten Last Airbender had one good scene.) The problem was that Shyamalan didn’t want these movies to be good; he wanted them to be great, to be revolutionary, to capture the zeitgeist. Sadly, his clumsy storytelling dashed those hopes, and when you added his ham-fisted dialogue into the mix, the laughable writing masked the visual artistry. Shyamalan’s recent films didn’t fall short of greatness so much as they fell off a cliff.

The Visit is not a great movie (not even close), but the key to its relative success is that it doesn’t want to be great. This is a slender, modestly mounted fright flick—sometimes scary, sometimes funny, frequently ridiculous—and its lack of ambition frees it from the shackles of grandiosity. That in turn gives Shyamalan greater freedom to flex his filmmaking muscle, which he does with aplomb, repeatedly delivering memorable set pieces and exquisite framing. He’s always been good at that stuff, but here he hasn’t weighed himself down with a ponderous storyline, making this the first time he’s ever seemed relaxed. Read More

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