Past Misdeeds: The Pact (2012)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


The death of her abusive mother brings Nichole (Agnes Bruckner) back to the family home she and her sister Annie (Caity Lotz) thought to have left behind for good. Annie's even less happy with going back than Nichole, and only some fine sisterly pressure convinces her to return at all, and much later than Nichole does.

When Annie arrives "home", Nichole has disappeared into thin air after - as the audience knows - some rather disquieting things happening to her. Annie assumes Nichole, with her history of drug use and disappearing acts, has just fallen back into old habits, leaving her sister alone to deal with a house and a funeral she only thought of going to for her sister's sake, and her cousin Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins) to take care of her little daughter Eva (Dakota Bright).

But when Annie meets Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins) and her niece at her mother's funeral, she isn't quite as convinced of Nichole's disappearance having a comparatively harmless explanation anymore. Liz argues Nichole would never have left her daughter alone this way; after all she has turned her life around for her.
Because Annie is more than a bit freaked out about staying at her mother's place alone for another night, she invites Liz and Eva to stay the night with her. After dark, everyone is woken by strange noises, and now it is Liz's turn to disappear while Annie has an encounter with an invisible force that can only be explained by supernatural agency. She barely manages to get out of the house with Eva before whatever happened to Nichole and Liz can happen to her too.

When Annie goes to the police with her story, the part about poltergeist phenomena does not exactly improve her chances for being taken seriously about anything else she says. Only Bill Creek (Casper Van Dien), a cop who knew Nichole - and one suspects also knows something about the family history - is willing to actually listen to her. Creek isn't willing to believe in any of that spooky stuff, but at least, he's still taking Annie seriously enough to help her in the few ways actually in his power. However, if Annie wants to find out where her sister and her cousin went, and what is haunting her mother's house, she will have to do most of the investigating alone, with a messed-up sensitive named Stevie (Haley Hudson) she knows from her high school pointing the way. Annie might just find some terrible family secret hidden nearly in plain sight.

Say what you will about (or against) the last decade in horror movies, but it has - probably via the successes of Japanese cinema in this regard - brought about a minor renaissance in movies about hauntings and ghosts, some of which, like Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact, can stand their ground next to any movie in that particular sub-genre you'd care to mention.

The Pact is a brilliant example of a movie closely concentrated on creating a mood of dread and fear very close to the kind of fears I remember too well from my own childhood. The movie manages to create a feeling of tension even though it isn't a permanent barrage of Completely Shocking Things™. There are some truly shocking and some truly creepy things happening throughout the movie, but there's never the feeling any of them are in the movie because it needs to include a shock every ten minutes. Rather, everything here happens for a reason closely related to the film's plot and the film's mood, two elements as organically entwined as possible.

McCarthy's direction is very stylish (the Internet tells me of Argento but also Val Lewton productions as an influence, and I believe her in this case), yet he never gets too flashy. McCarthy instead opts to put his stylistic abilities exclusively into the service of creating the film's particular brand of tension. For most of the time, the camera glides through the cramped and claustrophobic spaces of Annie's mother's house, looking over Annie's shoulder, lingering on blackness and the place's quotidian and bleak interior until they become threatening in their near normality.

I also love how willing McCarthy (also responsible for the script) is to not outright state a lot of what is going on with his characters and their lives but to subtly show it through details of the interiors they move through and Caity Lotz's body language (insert gushing praise about Lotz's performance here). It's not that the film is vague about anything, The Pact is just not the kind of film feeling the need to spell everything out an attentive audience will understand in other ways.

It's all part of the film's overall spirit of tightness and concentration, virtues it doesn't even leave behind when its plot later on takes a turn towards a somewhat different type of horror film than it initially seemed to be, fortunately without doing the boring "look at this surprising twist!" routine. What could have been flabby and digressive in less capable hands feels organic and logical here.

Finally, it's also worth mentioning - seeing as this is a horror movie - how creepy the film is throughout, how successful The Pact is at combining Annie's struggle with her past (her own childhood fears), the idea that however horrible one's past was, there might always have been something more horrible lurking unseen just a (literally and metaphorically) thin wall apart, and the more general images of childhood fears it conjures up in pictures that seem archetypally effective - and willing to be strange if it suits the film - to me.


That, dear reader, means I was freaked out more than once during the course of The Pact, which is the sort of compliment I can't give many horror films.

Three Films Make A Post: A Campfire Legend of Flesh-Eating Terror!

Holidays (2016): This holiday (all the Western holidays, I’m still waiting on Christian Orthodox horror, Chanukah, and so on, and so forth, though thanks to Hong Kong we’ll never need to be without a Lunar New Year horror fi´lm) anthology starts off strong, with a first half of segments that are female-centric, weird as all get out (I have no words to describe Nicholas McCarthy’s Easter bit) in all the best ways and not as dumb as V/H/S style horror anthologies often are. After that, unfortunately, there comes a dreadful Kevin Smith thing, and two five minute jokes that sort of work but aren’t exactly the place you’d want to end a film. On the other hand, Sarah Adina Smith’s and Anthony Scott Burns’s pieces in the first half are so strong, it’d be worth watching the film for those two alone.

Retribution (1987): Guy Magar’s late 80s low budget horror about a depressed artist attempting suicide by jumping off a roof only to survive and add “astral body possession through burned to death gangster” to his list of problems is a bit of a frustrating affair. It’s a film that’s often too subtle and interested in its characters as relatable human beings instead of fodder for the killing scenes to be your typical piece of 80s horror, but on the other hand way too interested in your typical 80s horror nonsense (neon and disturbing haircuts and overlong gory kills) to work as the subtle and psychological horror film the other half of it attempts to be, ending up in an awkward half-way place. It’s too bad too, for there aren’t too many places elsewhere in 80s horror where you will find actual sympathy for (and a bit of a romantic idea of) the left behind and losers of this world, a competent yet empathic female psychiatrist who isn’t falling in love with her patient, and Dennis Lipscomb in a pretty great leading performance?

The Green Inferno (2013): This on the other hand is exactly what you’d expect from Eli Roth making a cannibal movie: it looks really nice, but is utterly thoughtless and vapid. It is of course the sort of stupid film that thinks it’s oh so clever and can’t help but grin smugly in your face. Unlike the Italian cannibal films, which at least came by their bad taste in an honest attempt to do the Roman circus thing, this is tasteless in that pointless sort of way I can only tolerate from three-year-olds playing with their own poo.

Some thoughts about At the Devil’s Door (2014)

aka Home

I’ve gone on record as a big admirer of director Nicholas McCarthy’s first feature, The Pact. However, I’m not as enamoured of this second film of his. It might be the use of particularly tired and tried out material in form of the rather en vogue demonic possession/Christian apocalypse mythology, it might be the film’s curious and interesting but not necessarily effective structure, or most probably a combination of both. So while I found myself appreciating McCarthy’s often highly artful direction, the way he often subverts suburban American values, I never actually felt sucked into the story as such, feeling kept at a distance to the story as well as its protagonists.

The clever shifting of protagonist identities doesn’t exactly help with the latter, and while the shift is certainly interesting and makes sense in the context of the story, it can’t help but distance a viewer further from characters that aren’t very deeply drawn anyway.’ For example, co-protagonist Leigh feels lonely and wants babies because she can’t have them, her artist sister Vera can have babies but distrusts all forms of closeness, probably some stuff to do with their dead parents but that’s really all the film ever tells our shows us about them. It’s particularly curious after a film like The Pact that was all about complex characterisation. What we learn of the characters does of course fit into the film’s argument against suburban values but also turns them into parts of an equation instead of something with breath and life (all efforts of some excellent actresses – men are of practically no import in the film at all – notwithstanding), an approach that actually reminds me of Kubrick, a director whose films – depth, craft and mastership notwithstanding – leave me utterly cold.

On the conceptual level, there’s a lot to appreciate here: the way the film plays pregnancy as the absolute worst thing for one of its characters certainly plays nicely with the assumed audience idea of how women are “supposed” to relate to children. Which might be another reason why I didn’t really connect with the film, because I personally don’t share these assumptions about “motherhood” at all. And, as I have mentioned previously, I think, my atheism does not really help me feeling creeped out by the whole “possessed by the devil”, “the number of the beast” angle. Though, after some consideration, I think it’s fair to say that the most conventional possession horror scenes are At the Devil’s Door’s weakest parts even if you don’t suffer from my specific handicap; they’re just too clichéd right now, like vampire sex or ticking bomb torture scenarios.

Having said all this, McCarthy does still demonstrate an incredible directing talent. Even though I didn’t like the distancing effect of the film’s narrative structure, he still handles it really well on a technical level. One also just has to praise McCarthy’s sense for meaningful scene setting, his use of deep focus as well as background details consciously out of focus, the gliding camera and the highly effective sound design. The more I think about it, the more I think the problem’s really with me and not with At the Devil’s Door. Oh well.

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On WTF: The Pact (2012)

One of the true pleasures in horror of the last decade or so for me has been a resurgence in tales of ghosts and hauntings. Sure, not all of these films are great, but regularly, one will stumble upon a fantastic example of the sub-genre.

Case in point is Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact. Click on through to my column on WTF-Film and hear me gush!

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