Three Films Make A Post: No safe space.

V/H/S/Beyond (2024): The much-vaunted pivot to SF horror changes nothing whatsoever about the principles of bro horror still followed by the VHS series. In fact, where S-VHS showed some ambition, this is mostly dire, over tuned nonsense by directors that have done much better work under different circumstances.

There’s no substance, no characters and no ideas in most of the segments, all of which play out like all VHS movie segments ever, without anything beyond an occasional cool monster design or bit of gore, or a rip-off of Tusk. The big exception is the final segment, Kate Siegel’s “Stowaway”. This one has cool effects ideas, but also an actual emotional core, a heart, and a sense of bitter irony that makes the gore crap that came before look even more creatively bankrupt.

Caught (2017): Jamie Patterson’s conjuration of the High Strange is a much more evocative piece of work than most of the VHS attempts at using it for horror. The film is tense, it is tight, and its British variation on the Men in Black trope uses the elements of this kind of encounter in a much more interesting and intelligent way than you’d at first expect. There’s gore here, as well, but there’s also the feeling of the main characters encountering something that isn’t totally comprehensible, as well as the realization that the something can’t comprehend them totally either.

The film also dares to go as weird and as emotionally brutal as it can afford, ending its version of a home invasion in a deservedly harsh manner.

Godforsaken (2020): For its first forty minutes or so, Ali Akbar Akbar Kamal’s POV horror film about what happens after a young woman in a Canadian small town comes back from the dead changed, transcends its amateurish acting by the effective way it handles the dread of a cosmic (or is it religious) revelation that shatters and changes people in ways which become increasingly creepy. There’s a wonderful sense of the small town community it is corrupting as well.

Unfortunately, the final act turns into disappointingly generic zombie business; the amateurish acting becomes an incessant cacophony of amateurish screeching.

The thing is, the earlier two thirds are so strong – the resurrection alone is worth your time – I’d still recommend anyone interested in existentialist or cosmicist horror to take a look at Godforsaken.

In short: Hush (2016)

After a bad break-up deaf mute – and no, happily the film’s not just using this as a gimmick - writer Maddie (Kate Siegel, who also co-wrote the film with her husband, director Mike Flanagan) has moved into the splendid isolation of a house in the woods. It’s not quite as out of the way as these houses often are in horror films: the nearest neighbours (Samantha Sloyan and Michael Trucco) are in walking distance, there’s working Wi-Fi, and even the police seems to be relatively close.

Nonetheless, Maddie soon finds herself in trouble. A serial killer (John Gallagher Jr.) wants to play home invasion with what must look like an easy victim to him; turns out the bastard just might have bitten off more than he can chew.

So, Mike Flanagan’s a bit of a great director, isn’t he? Leaving the supernatural elements of his earlier films behind, this one’s a splendid variation on the home invasion movie, though spiced up with more siege elements in the classic Carpenter (or classic-classic Hawks) style, and avoiding everything I dislike about most home invasion movies. So the subtext about the evil of poor people is replaced by some rather more interesting commentary about various kinds of isolation, the suburban yuppie vacuum protagonist by a deftly written author who is actually likeable, and the sub-genre’s love for sadism is replaced with less unpleasant yet sturdier thriller gestures.

That last point doesn’t mean Hush is a film that pulls its punches: Maddie and the other characters still go through a lot of horrible stuff but Flanagan has such a tight control over the material he reaches greater effect through being less sensationalist. This tightness is one of the film’s greatest strengths and feels very much like script and direction working in perfect concert at keeping things lean but never too lean. There’s something fearsomely effective about the handful of scenes the film uses to introduce Maddie, with no wasted line in the script, no wasted gesture in Siegel’s – rather fantastic – performance yet still the film avoids the impression of simplifying overmuch.

That’s really Hush in a nutshell: sharp writing that doesn’t need to make its characters stupid, and tight yet elegant direction meet excellent acting (Siegel’s opponent as portrayed by John Gallagher Jr. is nearly as impressive as she is, and stays threatening even though he’s never played as being superhuman) and turn the film into something which transform quite a few played-out tropes into something that feels alive again.