Three Films Make A Post: Seclusion. Seduction. Survival.

The Detained aka Deadly Detention (2017): Ah, detention horror, the more high-school-y sub-genre of the corridor runner. Well, usually, it is. In the case of Blair Hayes’s The Detained, the corridors our detained high school kids run up and down and forwards and backwards and around in, above or under belong to a closed-down prison, for their high school has been closed because of an opossum infestation. Yup, this is one of those films that excuses all sorts of lame (and perhaps a wee bit lazy) aspects of its script by being all ironic and shit. So the main characters aren’t walking and talking clichés but ironic walking and talking clichés. We all know the drill by now. Does the “irony” add anything to the film? Does it help uncover any interesting insights? Of course not. To be fair, I have seen much worse in ironic horror, and much worse corridor runners. At least, the acting is decent, about every tenth cheesy joke is actually funny, and the basic aspects of filmmaking are perfectly competent. Hooray?

Jackals (2017): Plotwise, Kevin Greutert’s 80s set movie about the members of a family and a deprogrammer having to fight off a siege by a group of rather creepy cult members from whom they’ve stolen the family’s son back, is a very sparse film. The characters aren’t terribly deep either, but they are brought to life by a fine cast – Deborah Kara Unger, Johnathon Schaech, Stephen Dorff among them – and Greutert has an eye for using character archetypes in just the right way for the kind of film this is. Visually, Jackals is very atmospheric, and there are quite a few clever little touches: the cult’s use of animal masks and Greutert’s tendency to shoot them in silhouette is a prime example of how to make your antagonists feel ever so slightly worse than human. The pacing is excellent, and while I hoped in vain for an escalation in the direction of the supernatural, the whole film is just a tight, exciting little package in the best low budget movie tradition. Why, I even liked the kicker ending!


Wendy and Lucy (2008): This Kelly Reichardt film featuring Michelle Williams and a dog named Lucy might be among the saddest films I have seen in a long time. Plot-wise, it’s not about much more than an impoverished woman and her dog stranding on their way to Alaska in some horrible little town, with little outwardly happening, and that slowly. In truth, it’s a film about a personal apocalypse, a life that has turned to a dead end without the woman living it having quite noticed it (or perhaps rather admitted to herself), a society that replaces kindness with an insistence on proper procedures, bureaucracy, and money, and can’t even imagine not filtering everything through the lenses of these things. It’s also a film about what it means to be poor in the western world today (well, 2008, and things haven’t exactly improved, have they?), and how the worst cruelty is inflicted on people by other people who probably can’t even see it. There’s also an absolutely horrifying encounter with a half-crazed man played by Larry Fessenden that puts further emphasis on the way poor women have it even worse. It all adds up to something so sad, filmed and acted with such care, words – my words at least – can’t really do the film justice.

Three Films Make A Post: He Was On the Side of Law and Order. He Was On the Side of Crime and Chaos. He Was On Any Side That Would Have Him.

Annabelle (2014): If you’re the potential audience for John R. Leonetti’s prequel to The Conjuring, you must have been burning to learn the origin story of that film’s evil doll. Here it is, and it’s all your fault, potential audience for Annabelle. The tragic thing, as with so many of these new mainstream horror films, is that this really isn’t a bad film as much as one that’s utterly lacking in personality and anything you might want to call an interesting idea. While most of what we see here is on a high technical level, my main impression while watching was a feeling of boredom, as if I had seen every fright scene here before in films that did the difficult work of making these scenes more than just short shocks, giving them meaning, resonance, or personality. But whenever the opportunity arises to put forth something more interesting than “boo!” and “waaa, demons!” (turns out “demons!” does not an interesting mythology make) Annabelle comes up with absolutely nothing, having its non-entities of main characters go through meaningless motions we all have seen before. In other words, there’s an absence here where a good – or even a more interesting mediocre – film carries stuff like themes and ideas, and little personality to make up for it.

Jessabelle (2014): In most aspects, Kevin Greutert’s Southern Gothic ghost story is much superior to Annabelle. Its main character (as played by Sarah Snook) has an actual personality, it takes place in a place and time that feels real enough, and it does make use of these mildly advanced elements of the filmmaking art like a theme, a coherent visual style. Why, most probably it even has an idea what kind of story it wants to tell.

Unfortunately, at least for me all these pleasant and worthwhile elements are completely let down by a supernatural element that is again just as generic as all get out, with none of the supernatural shenanigans an organic part of the film’s thematic concerns but the usual series of haunted appliances, a screaming woman ghost and so on. None of them feels like a stringent part of the film they appear in and the story its telling, and to my eyes are completely interchangeable with all other ghostly shenanigans in all other mainstream horror movies about ghosts. This leaves the rest of the film without the glue it needs to keep together as a whole. Things aren’t improved by a rather crappy ending either, but then, I’ve gotten so used to those, I’d probably still be positively surprised by Jessabelle if it had only understood that hauntings need to be specific and individual things or they lose all meaning.

Ouija (2014): Speaking of recent horror films that aren’t great, here’s Stiles White’s ultra-generic attempt at the old ouija board horror tale, a film I find only worth mentioning because it manages to avoid jump scare overkill as well as yet still does not contain a single memorable moment. Even if you can live with nothing going on intellectually under its hood at all (in fact, it feels as if the film is going out of its way to contain nothing anybody could confuse for a thought or – god help us! – an idea), there’s also the little problem that there’s really nothing creepy, atmospheric or disturbing about it. Which is a wee bit of a problem in a horror film, or so I’ve heard.

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