In short: We Need to Do Something (2021)

During a tornado warning, a family – mother Diane (Vinessa Shaw), father Robert (Pat Healy), teenage daughter Melissa (Sierra McCormick) and younger son Bobby (John James Cronin) – shelter from the storm in their big bathroom. In this sort of situation, family tensions do tend to escalate. It certainly isn’t helping that mom and dad are in one of those she cheats/he’s a prick kind of moments in their relationship, nor that Melissa seems particularly desperate about the health of her girlfriend Amy (Lisette Alexis). However, there’s worse things than being huddled up together with people one is supposed to get along with but doesn’t: quickly, the family are locked in by a fallen tree. They find themselves stranded in their bathroom for much longer than they reasonably should be, long enough that cannibalism might become something to talk about. It seems there’s something worse going on than a storm and its aftermath, with some thing sneaking around the periphery. And what’s with the flashbacks Melissa has to her teen romance with Amy?

If you wanted to be facetious, you might say Sean King O’Grady’s We Need to Do Something (with an excellent script by Max Booth III based on his own novella) is the best horror film about a family locked into their own bathroom ever made, a new highlight in bathroom films, even. However, the film has rather a lot more going for it than just this set-up, and turns out to be a bit of a tour de force through family problems, witchcraft, guilt, and what may or may not be a Weird apocalypse.

Tonally, there’s certainly a very dark, sardonic sense of humour on display, something that’s twisted and wry at the same time. The humour is never used as comic relief, but rather the opposite, a way to intensify and escalate the family catastrophe on display, as well as a method to help turn the circumstances our protagonists encounter stranger and more discomforting. There’s a finely drawn sense of ever increasing doom surrounding the family, the sense of forces from the outside pushing them just long and hard enough to tease out their inner weaknesses and lies, yet also twisting them and making them larger and less familiar than they should be.

The acting ensemble really gets into the very specific tone needed, grounding the increasing derangement on display in something that feels natural and real (not necessarily pleasant and easy, of course), so that the film’s stranger moments hit all the harder.

We Need to Do Something is, apparently, one of those films particularly not for everyone. I suspect its tone simply will not work for everyone (which seems perfectly alright to me), nor will its approach to ambiguity and resolutions make everybody happy. Me, I felt rather at home here, or as at home as the circumstances portrayed allow.

In short: Carnage Park (2016)

A very bad day at the small town bank trying to get life-saving money out of an ass turns even worse for farmer’s daughter Vivian (Ashley Bell) when she is taken hostage by Tarantino wash-out gangster “Scorpion” Joe Clay (James Landry Hébert). Joe Clay’s day then gets even worse – though much shorter - than hers when his partner dies from wounds incurred during their little bank heist and he ends up driving them right into the territory of a Vietnam vet serial killer (Pat Healy) with a rifle and a nasty streak.

Of course, it’s Vivian who will have to survive a series of chases and fights against the madman, through the desert, the kind of ramshackle huts all movie killers love, as well as some really unhealthy looking mines. Fortunately, she will turn out to be rather tougher than she looks.

All of the movies of director Mickey Keating seem to be made with a pretty specific model of a different genre and period style in mind. In Carnage Park’s case, we are quite obviously in the land of 70s exploitation horror cinema. Keating, despite production design quite in the proper grimy style, and using a digital colour scheme meant to evoke the yellowing prints many of us have watched movies of the era in, is not a mere imitator either here or in any of his films, always using elements, details in the characterization, and so on that ground his films very much in the decade they are made in instead of going for exclusive retro cool.

Keating’s editing style is certainly of our time, his use of cross-cutting to short flashbacks pretty much the opposite of period approaches to storytelling, his editing making the film’s pacing much faster than typical of the 70s. To my eyes, rather than being retro, the film seems to create a sort of dream-version of 70s horror that mixes some of the best of that decade’s style with some of the best of today’s.


Carnage Park is certainly one of the director’s less abstract movies, really going all-out in telling a traditionally exciting tale, using some of the somewhat psychedelic visual tricks for exploring his female protagonist’s inner life that seem central to his other films, but ending up with a rather more straightforward suspense piece than one might expect going in. That’s not a criticism, mind you, for while I do like my abstract arthouse horror, a rather well-done exercise in suspense by a director usually tending to abstract arthouse horror is a nice thing, too. Particularly since Keating turns out to be rather good at this sort of thing too, adding a more direct sense of tension his other movies tend to lack. Why, he even makes a climax that’s mostly taking place in the dark work as much more than a statement of intent.

The Innkeepers (2011)

A hotel with the quaint name of "Yankee Pedlar Inn" is in the final week of its existence. Businesswise, there's nothing at all happening, so Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy), the place's two remaining employees (its boss is using his ill-gotten gains for a holiday) look forward to a quiet and boring time, which is the thing you want when you have to sleep at your place of work for its closing down, and you'd really rather play around hunting the hotel's ghosts you don't actually believe in.

The hotel's only guests are a cranky mother (Alison Bartlett) and her little son (Jake Ryan), an old man (George Riddle) wanting to sleep in the honeymoon suite for reasons of nostalgia, and the former TV actress Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis), so there's enough time and space for Claire and Luke to try and make contact with the hotel's resident ghost. Luke, who is more into the whole ghost hunting thing, or at least more experienced at it, has already encountered the ghost before, but during the course of the following nights, it will be Claire who is most determined to meet the dead.

Alas, as M.R. James taught, encountering a ghost can have dire consequences.

Last time I wrote about a film by Ti West I was more than just a bit exasperated by the director's seeming unwillingness to use his clearly great talents as a filmmaker for anything more than a piece of retro horror so retro it even copied all of the flaws of the films it imitated, instead of making the great Ti West movie he obviously had in him.

I'm happy to report this criticism doesn't apply at all to The Innkeepers. While the film is informed by a knowledge and love for older horror movies and ghost stories, it's not a slave to that knowledge and love, and instead uses them as a foundation on which to build something all its own, really turning it into the Ti West movie - that is, a film giving expression to a personal philosophy and style - I had hoped for.

This doesn't mean that West leaves behind everything he did before stylistically. As the director's earlier films, The Innkeepers is putting its narrative emphasis firmly on mood and characterisation, telling its story in a slow and deliberate way that is the complete opposite of the way ninety percent of modern horror movies tell their stories. I'm sure quite a few people will be bored by the film; I'm just as sure these people are missing out on one of the best ghost stories not filmed in Japan.

For West really is so, so good at creating mood. At first, the film stays tonally so light it could easily turn into an outright comedy (of the mid-brow indie type), but slowly, in ways expected and unexpected, the hotel and the things we see, those we nearly see, and those we only expect to see (not to speak of the things we hear - the film's sound design is decidedly clever), come together to create a mood first of tension, then of outright dread, until the film culminates in a climax that is as consequent (as in destiny) as it is ambiguous. Even though all the clues to understanding what's going on are in the film (which of course does not hinder certain types of viewer from not understanding because the exposition fairy didn't come and puke into their faces), there's still a lingering feeling of the inexplicable left after all is said and done, something, I'd argue, more horror films should try to produce.

I'm still not completely done swooning, for The Innkeepers does not just showcase West's technical perfection (apart from the sound design, his editing and Eliot Rockett's cinematography are something to behold in a subtle, not at all showy, way) applied to a very fine ghost story, it's also a film that shows of a small and very talented case without, you know, showing off with them. The three main members of the cast - Paxton, Healy and McGillis - are all highly sympathetic and manage to not just let their characters come to life - so as to keep the audience more wary of their final fates - but also present their hidden complexities in ways subtle enough to fit in with the rest of a film that is playing with perfectly open cards yet also wants its audience to be patient and attentive, or perhaps rather a film that knows that its audience is patient and attentive.

The Innkeepers is just an all around fantastic film, the sort of movie I'd call a future classic of horror cinema, if I were the kind of guy who made that kind of pronouncement.

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