Death Came Knocking

Screens at 3pm on Sunday, October 18 at Nightmares Film Festival.

by Hope Madden

A slow build, a single location, and 16mm camerawork combine to craft an intense, uncomfortable throwback horror in writer/director Eric Yoder’s Death Came Knocking.

The film opens with hard drinking, tough talking Aunt Carolyn (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’s Caroline Williams) stopping by her sister’s old house to pick up the car. The LA house is being demolished in favor of a new mall, and while cousins Julie (Jacqueline Barone) and Aaron (Mario Silva) pack up, Aunt Carolyn will drive the car cross country to her sister’s new home.

It’s an organic way to deliver backstory, and then we’re alone with the two young adults who do a little packing and a bit of dancing while they snap Polaroids and smoke indoors (because it’s the 1970s, and that happened then).

Then the doorbell rings. Aaron wisely sends the man at the door away, but Julie lets him in because women in 1970s movies always do the dumbest things. But Yoder makes the most of his aesthetic, drawing clear comparisons to the Savage Cinema of American 1970s independent horror, most explicitly, Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left.

Slowly, Yoder tightens tensions as the film moves from a horror of manners toward a home invasion flick. First, it’s Daniel (Rey Marz), then his pregnant wife Marlene (Bix Krieger), and soon enough, Daniel opens his case, and we meet Jasper, the ventriloquist dummy.

And nobody wants that.

Marz delivers an expert performance, aw-shucks good guy one minute, amused sadist the next. The period aesthetic and practical effects help the film overcome some plotting and pacing issues, and the unapologetic violence certainly shocks, but also feels fitting in a film so entirely influenced by Seventies horror.