Tag Archives: horror movies

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Bloody Yield

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Strange Harvest

by Hope Madden

Strange Harvest is an evocative title. It conjures all kinds of folk horror notions, or better still, body horror. Mysterious, right? And what better way to solve a mystery than by working with the detectives on the case?

Writer/director Stuart Ortiz’s latest horror film takes on the eerily realistic shape of a true-crime TV show. In fact, it often recalls I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, the series built on Michelle McNamara’s investigation into the Golden State Killer. Tapping into the true crime phenomenon without actually delivering truth, just fiction, can be a tough go.

Luckily, Ortiz has some genuinely horrifying ideas to present. The crime scenes littered throughout the investigation are the stuff of nightmare. And though a couple feel almost Saw inspired, most are jarringly original and truly ghastly.

They suggest the work of a true sadist, and fleeting images of the killer himself—masked and unmasked—unsettle. Strange Harvest boasts an awful lot of pieces working together to get under your skin.  

Ortiz stitches this footage together with studio interviews of the investigators, Det. Joe Kirby (Peter Zizzo) and Det. Lexi Taylor (Terri Apple). Here’s where the authenticity begins to thin. Heavy-handed writing paired with, especially in Zizzo’s case, obvious performance delivers something far more staged and artificial than what the balance of the film offers.

They also leech the film of a lot of the horror and tension being built by these horrifying crime scenes. One of the few notions not pulled from McNamara’s show is the focus on the victims. That kind of human underpinning, handled so well by Anna Kendrick in her  2024 directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, might have created the empathy Ortiz seems to be trying for with the investigator interviews.

Feeling for someone—frightened for them, compassion for them—deepens the impact of any horror film. There were certainly opportunities to help us care what happened at each crime scene, but instead we’re asked to be frustrated with the investigators. That can work. Zodiac made it work, but of course that was David Fincher and we were actively investigating with the police, not privy to their trauma after the fact.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes, John Erick Dowdie’s 2007 found footage style horror, steers much closer to the road Ortiz is taking, and because we hear more from and about victims, it leaves deeper scars.

There’s a lot Strange Harvest has going for it, but Ortiz and his cast never fully deliver on the promise of the title.

Outtakes

On a Mission from God

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Shaman

by Hope Madden

Director Antonio Negret and writer Daniel Negret have something interesting to say. Unfortunately, they can’t find a consistently interesting way to say it with their latest film, Shaman.

The film shadows an American Catholic missionary family working with an Ecuadorian priest in a mountain village. Candice (Sara Canning) teaches catechism and English, and she and husband Joel (Daniel Gillies) help Father Meyer (Alejandro Fajardo) with baptisms, school and church maintenance, and they serve meals to the community.

Out playing with his friends, preadolescent son Elliot (Jett Klyne) enters a cave, though warned by the two locals he hangs out with. He comes home carrying something much older than Jesus.

Candice notices immediately and blames the shaman who lives in the mountains, while Joel scolds her to stop giving them power they don’t have. Meantime, with something afflicting her own family, Candice finds that her own faith may be more of a false front, a façade of superiority and benevolence.

What is weird about Shaman is that both Klyne and Canning co-starred in Brandon Christensen’s 2019 possession horror Z, a film where a mother watches helpless as something ugly takes hold of her innocent son (Klyne).

At times, the atmosphere Negret creates offers a subtle but worthwhile change in the missionary horror of the past, which told of either a white savior discovering primitive evil, or in more recent years, a white savior who is, in fact, the evil. Negret combines the two tropes in ways that are sometimes provocative, sometimes predictable, sometimes tone deaf.

Solid performances all around, plus gorgeous locations and some genuine surprises elevate the proceedings, but the pace is slow, the FX are weak, and the story too often falls prey to the cliché it’s trying to expose.  (They also don’t get any of the Catholic stuff right. There, I said it.)

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So Happy

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Together

by Hope Madden

Horror has always trodden the terror of losing your identity, of losing your very personality or individuality, of what makes you you. From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to every Invasion of the Body Snatchers iteration (including The Faculty) to most zombie horror, horror fiction and cinema reflect our own worry that there is something out there that will steal from us what makes us ourselves and turn us into something else.

The anxiety of losing your identity to coupledom is just as real, though few films (horror or otherwise) have depicted this relatable, perhaps primal fear as adorably, as authentically, or as grotesquely as Michael Shanks’s Together.

The writer/director’s feature debut benefits enormously from the lived-in camaraderie of its leads. Alison Brie and Dave Franco, married in real life, play Millie and Tim. They’ve been together for nearly a decade, but this new chapter of their lives marks a distinct step. Millie took a job teaching in Upstate New York, two hours from NYC where Tim sometimes plays guitar with a band while he tries to finish his solo EP, to be self-released.

Millie has grown up. Will Tim? Can he? Or is he abandoning himself, giving up on his dreams and forgetting who he is by moving with Millie? If they don’t split up now, it’ll just be harder later.

Much, much harder. Stickier too.

Something happens as the pair explore the woods around their new home and, little by little, it draws their two bodies together, attempting to fuse them into one thing. It’s a delightful metaphor played joyously and goretastically, the body horror and humor fusing just as readily as Tim and Millie’s extremities.

Brie and Franco are perfect, and Damon Herriman lends his considerable, understated talent to develop the plot and keep you guessing.

Though Shank’s writing sometimes lands heavily (past trauma exposition), and other times leaves you disbelieving (why on earth is she still with him?!), the sweet, romantic believability of the performances charms you into sticking it out. And you’ll be glad, because once the film hits its stride, it is a wild, funny, charming, repulsive ride.

What Shanks manages with his film is to be overtly romantic, never cynical, consistently funny, and gross as hell. It’s the perfect date movie. But maybe go on an empty stomach.

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Found and Lost

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House on Eden

by Hope Madden

Can you watch a found footage horror film and not be constantly asking yourself, who edited this footage together? Who pulled from one camera, then another, spliced in security cam stuff? Who looked at all the footage from all the different cameras and decided what we would see when? And how did they get it all? And where did they go?

If it does not bother you, then it’s possible that you will enjoy writer/director Kris Collins’s House on Eden more than I did.

This found footage horror clings close to real life. Spooky content creators “KallMeKris” Collins, “celinaspookyboo” Celina Myers, and filmmaker Jason-Christopher Mayer play versions of themselves, social media handles and all. The trio is out to make a great video, not one of those boring videos everyone makes. So instead of going to the cemetery Celina has researched, Kris diverts the road trip to a house she found online that she’s sure no one has ever been to.

Sure. Because totally anonymous houses post themselves online.

And what’s the draw? Why is it spooky? Because maybe a girl went missing somewhere in the vicinity 60 years ago.

For context, wherever you are standing at this very second, some girl has gone missing from that spot in the last sixty years.

So, three youngsters break and enter into a beautiful, well-maintained home, not a speck of dust anywhere. But it’s really, really far away from everything else so surely, it must be abandoned.

That is to say, three people break into a well cared for, isolated home to unravel no mystery they know of in one of the more tedious, uninspired, lazily written found footage horror films in recent memory.

It’s not as if found footage can’t be done well, even the ghosthunter variety. Deadstream is epically watchable, funny and scary at the same time, and it maintains the integrity of found footage pretty well. My advice to you is to watch that instead.

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Suspect Your Elders

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The Home

by George Wolf

About an hour into The Home, things escalate. And quickly. There’s a big enough jolt of blood and violence to make you hopeful the foolishness that’s been rolled out so far can be rescued.

Sorry, too little, too late.

Pete Davidson gives the film a solid, sympathetic anchor as Max, a troubled man who gets sentenced to community service doing custodial work at a New Jersey old folks home. He makes friends with some of the residents, angers some of his co-workers, and quickly comes to realize something pretty f’ed up is going on.

Director and co-writer James DeMonaco, who created The Purge franchise and helmed three of the chapters, can’t mine the same levels of socially-conscious horror or reality-based tension. What’s up with these seniors is ridiculous sci-fi horror built on ideas from much better films, with a message that’s hammered home through repetition, explanation and – for the first 60 minutes at least – boredom.

Through it all, Davidson exhibits a fine screen presence, and the supporting cast is littered with veteran faces you’ll recognize even if the names (John Glover, Ethan Phillips, Bruce Altman) aren’t familiar. They help you to keep rooting for the movie when the bloodshed hits, but DeMonaco doesn’t see it through, pulling up too soon and settling for a curious finale that’s far too weak to satisfy.

A horror film out to chop bloody holes in that “Greatest Generation” mantra is plenty intriguing. The Home, though, feels stuck between more desirable neighborhoods. It’s not self-aware or over-the-top enough to be satirical fun, but far too obvious for metaphorical nuance.

So we’re left wanting, reminded of how important it is to craft a good plan for the golden years.

Fright Club

Fright Club: That’s Not Your Baby!

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The idea of a changeling—a baby that’s not really yours, and who knows where your dear sweet little one really is?!—is so primal a fear that it’s existed in folktales for centuries. Ireland really picks this scab well in their horror movies, but they are not alone. It’s an idea that can’t help but unsettle. Here are our five favorite “that’s not your baby!” horror movies.

5. The Baby (1973)

Lord above, here’s a weird one.

Director Ted Post (Hang ’em High, Magnum Force) gets a little unseemly with this story of welfare fraud, Greek tragedy, fear of emasculation, and more. Freud would have a time with The Baby!

Mrs. Wadsworth (Ruth Roman) does not want nosey new social services wench Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) sniffing around. Why does she and her two perfectly normal, not at all criminal, grown daughters have to prove that their fully grown son/brother still thinks he’s a baby? The grown man in the crib and onesie upstairs.

If that’s not upsetting enough, Ann Gentry’s not all she’s cracked up to be, either. What was the deal with the Seventies?

4. The Hallow (2015)

Visual showman Corin Hardy has a bit of trickery up his sleeve. His directorial debut The Hallow, for all its superficiality and its recycled horror tropes, offers a tightly wound bit of terror in the ancient Irish wood.

Adam (Joseph Mawle) and Clare Hitchens (Bojana Novakovic) move, infant Finn in tow, from London to the isolated woods of Ireland so Adam can study a tract of forest the government hopes to sell off to privatization. But the woods don’t take kindly to the encroachment and the interloper Hitchens will pay dearly.

Hardy has a real knack for visual storytelling. His inky forests are both suffocating and isolating, with a darkness that seeps into every space. He’s created an atmosphere of malevolence, but the film does not rely on atmosphere alone.

Though all the cliché elements are there – a young couple relocates to an isolated wood to be warned off by angry locals with tales of boogeymen – the curve balls Hardy throws will keep you unnerved and guessing.

3. Hole in the Ground (2019)

Sara (Seána Kerslake), along with her bib overalls and young son Chris (James Quinn Markey), are finding it a little tough to settle into their new home in a very rural town. Chris misses his dad. Sara is having some life-at-the-crossroads anxiety.

Then a creepy neighbor, a massive sink hole (looks a bit like the sarlacc pit) and Ireland’s incredibly creepy folk music get inside her head and things really fall apart.

Writer/director Lee Cronin’s subtext never threatens his story, but instead informs the dread and guilt that pervade every scene. You look at your child one day and don’t recognize him or her. It’s a natural internal tension and a scab horror movies like to pick. Kids go through phases, your anxiety is reflected in their behavior, and suddenly you don’t really like what you see. You miss the cuter, littler version. Or in this case, you fear that inside your beautiful, sweet son lurks the same abusive monster as his father.

2. Border (2018)

Sometimes knowing yourself means embracing the beast within. Sometimes it means making peace with the beast without. For Tina—well, let’s just say Tina’s got a lot going on right now.

Border director/co-writer Ali Abbasi has more in mind than your typical Ugly Duckling tale, though. He mines John Ajvide Lindqvist’s (Let the Right One In) short story of outsider love and Nordic folklore for ideas of radicalization, empowerment, gender fluidity and feminine rage.

It would hardly feel like a horror movie at all were it not for that whole, horrifying baby thing.

The result is a film quite unlike anything else, one offering layer upon provocative, messy layer and Abbasi feels no compulsion to tidy up. Instead, he leaves you with a lot to think through thanks to one unyieldingly original film.

1. Lamb (2021)

Among the many remarkable elements buoying the horror fable Lamb is filmmaker Valdimar Jóhannsson’s ability to tell a complete and riveting tale without a single word of exposition.

Not one. So, pay attention.

Rather than devoting dialog to explaining to us what it is we are seeing, Jóhannsson relies on impressive visual storytelling instincts, answering questions as they come up with a gravesite, a crib coming out of storage, a glance, a bleat.

His cast of three – well, four, I guess — sells the fairy tale. A childless couple working a sheep farm in Iceland find an unusual newborn lamb and take her in as their own child. As is always the way in old school fables, though, there is much magical happiness but a dire recompense soon to come.

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Vampire Blues

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Abraham’s Boys

by Hope Madden

The problem with crafting a feature length film from a short story is that, often, the story’s too short. Filmmakers need to pad, and that can be tough because if the story needed more, likely the writer—certainly a writer as strong as Joe Hill—would have realized that.

But it can be done. Hill’s The Black Phone—an incredibly creepy short—benefitted from a number of changes as it leapt from page to screen. Director Scott Dickerson, who co-wrote the screenplay with regular collaborator C. Robert Cargill, added complexity and a strong B-story to enrich Hill’s original tale.

In adapting Hill’s short Abraham’s Boys, filmmaker Natasha Kermani (Lucky) keeps the core ideas intact but alters everything in the orbit of our three main characters: Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Titus Welliver, solid), his oldest son Max (Brady Hepner), and young Rudy (Judah Mackey). The family lives, along with delicate mother Mina (Jocelin Donahue, Last Stop in Yuma County), in the as-yet isolated California desert.

Mina is but a distant memory in Hill’s writing, so her presence allows the film to round out the family dynamic. Kermani also adds railroad builders, which deepens the pool of potential victims, but also hints at Van Helsing’s paranoia when he and his family are not isolated from the rest of the world.

Why so paranoid? Like the short story, the film raises suspicions concerning Abraham’s reasoning and behavior.

Kermani’s film delivers on horror, bloody and emotional, in a way the short does not. Dreamy sequences bring depth to the inner conflict haunting Max, the film’s main focus. And none of Kermani’s additions subtract from the prickly family dynamic that was the soul of Hill’s tale.

Hepner, who had a small part in The Black Phone, struggles to carry Abraham’s Boys. It’s his arc that defines the story, but the performance is little more than a stiff spine and a pout.

The balance of the cast fares better, but bringing Mina into the story complicates what, in Hill’s tale, was a very simple premise. Her talk of having seen Dracula, of having his voice in her head, muddies the plot in ways Kermani never clarifies. The mixed message weakens the climax a bit, but thanks to the slow-boil atmosphere and Welliver’s brooding turn, all is not lost.

Shudder Premiere

Killer Neighborhood

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Push

by Hope Madden

From the moment Push holds on the “for sale” sign in front of an isolated Michigan mansion, co-writers/co-directors David Charbonier and Justin Douglas Powell proclaim their inspirations. The Craven Road property, for sale by Hitch & Wan Real Estate, is probably not the house you want.

Will the mansion be haunted outright, a la James Wan’s The Conjuring? Or will its ghosts be all in realtor Natalie’s (Alicia Sanz) mind, like Hitchcock’s Rebecca? Or is there something more corporeal to fear, a la Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left?

The filmmakers have set a high bar, and though their film doesn’t entirely clear it, Push does deliver an often effective little thriller.

The year is 1993 and Natalie, a very pregnant, recently widowed Mexican transplant peddling real estate in Michigan, finds herself trapped in the mansion she’s trying to sell. The sprawling, remote property is on the market because of the murder of its previous owners. Maybe that’s why only one guy (Raúl Castillo) shows up for the open house.

Cinematographer Daniel Katz’s floating camera is like a ghost warning you to pay attention. Both filmmakers and both leads amplify the atmospheric tension. One character is the picture of vulnerability, the other, a silent and brutal menace.

Push offers next to nothing in terms of motivation or location backstory. We know enough about Natalie to understand her arc, but the situation and how it came to be is forever a mystery. That can work—people step into unexplained horrors every day. That moment when you realize you’ve willingly put yourself in a perilous situation can deliver revelatory thrills.

Both Sanz and Castillo are up to that challenge, but the script sometimes is not. The conveniences and cliches pile up, and suspension of disbelief is strained to breaking.

It’s interesting to circle back to that for sale sign because in choosing not to clearly commit to a path—psychological, supernatural, or brutal—Push limits its impact.

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Promised Land

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40 Acres

by Hope Madden

At one time, a lot of people were promised 40 acres and a mule. It was a lie. But Hailey Freeman’s ancestor had freed himself, left his family behind, and walked to Canada to make his own promises. Generations later, Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler, a force of nature) will be damned if the apocalypse, wandering cannibals, or a teenage boy’s hormonal behavior is going to jeopardize that farm.

Co-writer/director R.T. Thorne’s post-apocalyptic horror/thriller feature debut 40 Acres benefits early and often from inspired framing, gorgeous shot making, and one remarkable performance. Indeed, Deadwyler is so good that sometimes the cast around her can’t keep up.

She’s the matriarch of the Freeman farm and she’s a hard woman. She has to be, but the land is providing for the family, and the family is protecting it from those outside the electric fence and barbed wire who might want to come inside.

The bigger problem might be Hailey’s oldest, Manny (Kataem O’Connor), whose restlessness and desires put the family at risk.

Thorne uses flashbacks sparingly, which gives them some weight. Wisely, these serve less to explain the apocalypse than to hint at relationships and character, because, naturally, the real story here is not the flesh eaters moving from farm to farm, but the strains of coming of age within this pressure cooker.

Many films—horror movies, in particular—rely on terrible decision making to move the plot forward. 40 Acres weakens as it moves from Act 2 to Act 3 with wildly bad character choices. But something has to trip this family up so Thorne can show off remarkable instincts for action cinematography, as well as his lead’s range.

Yes, we know Danielle Deadwyler—snubbed by Oscar for her searing performances in The Piano Lesson (2024) and Till (2022)—is a magnificent actor. One of the best working today. But you might not realize (unless you’ve seen her fantastic 2019 thriller Devi to Pay) that she’s also quite at home in genre films. The degree to which she brings authenticity to her role as an Army veteran annihilating redneck cannibals with machetes is breathtaking.

Michael Greyeyes (Wild Indian, Blood Quantum) delivers needed warmth and humor, and he and Deadwyler share a touching chemistry. A full slate of nasty marauders impresses, especially veteran genre actor Patrick Garrow.

The writing periodically drags 40 Acres backwards, particularly the budding romance and related choices. But for thrills-aplenty action with something on its mind, you could do worse than this.

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Still Crazy After All These Years

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28 Years Later

by Hope Madden

Nearly a quarter century ago (!!), director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland unleashed the genre masterpiece 28 Days Later. Smart, prescient, with a broken human heart and 113 minutes of sheer terror, it changed the “zombie” genre forever with living, breathing, running, rampaging humans infected by a rage virus.

Original as it was, there was still a little Romero in there. You might not have seen it with the racing beasts, but Boyle and Garland understood what Romero knew all along—it’s organized human authority you need to really worry about.

Boyle’s film was followed in 2003 with a fine, if mean spirited, sequel, but the Oscar winning director returns for 28 Years Later. So does Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men, Civil War), who’s gone on to be one of the most interesting filmmakers of our time.

They pick up the story 28 years after the rage virus hits London. Onscreen text tells us that continental Europe was able to turn back the virus and keep it from spreading globally, but the islands that were once the UK are, and will forevermore be, quarantined. No one leaves. Not ever.

We’re dropped into a small Scottish highland community where 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) is about to go on his first mainland hunt with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). They’ll cross a bridge only passable during low tide, which means 4 hours to get back or it’s an overnighter on the big island full of the infected—which includes some mutations we didn’t worry about 28 years back—and the uninfected, who can be worse.

Wisely, Garland and Boyle anchor the film with family drama. Plucky Williams makes for a great hero, his arc from innocent to survivor both heartbreaking and impressive. A supporting cast including Jodie Comer and the great Ralph Feinnes enhances that tender drama. But what’s missing are the scares.

As Romero’s zombie films developed, so did his monsters. By Land of the Dead, they had their own leaders, their own families, their own kind of consciousness. The zombies were evolving around and without us. It was interesting, but it wasn’t scary. Likewise, 28 Years Later conjures beasts that have evolved into their own kind of society, and while it’s clever, it lacks the visceral terror of both previous installments. There’s also a lot of dubious science afoot.

The film’s opening and closing segments promise something meaner and more mischievous in upcoming sequels. (There are three films in this second part of the series, and the next installment—28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta—is in post-production now.)

Maybe the bar set by the original is simply too high for any sequel to meet. 28 Days Later remains one of the scariest films ever made. Circling back to see how humanity’s getting along a generation later is interesting, sometimes gorgeous, awfully bloody, and frequently very sweet. It’s just not very scary.