Tag Archives: independent horror movies

Nightmares Film Festival

Can You Hear Me Now?

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Interaction

Screens Sunday, October 19 at 4pm

by Hope Madden

Dallas Richard Hallam’s mesmerizing, beautifully shot, and quietly audacious feature Interaction lulls you, then hypnotizes you. But you have no idea what you’re in for.

House cleaner Rebecca (Suziey Block) hides little recording devices in all the homes she cleans. Never without her headphones, and right under the noses of clients with the means to pay for housekeeping, she listens to their most banal and most intimate moments.

But she listens all the time—in the car, in bed at night. The keepers are even labeled, for when she needs to relax, when she needs to laugh, when she needs a good cry. And for quite a while, this unapologetic invasion of privacy plays like a poetic reflection of modern social isolation.

The quietly beautiful image of loneliness and disconnect is a sleight of hand, though, and the film slowly – with zero exposition – turns more and more sinister.

Nearly the only dialog in the entire film comes from these recordings. When someone does speak, it feels like an invasion. This, too, suggests a director in absolute command of his medium. Though we may believe we have nothing in common with Rebecca, we come to connect with her. We worry when she seems too at home in someone else’s living space, fear that she should remove the headphones before she commits to certain acts, in case someone is around the corner, or returns home unexpectedly.

Hallam tightens tensions minute by minute, so quietly and efficiently you may not even recognize your own anxiety. He’s helped immeasurably by a masterpiece of understatement from Block, whose performance is unnervingly authentic and, for that reason, shocking when it needs to be.

Filmmaker Claire Denis has built an immaculate career making movies about the moments in the story other directors ignore or leave out. The same story is told, she just uses different beats within the same tale to tell it. Hallam, who co-wrote the script with A.P. Boland, approaches the film in much the same way.

At no point does his choice feel like a gimmick, which is success in itself. But when the film begins to veer toward true thriller, when it turns genuinely mean, it’s unsettling in the way a Denis or even a Michael Haneke film might be. Interaction is hard to forget.

Outtakes

Bagheads

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We’re Not Safe Here

by Hope Madden

The nightmarish images and unsettling sound design of writer/director Solomon Gray’s We’re Not Safe Here more than make up for its narrative stumbles.

A lot of films open on a scene of horror to be contextualized later in the movie. Likewise, Solomon sets the stage early with a swift, troubling little gem of a horror show. But interestingly, the tale he builds around it taps into a terror more subconscious and dreamlike than what you might expect.

Sharmita Bhattacharya is Neeta, a schoolteacher by day/artist by night who’s been unable to get started on her latest painting. Frustrated at the easel one night, she’s surprised by a visit from Rachel (Hayley McFarland), another teacher who’s been missing. Frantic and increasingly panicked, Rachel spills a story that began in her childhood. Something she thought she’d lost has found her again.

Aside from some very intimidating figures wearing bloody pillowcases over their heads (creepy!), We’re Not Safe Here is primarily a two-person show. McFarland is masterful, her paranoid madness tipped with a teacher’s command of the room. She’s mesmerizing.

Bhattacharya struggles a bit. Neeta is also troubled, and the performance feels stiff and unsure until the character gives into her demons. But there are moments between the two of them that are deeply upsetting. I mean that in a good way.

Gray’s use of setting—Neeta’s home, every wall cluttered with her sketches and paintings, every surface littered with books—creates a busy, fascinating space rich with potentially spookiness. A meandering camera and effective sound design capitalizes on what the set design has crafted: a lovingly lived-in space turned suddenly suspicious. The filmmaker evokes a kind of paranoia that feeds the perfect atmosphere for his film.

There’s a looseness to the script that often serves the film’s maniacal undercurrent. What’s delusion? What’s really happening? And is it contagious?

Gray refuses to fit all the pieces together, a choice that mostly pays off. The act structure and finale are rigid enough to give the tale a feel of completion. While a lingering vagueness in the backstory is frustrating, it also allows the imagination to veer into its own halls of madness.

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.)

New In Theaters

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.

Outtakes

A Mission Not Worth Taking

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Resurrection Road

by Daniel Baldwin

Genre mash-ups are a tricky thing. A consistent tone is hard enough to maintain when one is working in one genre, but once you add any additional genres into the mix, the odds of things going off of the rails increase exponentially. More often than not, they tend to fall apart. After all, for every From Dusk Till Dawn or Sinners, you have a Cowboys & Aliens or an Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Writer/director Ashley Cahill’s Resurrection Road is a genre mash-up, melding a Civil War men-on-a-mission tale with a heavy dose of supernatural horror. A squad of Black Union soldiers is tasked with a deadly clandestine mission to take out the heavy cannons at a nearby fort so that the army can safely approach it a few days later. It’s effectively a suicide mission and one that the men are blackmailed into accepting. One that would be impossible enough on its own in a standard war actioner but is now made even more impossible with the additional supernatural threat at work.

Malcolm Goodwin (iZombie, Reacher) is our lead and, as always, his presence alone elevates the material. His protagonist, Barrabas, is the most complex and interesting character in the film and Goodwin does everything in his power to carry Resurrection Road across the finish line. It’s not enough.

This isn’t the first time someone has attempted to craft a Civil War-era horror/action hybrid. Alex Turner’s Dead Birds attempted something similar a couple decades back. Making any sort of period piece on a low budget is a tall order, as one has to not only get the dialogue right, but also the production design. Resurrection Road unfortunately comes up short in both areas.

Fans of the ever-underrated Goodwin might still want to check this out, as he gives it his all. Folks who really enjoy period piece horror might also find something of interest here. Otherwise, it is a hard film to recommend. There’s always something to be admired in a project that’s reach exceeds its grasp, but in the end, this film just doesn’t measure up.

Shudder Premiere

Daddy’s Little Girl

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The Surrender

by Hope Madden

At one point in writer/director Julia Max’s feature debut The Surrender, Barbara (the always reliable Kate Burton) tells her daughter, Megan (Colby Minifie), that their grief over the death of the family patriarch is not the same. After 40 years together, Barbara says, “I don’t know who I am without him.”

That’s really the heart of the horror film that sees a bereaved mother and daughter transgress the laws of nature to bring their beloved husband/father back from the dead.

Max uses horror tropes to play nimbly with the dishonesty of memory and the ugliness of reality. What The Surrender unveils is that mother and daughter do not know who they are as a family without Robert (Vaughn Armstrong); they don’t recognize the other without the third wheel for balance.

As a character study and a glimpse into family politics, particularly during the tailspin of grief, The Surrender is beautifully, authentically written. Every inexplicable grace Barbara has granted Stephen during their decades is somehow unavailable to her daughter, who, in turn, forgives and forgets conveniently when it comes to her father. But Megan’s less forgiving of her mom.

And so, the two grasp desperately to regain balance and relieve their panic and grief, which is where the horror comes in. Max returns to the exquisitely horrific image that opens the film once Megan and Barbara, aided by “the man” (Neil Sandilands, compellingly understated), go in search of Stephen.

Max’s image of the other realm is as imaginative as it is stark. There’s a bleak beauty to it all that recalls Liam Gavin’s genre masterpiece, A Dark Song. The Surrender never reaches those heights, but Max knows how to ground the supernatural in relatable reality and wonders which is worse.

Shudder Premiere

Neighborhood Watch

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825 Forest Road

by Hope Madden

I wonder whether Ashland Falls is a far drive from Abaddon, New York. Looks like a pretty area.

Hell House LLC writer/director Stephen Cognetti launched a fun and mainly impressive horror franchise from the dusty soil of the mythical Abaddon, New York, reinvigorating the found footage genre and reminding those who’d forgotten that clowns are terrifying.

Cognetti’s latest, 825 Forest Road, is the filmmaker’s first feature outside that franchise. Though he leans on some of the style that made the Hell House films memorable, this movie is not found footage. In fact, it’s a pretty straightforward haunted house picture.

Chuck (Joe Falcone) and Maria (Elizabeth Vermilyea) buy a roomy old home in Ashland Falls, to be near the little college where Chuck’s younger sister Isabelle (Kathryn Miller) will attend. Couldn’t Isabelle just move into the dorms like every other college freshman?

Why do that when they could all uproot themselves and buy a haunted house?

The backstory—family tragedy, estranged siblings trying to rebuild something—is the first of the film’s many weaknesses. The fact that the incoming freshman looks like she’s older than her guardians doesn’t help set the mood, either.  

But it’s not just Chuck’s new house that’s haunted. It’s the whole damn town. That can be a ripe premise, too. Just not today.

825 Forest Road delivers a little bit of the style Cognetti’s become known for, and it’s refreshing to watch a modern horror film and know that if you don’t pay attention, you may miss an inspired bit of haunting. But in this case, that’s not enough to merit your time.

Though Vermilyea convinces, the balance of the cast feels more like they’re doing a read through than performing. Chemistry among the actors is nonexistent, which exacerbates the problem with the unfelt backstory.

Every reason to do something is a contrived excuse rather than natural choice, and every reason not to do something is even less earned. The movie plays like a rehearsal that could have turned into something fun with a couple more rounds of script revisions.

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Eerie Desert Vibes

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The Buildout

by Daniel Baldwin

When The Buildout opens, a religious group known as “The Clergy” is set on establishing a home in a remote part of a desert. Vague references are made to the fact that they’ve moved around a few times in search of a place where they can find a deep spiritual connection.  Is this dusty and arid middle-of-nowhere locale what they’ve long sought? Given that this is a horror movie, the answer is undoubtedly yes, while also falling into the “Be Careful What You Wish For” category.

Our leads – Hannah Alline (Mayfair Witches) and Jenna Kanell (Terrifier) – are two friends on a road trip who make the unfortunate decision to stop in that same area for a pee break. What follows is what one might call a “vibes movie”, where mood is tantamount to plot-based events. If you can roll with that, The Buildout may just be for you.

This is the feature-length debut of writer/director Zeshaan Younus and it’s an impressive one. Shot with a small cast and crew for pennies on the dollar, it still manages to pack both an aural and a visual punch. The footage is a mix of more classic anamorphic cinematography and camcorder vlogs, giving it a distinctive feel. The sound mix is full and immersive. From a technical standpoint, it’s exactly what one hopes to be gifted when they sit down with an indie genre film: something that looks like it cost way more to make than it actually did.

While the script falters a bit, Alline and Kanell are great together, which smooths over the film’s narrative deficiencies. The otherworldliness of what occurs to their characters brings to mind the early films of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. The Buildout might not be quite as impactful as their feature debut, Resolution, but it’s playing in similar terrain. Enough so that it makes one excited to see what Younus might conjure up next.

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No Place Like Home

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Invader

by Hope Madden

Lean, mean and affecting, Mickey Keating’s take on the home invasion film wastes no time. In a wordless—though not soundless—opening, the filmmaker introduces an unhinged presence.

Cut to Ana (Vero Maynez). She’s sleepy, it’s late, the bus is empty except for the driver hustling her off, his voice constant, annoyed, and on repeat: Come on. Get off the bus. Last stop. You gotta go.

It’s 4:30 am. The bus was late, the station is deserted, and Carmilla—Ana’s cousin—is not answering.

Immediately Keating sets our eyes and ears against us. His soundtrack frequently blares death metal, a tactic that emphasizes a chaotic, menacing mood the film never shakes. Using primarily handheld cameras from the unnerving opening throughout the entire film, the filmmaker maintains an anarchic energy, a sense of the characters’ frenzy and the endless possibility of violence.

Keating strings together a handful of believably tumultuous moments early in the film—particularly a couple of run-ins with a horn-blaring cabbie—to work the nerves and leave you feeling as raw and vulnerable as Ana. Rather than dip and settle, Invader delivers relentlessly on that early sense of harried terror.

Scenes possess an improvisational quality that coincides with the rawness of the overall effort. Keating is spare with exposition—if you can’t figure out what’s going on without having it explained to you, you are clearly not paying attention. The verité style accomplishes what it’s mean to, lending Invader an authenticity that amplifies the horror.

Maynez carries that authenticity. Ana never feels written, she feels alive. Her confusion, anger, fear—all of it runs together in a way that reflects what the audience is experiencing in each moment. Her limited screentime with Colin Huerta introduces enough tenderness to give the sense of terror real depth.

Joe Swanberg, with limited screentime and even more limited dialog, crafts a terrifying image of havoc. His presence is perversely menacing, an explosion of rage and horror.

Invader delivers a spare, nasty, memorable piece of horror in just over an hour. It will stick with you a while longer.