Tag Archives: independent horror movies

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. 

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Unhappy Birthdays & Home Invasions

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Everyone Is Going to Die

by Brooklyn Ewing

Daniel (Brad Moore) is a wealthy entrepreneur looking to reconnect with his teen daughter, Imogen (Gledisa Arthur), on her birthday. The angst-ridden party is interrupted when a woman in a mask appears in the yard of their secluded home.  

Director Craig Tuohy has created an uncomfortable thriller reminiscent of some of 2005-2010’s most popular French horror releases. Everyone Is Going to Die is stress-inducing, and filled with dread, and some of the scenes will be a tough, and triggering, watch for a lot of viewers. 

The cinematography is solid, and adds to the overall tension as the plot uncoils like a venomous snake waiting to catch you off guard. Actress Jaime Winstone is dialed in as Comedy, the masked intruder who has a lot to say about the patriarchy, and overtly wealthy men. She goes full out offering up a villain we love to hate. 

The film isn’t afraid to show, instead of tell, and the special fx makeup goes all in. One scene in particular had me yelling out loud at how real it looked. The masks created for the film are unsettling, bringing a level of tension to the first half as well.  

This movie isn’t for everyone. If you lean toward movies like Last House on the Left, The Strangers, Inside, or Funny Games, then you will not want to miss this. But viewer be warned, there are some very unsettling scenes that make this one harder to recommend to less seasoned horror fans. The twists and turns will satisfy viewers who love to play detective, and the creepy tension, and gore, will keep horror fans watching. 

Shudder Premiere

Rizz Up

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The Dead Thing

by Hope Madden

The clever, underlying theme in Shaun of the Dead is that every Londoner was already basically a zombie.

Elric Kane, co-writer and director of The Dead Thing, looks at a culture of app hook ups and sterile, fluorescent work spaces and sees something similar. A whole generation of people seems to already be dead.

They’re not exactly alive, anyway.

Beautiful Alex (Blu Hunt) fits that bill. Her job is mindless, she keeps her headphones in and avoids eye contact with her one co-worker, Mark (Joey Millin). After work and another swipe right hookup she sneaks into her apartment to avoid conversation with her longtime best friend (Katherine Hughes). Sleep. Wake up. Repeat.

Then she meets Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), and it’s as if she wakes from a trance. It starts off the same as every other meet up, but Kyle is different. They connect. He stays all night, they laugh and draw pictures of each other and hate to say goodbye the next day when her uber for work arrives.

She decides to keep in touch, but he never responds to a text. So, she shows up where he works, and a mystery begins.

Each act in The Dead Thing tells a different story. Hunt anchors the evolving storytelling with an authentic display of ennui, of disconnectedness—partly chosen, partly inevitable. Smith-Petersen’s vacant sweetness gives each change in the narrative an underlying sinister quality that also evolves nicely from one act to the next.

By Act 3, Kane abandons the film’s original metaphor in favor of a different analogy. While this change offers more opportunity for visceral horror, the result is less satisfying than the original, insightful image of modern romance.

Though the more traditional wrap up disappoints after such a stylish and intriguing premise, The Dead Thing—including Iona Vasile’s dreamy camerawork and deceptively creepy performances throughout—keeps your attention and manages to subvert expectations and entertain.

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Trail Snacks

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Consumed

by Hope Madden

The Wendigo is a presence that has proven hard to create on film. Ravenous—Antonia Bird’s 1999 small miracle of Western horror—conjures the spirit of the beast and comes off best. In her hands, the flesh consuming monster equates to the horrors of war.

For director Michael Altieri, working from a script by David Calbert, the mythical creature is a stand-in for cancer. It’s a great conceit, honestly, and one I wish had been executed a little more successfully.

Courtney Halverson plays Beth, who heads into the deep woods with her husband, Jay (Mark Famiglietti) to celebrate one year of remission. But the two are stalked by something terrifying and eventually fall into the hands of another person (Devon Sawa)—friend or foe, they can’t quite tell—as they plot their escape from the forest.

Altieri—formerly half of the Butcher Brothers (The Hamiltons, A Beginner’s Guide to Snuff, The Violent Kind), this time directing solo—soaks much production value from his two or three locations. A clear pro with limited means, Altieri makes the most of just three performers, generating dread and analogizing well.

The performers range in skill. Genre veteran Sawa convinces as the hunter with a past and an agenda and Famiglietti fares well enough as the supportive husband, although there’s not a lot to the role.

Most of the weight of the film lands on Halverson’s shoulders and she struggles early on, the layers of her conflicted emotions never taking authentic shape. She’s on more solid ground once Beth goes full badass, but without an early emotional hook for her character and relationship with her husband, you’re less invested in their survival.

More problematic is the presentation of the beast itself. Here the budget really makes itself known. Altieri oscillates between smoky swirls of digital FX and the shadowy presence of practical FX, but the combination is far from seamless. The film would have benefitted from sticking with practical and taking a less-is-more approach to what it showed.

It doesn’t entirely sink the production, but it does slow whatever momentum Consumed builds every time the beast arrives. Given its other setbacks, that’s enough to lessen the overall satisfaction the movie offers.

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Game On

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Latency

by Hope Madden

A descent into madness horror that relies almost entirely on two performances, writer/director James Drake’s Latency makes effective use of his single location to amplify themes and create tension.

Sash Luss is Haha, an agoraphobic professional gamer with a lot to lose. She’s months behind on rent, for one, and the last thing an agoraphobic needs is to have to find a new place to live. So, when she gets the chance to test new gear that enhances performance—which she can use to win a high stakes tournament before anyone else gets ahold of the tech—she jumps.

But the mind meld gear exacerbates some troubling aspects of Hana’s mental health, kicking off a rapid deterioration that blends memory with video game until she’s not sure what’s real and what’s not.

Latency feels a bit like a gamer’s Repulsion. Instead of mining sexual hysteria as Polanski did, Drake digs into the way seclusion and technology can intensify trauma and deepen mental illness.

Alexis Ren injects Latency with needed cheer and color, but it’s Luss who anchors the film. She’s in every scene. It’s a demanding role that asks, for instance, for magnetism while staring listlessly at a video game you can play with your mind. The arc of the character is dizzying and Luss can’t always deliver. While she transmits the fear and much of the regret authentically, the madness never feels quite mad enough.

The scares aren’t especially scary, either, but the narrative’s game like quality does build a sense of existential horror. Still, though the video game quality of the aesthetic cheats the need for realistic horror images, they’re still missed.

The film sees agoraphobia as a kind of macabre, inherited coping mechanism. But there’s something honest in the nightmare of days disappearing into other days, a timeless malaise of hyper-isolation.

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Woke Up Today and Chose Violence

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In a Violent Nature

by Hope Madden

When a filmmaker upends slasher tropes, the result often takes a comedic turn. Scream benefitted simultaneously from the audience’s effortless acceptance of genre staples and Wes Craven’s wicked sense of humor. Likewise, the absolute treasure of a meta-slasher Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon zeroes in on slasher cliches to generate fear and horror, laughter and empathy.

Chris Nash is not doing that.

After years making horror shorts, Nash writes and directs his first feature. Though In a Violent Nature builds its unstated plot on your knowledge of slashers, the filmmaker is not in it for laughs.

In a Violent Nature is unapologetically a slasher. A handful of young adults gathers in a secluded national park to camp. They are vaguely horny, annoying, drunk. One mourns some kind of recent tragedy. The fact that we will never get to know these characters by name seems fitting, since slasher characters are one-dimensional by nature. Why do we return to Crystal Lake year after year, sequel after sequel? It’s not for the campers.

We hear their inane chatter, their campfire stories, their bickering and flirtations, but just barely because we’re at a safe distance. We’re far enough from the fire that they can’t see us. In fact, it isn’t until the third act that we finally find ourselves more than a few feet away from the unstoppable killing machine whose point of view defines our story.

And even then, at the end, how far away could he be?

What Nash does with his retake on the slasher—utterly minimalistic except for the carnage, which is generally inspired—is both a deconstruction and loving ode. This movie loves slashers. It does not mock them, doesn’t wink and nod at what we accept when we watch them. Nor does it add any depth to them.

People watch slashers to see characters you don’t care about meet inventive, bloody death in a beautiful landscape. We watch slashers because death is comeuppance, it is coming no matter what, and it’s coming in the form of a hulking, horrifying mass with a tragic backstory.

The practical fx are glorious. The storytelling is clever in that the story tells you nothing, but Nash’s thoughtful direction is enough. If you don’t like slashers, you won’t like In a Violent Nature. If you sincerely do, though, this film is not to be missed.

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Schoolhouse Rock

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House of Screaming Glass

by Hope Madden

A descent into madness when the protagonist is probably already mad makes for a very short trip and not a particularly dramatic arc, but director David R. Williams gives it a go with his latest indie, House of Screaming Glass (which is a great title).

Elizabeth Cadozia (Lani Call) has inherited the old schoolhouse her grandmother has used as a home. It came to Elizabeth on her 27th birthday, upon the death of her mother. We don’t know what happened to Elizabeth’s mother, or anything Elizabeth chooses not to share with us directly. The only dialog in the film is done in voice over, Elizabeth telling us pieces of her story, and she does not seem like the most reliable narrator.

Call, in essentially a one-person show, really is mesmerizing. But she has an awful lot on her shoulders and Williams’s direction is not always on her side.

Having a camera trained on  your face as you wordlessly morph from dreamy apathy to dread to horror to tears and back again tests an actor, and Call passes beautifully. It’s the kind of scene that could easily become the watershed moment in any film, horror in particular. In keeping with Williams’s “more is more” direction throughout, Call is put through this about six times during the film’s hour and 45-minute run time.

This is symptomatic of a frustrating lack of focus that mires the entire effort in unfocused, self-indulgent tedium. This is especially disappointing because Call’s performance is genuinely arresting, and because Williams drops a good number of seriously startling, impressive images of horror throughout the film.

A sort of marriage between Lovecraft and Judeo-Christian hauntings, House of Screaming Glass succeeds when it unveils gooey shocks of body horror and practical monster effects. Call’s awkwardly sensuous turn amplifies the horror, but the imagery either gets lost in the unfocused narrative, or the scene in question goes on for such an unnecessary length that you lose interest.

House of Screaming Glass could have been a memorable hypnotic fever dream had Williams pruned at least 30 minutes. It’s still worth watching—Call’s performance, Stephen Rosenthal’s cinematography and many of Williams’s nightmarish visuals are transfixing.

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Put On a Happy Face

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Faceless After Dark

by Hope Madden

Back in 2016, Jenna Kanell made a horror movie, a low budget affair, the unofficial sequel to a very minor indie nearly no one saw. By that point in her career, Kanell had made half dozen or more low budget indie features, done loads of TV,  shorts, and a few music videos. In all likelihood, Terrifier didn’t register at the time as anything other than one more microbudget horror flick.

But that is not what Terrifier turned out to be, is it? The little clown killer that could undoubtedly changed Kanell’s career, perhaps not in all the ways the actor/writer/director/stunt performer might have wanted it to. What’s a not-final girl to do?

Kanell channeled the experience into the new feature, Faceless After Dark, which she co-wrote with Todd Jacobs. Directed by Raymond Wood, the film follows a disgruntled struggling actress named Bowie (Kanell) who pays more bills selling autographs at horror cons than through actual acting gigs—but the clown from her hit movie earns more.

Plus, her more famous girlfriend is still closeted about the relationship, and her longtime best friend’s film got greenlit—as long as he gives the lead to a different actress.

And, of course, you have the creepy fans.

It all gets to be too much one night, until Bowie taps into her own creativity and becomes the artist she was meant to be.

Meta can get very tiresome, especially in horror, but there’s something wearily honest about its application in Faceless After Dark. At its best, the film is a reflection of the maddening obstacles facing people—women, specifically—trying to survive Hollywood.

Kanell delivers a commanding performance and the writing is sound, even if the plotting is a little obvious and superficial and the psychotic break feels unearned. But as a showcase for Kanell’s charisma, and an often satisfying reaction to the rampant misogyny in cinema and particularly in fan culture, it’s fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95DKHrE5bJM