Over the course of October, I shall be watching one horror movie a day and reviewing it right here for your reading pleasure. I haven't seen any of the films I'll be watching before and you can find the full list here.
Serial killers are very old hat now when it comes to horrors, thrillers and chillers, but there's still the odd film that crops up every now and again to bring something new to this particular character brand. A Horrible Way to Die attempts this by presenting AJ Bowen's very domestic serial killer, Garrick Turrell (something which has also recently been explored in Stephen King's A Good Marriage and the short story on which it is based) and his relationship with his girlfriend. Played by Amy Seimetz, Sarah is an alcoholic whose drunken state ensures a lack of awareness when it comes to her boyfriend's violent moonlighting. Their addictions and the conflicts that result are paralleled throughout the film; his for killing women, hers for the bottle.
The performances elevate the film somewhat, rising out of the dullness by giving these characters a real sense of dimension. Seimetz in particular is excellent as the fractured and downtrodden Sarah. Her tentative romance with a fellow alcoholic from her meetings, played by Joe Swanberg, is disarmingly sweet at first and their sense of shared difficulties adds an extra layer of pathos. As the serial killer at the centre of the piece, AJ Bowen is all the more sinister because of how non-threatening he appears to be
There are a few successful attempts to make strong links between Garrick and Sarah's respective trials and tribulations. When he is preparing to make his escape from the police car transporting him, the film segues into Sarah's lunch date with Swanberg's Kevin, her attempt to escape from her old relationship into a new one. However, overall, the film is rather hackneyed in its approach, stumbling around without any sense of urgency or purpose. The minimalist score seems designed to do exactly this, but the film is too quiet, too fractured for it to have any effect.
When the violence does come, it's a bit of a relief and the ending does go some way to elevating what has gone before. There's a couple of twists in there, one that I saw coming very early on and another that I missed completely. That final switcheroo is neatly done and ties together the somewhat disparate story threads to resolve the film in a satisfying manner. It's a shame then that this same creativity isn't consistent throughout and it never really goes anywhere with the links between the respective addictions of Sarah and Garrick which is where my primary interest lay.
I'm all for grim and bleak, as you'll have seen over the course of this month, and my tolerance for slow-burners is pretty high. But there has to be something to latch on to within that, which this film can't provide. There's shades of the wit and inventiveness that Wingard and Barrett would later bring to You're Next and one of this year's finest films, The Guest (and I suspect I've been somewhat spoiled by the latter), but the experimentation with narrative staples here doesn't feel as assured, nor as effective.
- Becky
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Over the course of October, I shall be watching one horror movie a day and reviewing it right here for your reading pleasure. I haven't seen any of the films I'll be watching before and you can find the full list here. Major spoilers ahead for this one - I had too much to talk about.
Utopian fiction sprung up a lot towards the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, a way of counteracting the constant driving development of industry and technology by finding something pure. Utopias varied from novel to novel, but a predominant trait was that this society had somehow got something right in their social system by engineering it somehow. For Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this was to imagine a society without men, a matriarchal structure that had evolved to reproduce asexually. H.G. Wells imagined a eugenically produced society founded on socialist principles and William Morris created something similar with a focus on health to lengthen life spans.
One of the key things that all of these novels and more had in common was the character of the outsider, someone travelling from their contemporary society into one of these utopias and reporting on what they found and the differences they discovered. It allowed not only for an exploration of the these differences and the possible benefits they could provide, but also for an examination of what contemporary societies were lacking. It also led to the more satirical side of the genre to arise, one that pointed out all the various flaws in creating such utopias and the outsider characters came to be recognised as the sensible ones in the situation (think Aldous Huxley's Brave New World).
Although the film is largely cribbed from the true events of the Jonestown Massacre, there's a lot of this utopian exploration going on in The Sacrament. Journalists Sam and Jake tag along with Patrick who goes to visit the commune Eden Parish at the request of his sister, Caroline, who has been living there. It's a Christian settlement shrouded in secrecy; they have to fly to a certain location before being picked up and transported by helicopter. When they are there, they find a largely peaceful commune, ruled over by the charismatic Father, who everyone seems to obey happily.
The film adopts a found footage documentary approach which works well within this utopian context; like the diaries or narrations of the original utopian genre, the documentary serves to contrast the filmmakers' ideals, which also stand for the audience's, with those of Father and his 'children'. In the hands of the filmmakers, the camera becomes a questioning eye, evaluating each aspect of the commune for both the documentary and the audience. Initially, everything seems a little too good to be true. Everyone's happy and satisfied with their peaceful existence and there's an understanding on behalf of the filmmakers; they accept why people would want to live like this, but don't feel they could do it themselves.
However, even though things look calm on the surface, Ti West's screenplay drops in little hints that everything is not all right in paradise. There's men with guns guarding the gate, some people aren't so happy to see a camera crew wandering around and there's a general sense of unease. When Father finally appears amidst a round of applause and general rock star treatment, the film crew are granted an interview, which he quickly spins against them. He's a charismatic figure and it's easy to understand why people would flock to him, specifically the vulnerable people that the crew meet throughout the day. Gene Jones plays Father with a quiet menace and it's here that the presence of outsiders begins to affect those around them.
The crucial point in any utopian novel is when the outsiders have too much of an effect on the world they've wandered into. In Herland, for example, this break occurs when one of the male travellers attempts to force himself upon his female companion, a huge violation of Herland's rules. In The Sacrament, it's the opportunity to leave that the outsiders represent. Several residents assume that the filmmakers will be able to take people with them and this quickly causes a riot as they beg to be taken. However, like all utopias, steps are quickly taken to ensure that the status quo is maintained. In this case, it's to keep everyone together in death if they can't in life. Father's paranoia about the outside world leads to a plan that will find everyone committing mass suicide.
It's significant then that the camera is no longer in the hands of the filmmakers when the massacre itself begins. They are removed from the action and the film no longer carries the same judgemental quality that characterised it before, simply because their gaze isn't focused on these events. Instead, it is in the hands of Caroline who agrees entirely with what Father is doing to the point of killing her own brother. When the massacre begins, the film becomes considerably calmer, a sharp contrast to the hysteria that characterised it before Jake left for the helicopter. It makes the massacre itself incredibly chilling and a balance is struck as a result.
Seeing these people die for their faith doesn't feel exploitative because we're left to form our own opinions on what we're seeing. When babies are fed syringes as their mothers willingly look on, when children drink the 'potion' down in one gulp because they're asked to or when a family begs their son to join them, the camera presents it coldly, in a matter of fact way. This in turn makes the events feel that much worse because the audience are. It's here that The Sacrament naturally must diverge from the utopian genre as the society is well and truly destroyed by Father's actions.
It's at this point that the camera is returned to the filmmakers, a necessity in order to align the audience back with the emotional core of the film and to observe the horrific aftermath of the massacre. The outsiders manage to escape, but not without leaving pretty much everyone in the camp dead in contrast to traditional utopias which would see the society continue as the outsiders leave. Here, the film closes with the tragic results of the massacre, a haunting reminder of the dangers of exploitation and fanaticism.
- Becky
You can check out the full list of Shocktober reviews so far here.
Follow @AssortedBuffery on Twitter
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Over the course of October, I shall be watching one horror movie a day and reviewing it right here for your reading pleasure. I haven't seen any of the films I'll be watching before and you can find the full list here.
