Ten Days of Terror: The Endless

Film: The Endless
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

Movies about cults feels like an untapped genre to me. There is something inherently upsetting about cults, and in many ways, there is something fascinating about them as well. I say this as a person with no religious faith and happy to be that way. I won’t go into a diatribe here, but I do think the notions of religion are inherently disturbing on a cosmic scale. Most religions essentially tell us that we are the surveilled playthings of something of infinite power. The Endless is a film that makes this idea manifest.

Brothers Justin (Justin Benson, writer and co-director/producer) and Aaron (Aaron Moorhead, the other director/producer) are survivors of a cult that they left when they were very young. Justin remembers this as a cult where the people talk about mass suicides and the men castrate themselves. Aaron, who is younger, remembers it more fondly as a place where he was safe and was fed decent food. Aaron is fed up with the life he and Justin are leading—broke, working menial jobs, and always hungry. They receive a video tape from Anna (Callie Hernandez) welcoming them back to the group. Aaron is interested and coerces Justin into going back for one night.

Ten Days of Terror!: Afflicted

Film: Afflicted
Format: DVD from Earlville Public Library through interlibrary loan on gigantic television.

I am not generally a huge fan of found footage movies, although there are certainly those that have been done well. [REC] and Noroi are great examples of what can be done with the style. The problem I tend to have with the style is that it often comes across as lazy. It’s an interesting way to tell a story, but it also easily breaks the fourth wall by being edited. I tend to go into found footage wary, and I don’t always love finding out that the movie I’ve signed up to watch is done in this style. So I wasn’t really pleased to learn that Afflicted is going to be a lot of shaky cam, shots that don’t really show us anything, and editing in something that by definition shouldn’t be edited.

I should also say off the top here that Afflicted dives into a very different subgenre of horror. Yes, it’s found footage, but this is going to go in a different direction than most. It’s actually the most similar to Chronicle in a lot of respects. That said, I don’t want to completely spoil the surprise of where this goes, so I’m going to put a spoiler tag here—this will contain spoilers. I’ll keep them toward the end as much as I can, but if you haven’t seen this and don’t want the movie spoiled, you should stop reading here.

Ten Days of Terror!: Lights Out

Film: Lights Out
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on gigantic television.

The thing that made the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre revolutionary was not the implied blood, but the fact that everything happened in bright daylight. There was no hiding the horror in the shadows. The makers of Lights Out evidently decided that this was a bad idea and created a movie with the opposite premise. Our monster in this film can’t appear in light—it’s light that causes her to disappear. That premise seems really scary on the surface, but when it comes to a film, it means the audience isn’t going to see a damned thing.

On the surface, I get this decision. Having a creature that you can’t really see or get a close look at is scary, and the film is actually smart enough at one point to create a method for us to see the monster in question. Up to that point, though, this is a movie that lives almost literally in the shadows. Scary for the characters in the narrative, but frustrating for the audience trying to see anything.

Ten Days of Terror!: The White Reindeer

Film: The White Reindeer (Valkoinen peura)
Format: Streaming video from AMC+ on Fire!

Lycanthropy is a pretty common trope not just in movies, but in culture. We tend to think “werewolves” when the idea comes up, but different cultures have different animals that evil people turn into. The DC character King Shark is based off the Hawaiian legend of Nanaue, a man who could turn into a shark. Not all of the were-creatures are as viscerally threatening as a wolf or a shark. Case in point is The White Reindeer (Valkoinen peura), a Finnish horror film where the title character is a shapeshifter.

The White Reindeer is very much a folk tale, the sort of story that feels like it was told around a fire at night by Laplanders herding reindeer. A girl is born to a Finnish family. Her mother Maarita (Mirjami Kuosmanen) names her Pirita (also eventually played by Mirjami Kuosmanen). It is prophesied that Pirita will become the subject of a great song of the people. Of course, all great tales need a hero, but they also need a villain.

Ten Days of Terror!: Spring

Film: Spring
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

There’s a surprising amount of romance in the horror genre. Gothic films often have a strong romance element in them. In fact, when Dracula was released in 1931, it was advertised as the strangest passion the world has ever known. These days, we have Guillermo del Toro and the whole (pardon the expression) “monsterfucker” crowd, people who have an apparent fetish for monsters in one way or another. Enter Spring, a movie that starts as a romance, clearly becomes body horror, but stays a romance for the running time.

Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) watches his mother die from cancer, and days later, after her funeral, gets into a fight in the bar he works at. The man who incurred his wrath finds out where Evan lives and plans to press charges, and the fight costs Evan his job. While he doesn’t want to necessarily leave his friend Tommy (Jeremy Gardner), Evan decides that discretion is the better part of valor. He grabs his passport, heads to the airport, and hops on the first flight he can get out of the country, winding up in Italy.

Ten Days of Terror!: Pathogen

Film: Pathogen
Format: Streaming video from Fawesome on Fire!

We need to talk about Pathogen, the 2006 movie written and directed by Emily Hagens. There are plenty of zombie movies and plenty of movies directed by women. But how many movies, let alone zombie movies, are there directed by a 12-year-old girl? That’s the case with this one—a true product of a child’s ambition. That, if for no other reason, makes this worth seeing.

What this means, though, is that you shouldn’t really go into this with a lot of expectations of Pathogen being a masterpiece. It’s not. It is exactly what you expect in a lot of ways—it has virtually no budget and everyone involved in it is an amateur. This is evident from the opening moments through to the end. The zombies are just folks Emily knew, as are everyone else in the cast. The effects are going to happen off-camera because she didn’t have the budget to show much. Camera angles are spotty, line reads are wooden. And you know what? It doesn’t matter a bit.

Ten Days of Terror!: Day of the Dead (2008)

Film: Day of the Dead (2008)
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

I suppose a remake of George Romero’s Day of the Dead was inevitable. We got a 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, which turned out pretty good. The 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead had some issues, but it made up for them with buckets of blood. The 2008 remake of Day of the Dead is more a spiritual remake in that there are similarities to the original, but these are surface similarities only. This feels like more of an attempt to capitalize on the name more than anything else. It’s a zombie movie, but it’s one that doesn’t seem like it exists in the same universe.

The biggest issue with Day of the Dead is that it is staggeringly inconsistent with its own rules. This is a movie that sets up the parameters of the zombie plague and how it works and then routinely alters those rules if the plot demands it or there’s some scare to be had from breaking its own rules. It’s a cardinal sin of movie making in my opinion. Worse than being a bad movie is being a lazy one, and not much is lazier than breaking your own rules because you haven’t found an in-world way to work out what you want to have happen.