Ten Days of Terror!: Pyewacket

Film: Pyewacket
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

I like folk horror. There’s always a sense, at least to me, of people meddling in the primal evils of the world that feels like it is touching on just how small we are in the universe. Touching on the deeper, darker underlying horror of the world is akin to our own insignificance in the universe. Calling up primordial horrors, at least to me, is no different in terms of story structure to films like The Vast of Night or Aniara, just with a more Lovecraftian vibe. When I come across a movie where people are performing rituals in the middle of nowhere, I’m going to be interested, even if the movie isn’t highly acclaimed. Thus, we have the oddly named Pyewacket.

Leah Reyes (Nicole Muñoz) is a high school student who leans a bit darker in the things that garner her interest. She’s become increasingly interested in the occult since the death of her father, an event that has pushed her away from her mother (Laurie Holden). The final straw for Leah happens when her mother decides that the house they are living in is too filled with memories of her husband, and she decides to move them to a remote house, away from Leah’s friends. The fact that Leah can’t drive makes this feel like both a prison and a punishment.

Emergency Broadcast System?

Film: This is Not a Test
Format: Streaming video from AMC on Fire!

Is the zombie subgenre played out? I think you can make a pretty good case for that even if I don’t specifically agree with it. The problem with zombie movies is that it’s very difficult to distinguish one movie from another after a while. A movie needs to either be really innovative and do something different or it needs to be made so well that it can’t be ignored. The Girl with All the Gifts presented very different zombies and an interesting version of the zombie plague. Train to Busan was simply pure, high-octane action. Both work because of that. Since This is Not a Test doesn’t have the wall-to-wall insanity of Busan, it’s going to need to do something new.

Sadly, it does not. Zombies and high school kids is something that has been explored before and in interesting ways. Dance of the Dead (zombies at prom) and Anna and the Apocalypse (zombie Christmas musical) did something new. Kids trapped in a high school while zombies rage outside was definitively handled by the Korean show All of Us Are Dead. This is Not a Test follows a lot of the same path. There is a difference here, but it’s not a notable or interesting one.