Ten Days of Terror!: A Horrible Way to Die

Film: A Horrible Way to Die
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Low-budget filmmaking is aways interesting to me because it often requires the filmmaker to be a lot more creative with how they tell the story. I remember seeing an interview with Sam Raimi talking about this, saying that with the first Evil Dead movies, they had to figure out creative ways to get the shots they wanted, but with a budget, you just throw money at the problem. A Horrible Way to Die is a film that honestly pushes the limit of what can/should be expected in low-budget filmmaking.

I genuinely don’t want to come off as a snob here, because for whatever reason, director Adam Wingard—who has done Godzilla movies—has evidently decided that “low budget” also means “amateurish.” Now, to be fair, this was an early film in his filmography, and it wasn’t until he’d been around for a bit that he got to do things like Godzilla vs. Kong. That might explain some of this, but it doesn’t explain the fact that he seems to be dead set against 1) letting the camera sit still for 10 seconds and 2) focus. I mean that second part literally—it’s not that the film isn’t focusing on a story; it’s that the camera is literally out of focus in a lot of shots.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Guest

Film: The Guest
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

It’s fun when a movie goes in a direction that you don’t expect. Because The Guest is on the They Shoot Zombies list, I knew this would eventually turn into a horror movie, but I wasn’t sure exactly how it was going to turn into a horror movie. On the surface, this looks like it could be a lot of things, and while thriller is certainly a possibility (and it’s closer to a thriller in a lot of ways than straight horror), there are moments when it looks like it might be a comedy or even a romance. I respect that in a film. Keep the audience guessing.

The Guest doesn’t start out like a horror movie, but we’re going to get some real hints that it’s going to dive head-first into horror. We begin with the realization that the Peterson family has lost a son in military service. Shortly after this, a man named David Collins (Dan Stevens) arrives and tells them that he knew their son in the service. David is good-looking and plenty charming and has soon gotten Laura Peterson (Sheila Kelley) to invite him to stay with them for a few days. David’s claim is that he promised Laura’s son Caleb that he would look after them.

Home Sweet Home

Film: You’re Next
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

Home invasion movies, especially if you expand that subgenre to include movies like Vacancy, have experienced something of a renaissance in the past decade or so, but they’ve been around for a long time. Wait Until Dark is a home invasion movie, after all, and there are movies that have home invasion as an important plot point from decades before this. For modern home invasions, movies like The Strangers are a convenient template, but so is You’re Next. After all, You’re Next is not simply home invasion; there’s much more of a plot here than just people breaking in and killing indiscriminately.

But, at it’s heart, that’s what You’re Next is. It’s going to be a film where we start with a sizable cast that is rapidly and consistently whittled down to just a couple. It’s also a game of cat and mouse between the people in the house and the killers, who are rather terrifyingly disguised The Strangers-like, but with animal masks. They are, in no order, Tiger, Fox, and Sheep.

Be Kind, Rewind

Film: V/H/S
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on The New Portable.

It’s time to dive head-first into that most horror-y of subgenres, the anthology film. V/H/S came out in 2012 to something like fanfare, at least in terms of horror anthologies. Truthfully, horror is one of the only genres where the anthology works at all, and really this is true only because it’s not that hard to get a good scare worked up in a few minutes. That said, the problems that other genres have with anthologies are still suffered by horror movies. There’s not enough build-up to really care about the characters, which means that deeper emotional levels are difficult to achieve. With horror, that means we’re going for the gross out rather than real terror most of the time, and I’m just not that interested.

Of course we’re going to have a framing story here. In this case, our frame is a group of guys who go out and commit a variety of crimes and film themselves doing so, and then sell the tapes of their work. These crimes include petty vandalism and a series of sexual assaults on women in parking lots. When the film starts, we learn they have been offered a large sum of money to break into a particular house and steal a specific video tape. When they arrive, they find a dead man sitting in front of a collection of televisions and a huge set of unmarked V/H/S tapes. And, of course, things are going to go downhill from here.