Ten Days of Terror!: The Hole

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

There are a lot of classic tropes in movies in general, and there are genre expectations in terms of plot. There are also set-ups that we see over and over again because they work. For the horror genre, one of the most classic of tropes is the idea of a group of teens or 20-somethings heading out to the middle of nowhere and then something terrible happens. The “people in the middle of nowhere” trope goes back to the silent era, or at least the earliest talkies. In later years and with the rise of more gonzo horror, it happened more and more. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and Evil Dead wouldn’t exist without this trope. The Hole takes this basic idea and attempts to do something a little different with it.

We start with the rescue of boarding school student Liz (Thora Birch), who is the only survivor of a group of four who have been missing for nearly three weeks. Through a series of interviews with a psychologist (Embeth Davidtz). The story we get from Liz is that her friend Martin (Daniel Brockelbank) has discovered a fallout shelter in the middle of the forest nearby and has a key for it. Liz wants quality time with the school stud, Mike (Desmond Harrington), and arranges for her friend Frankie (Keira Knightley) and her mancrush Geoff (Laurence Fox) to go with them during a school field trip. Their parents think they are on the trip; the school thinks they are with their parents.

Prison Break

Film: Le Trou (The Hole)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

For whatever reason, I’ve been seeing an increasing number of subtitled films lately (and most of the ones I’m planning on seeing this coming week fit this bill as well). I’m not sure there’s a specific reason why this is, other than that about half of what I have left is subtitled. I also didn’t plan to watch a couple of films in a row that feature non-professional actors. This happens now and again—I’ll watch two films that have something interesting in common without planning things that way.

Le Trou (The Hole) is the final film of Jacques Becker, who died while the film was in post-production. The film is based on a real life event, a prison break that happened in the late 1940s in France. We spend almost all of our time with a group of five men—one is sort of the main character, but also sort of isn’t and gets that designation only because we learn a little more about him than we do about the others.