Tag Archives: horror movies

Movie Review: The Conjuring

I saw the trailer for The Conjuring early last spring, you know the one I’m talking about, with the hide and seek, the clap, clap. Whatever movie this preview was opening for wasn’t even scary, and so I found myself totally unprepared for the terror that I was about to experience. Sure, and without giving too much away, the essence of that scene is mostly shock, or as they refer to it in that South Park episode, being startled.

The Conjuring Clap

But that’s exactly what you go to a horror movie to feel. A good one, anyway. The Conjuring is definitely a good horror movie. I felt like I was clinging to the sides of my seat the entire time, the sides of my seat, the bottom, I’d grab onto any part of the movie theater seat and clench my hands, my arms, everything, and I’d realize that it wasn’t really helping me manage the terror. So I’d shift, I’d grab something else. I wound up spending most of the movie sitting there with my arms wrapped tightly around my chest, exercising basically every muscle in my body.

So you get the picture, I was scared, I liked it. But why does this movie work where so many horror films fall flat? It’s all about pace, especially with a movie like this that doesn’t really stray too far from the time tested forms of the genre. There are creaky stairs, doors opening and closing by themselves, there was definitely a lot of stuff that we’ve already scene before.

But the pacing was perfect. It’s the kind of very slow, things-slightly-start-to-go-wrong mentality, an ominous build up that lets you know something very sinister is going on. That’s easy enough, at least, they made me scared during that trailer. But how would this idea play out for an entire movie?

We all know that there are going to be things popping out at you, lots of slow camera shots that just beg to be interrupted by a scary ghost-lady close-up, but at what point to you sit back and go, OK, this isn’t scary anymore? A lot of times whatever is being used as a plot gets too convoluted, like maybe they’ll look in the history books and figure out the origins of the paranormal activity, and they’ll have to return an amulet or something to set a certain spirit to rest.

So to me, the perfect horror movie never lets you go. Even as whatever is going on is brought to a climax, you’re still sitting there in your seat trying to find that magical position that might make the fear somewhat more bearable. That’s what this movie achieves. You’re never comfortable.

There’s a little side-story opening, involving a doll, which almost made me check out ten minutes into the film. Then we dive right into this family moving into this house somewhere in New England. It looks like it might have started falling apart a hundred years ago. They don’t waste time on too much backstory, and it’s not one of these things where only one person can tell there’s something wrong here.

And equally as important, there’s also not that one idiot character that, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, remains firm in his or her conviction that there’s absolutely nothing going on here.

Oh yeah, and it’s in the seventies. I’m telling you, the seventies are fucking scary. So are the sixties. The eighties are just this big neon joke and the nineties, well, I grew up in the nineties, so to me, it’s all a little too familiar. And go ahead trying to make a horror movie set in the present. Whenever I get scared in my house, I turn on all of my TVs, my lights, and I start streaming as much music and video from the Internet at the same time. There’s too much distraction in our modern world to get really scared of anything.

But the seventies, man, you’ve got a problem with ghosts? You can’t just send an email to some random ghost hunters you found on the Internet. No, you have to stalk them at some college hours away where they happen to be giving a lecture. And what if you need emergency clearance from the Vatican for a last minute exorcism? Sorry pal, we’ll see if we can’t get in touch with Rome tomorrow morning. And by the way, that call’s going to be expensive, so we’re going to need a deposit.

Also, the kids say stuff like groovy, and far out. Yup, that’s pretty much how I imagine the seventies, no cell phones, lots of creepy black and white TV static, groovy. I’m terrified.

The Conjuring is fantastically scary. Seriously, I’m still shaking. And no, nothing especially new happened, no envelopes were pushed or anything like that. It’s just a very well put together horror film. It’s like a really catchy summer pop song that the entire world gets stuck in its head. No, there’s nothing especially revolutionary going on here, but something’s been tapped, something universal, and it’s been executed almost flawlessly.

Movie Review: Evil Dead

Right away you know that everything is definitely not going to be OK. There’s a girl running through the woods. What’s she running from? Two guys with a shotgun. They catch her. They knock her unconscious. They bring her back to the cabin. Yeah, that cabin. In the basement. Yeah, that basement. The one with all of the dead cats hung from the rafters. With all of these deformed looking relatives standing around, some crazy witch lady reading out of a serious looking spell book in some unrecognizable tongue. There’s cursing. There’s a twist. Lots and lots of fire.

And that’s all even before the title, Evil Dead, is slammed on the screen, right in your face, big nasty red letters on an all black background, the last A in Dead, it’s got that cabin built right into the font. We’re not wasting any time here folks, we’ve only been in the theater for about five minutes now, and the pace isn’t about to slow down any time soon.

Now we’ve got the cast pulling up to the cabin. That cabin. It’s like the cabin from Cabin in the Woods, but not pretending to be a horror movie. This is the real deal. Every square inch of this dump looks like it’s one footstep shy of a rot-induced implosion. Why would anybody want to spend any time here at all, let alone five young, good-looking guys and girls?

Unlike the 1980s B-movie franchise from which this new release was derived, this plot is at least slightly more believable. Whereas thirty years ago Bruce Campbell and the gang thought digs like this would make a nice spot for a weekend party getaway, our contemporary crew is here on more serious business: helping their junkie friend swear off hard drugs and make it through the ensuing withdrawal in total isolation from the outside world. Don’t worry, one of the women is a registered nurse.

Again, this was a novel plot twist on a very played out genre. When that spell book from earlier is found, despite barbed wire wrapping, with total disregard to the written-in-blood warning to, whatever you do, do not read from this book, the nerd of the group cannot let his curiosity lie. He doesn’t know it right away, but he summons an old demon, it infects the addict, and everybody mistakes her possession for classic dope-sickness.

Even when she beats the dog to death with a hammer. Even when she scalds herself with boiling water. Even after she starts stabbing people with a box cutter, proclaiming, “You will all die here tonight,” in a clearly demon-possessed voice. And yes, even after the nerdy guy figures out what he’s done and tries to burn the spell book, only to realize that it simply will not burn. “I don’t know,” the non-nerdy guy protests, “Maybe she’s just really, really sick.”

I’m partial to cheesy horror movies. I spent the summer in between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college driving to various Blockbusters on Long Island in hopes of finding all three parts of the Evil Dead trilogy. Back in the eighties, Sam Raimi had little to no money to instill fear upon an audience. He made up for it by making his movies as over-the-top as you could imagine. Think buckets of blood everywhere.

The new movie is obviously a big budget production, but they stay true to form, squeezing every possible ounce of gore and violence out of every dollar in the budget. There’s not a second of down time. It’s scene after scene of squirming in your seat, not knowing from which way what horror is going to come at you this time. There’s a chainsaw. There’s a nail gun with a never ending supply of nails. There’s a jury-rigged defibrillator made out of a car battery and some leftover syringes. In homage to Sam Raimi’s buckets of blood, the sky literally cracks open and pours torrents of red.

My pulse is still racing. As an adult, when I see new horror movies I’m either left overly disgusted by torture-porn or terribly underwhelmed by bad writing and unconvincing stories. Evil Dead didn’t give me a second to feel anything at all. I sat down, the words Evil Dead pounded on the screen, my body locked up all tense for an hour and a half or so, and the words Evil Dead were stamped once again. Go see this movie. Wait for it to come out on Netflix months from now. Find an old VHS player and somehow record it onto a blank tape. When you have kids, wait until they turn seventeen and set it up so that they find it lying around on their own. Baton passed.