In short: Impossible Horror (2017)

Indie filmmaker Lily (Haley Walker) is reeling from the end of long-term relationship. Unable to work, she is spending her insomniac nights watching VHS tapes of what look like home movie interpretations of genre films. To add insult to injury, her apartment is also haunted by a presence that goes through all the typical small scale spookery one can expect from any low grade example of its type. Then there’s the Scream (capital letter properly deserved) coming from outside which usually seems to happen around the same time of the night.

One night, when the haunting gets too bad and a horror movie sensibly suggests flight when encountering the supernatural, Lily leaves her apartment only to encounter a woman with a mutilated face and other assorted troubles. She also meets Hannah (Creedance Wright) a young, apparently homeless woman prone to violence obsessed with following and understanding the Scream; she’s particularly driven by a loss we’ll only learn about later. She and Lily team up eventually, racing through the nights following the Scream and a series of objects it seems to leave behind, while growing increasingly less sane.

This scrappy little film directed by Justin Decloux is certainly not going to be for everyone, even everyone who likes the more odd side of movie street. The movie itself makes some wry comments about film school projects, and at times, its use of every filmic technique it can afford (plus the kitchen sink, of course), the very earnest presentation of some of its ideas, the sometimes awkward yet always fully involved acting and even its specific sense of irony do indeed smell of the film school quite a bit.

On the plus side, there’s really nothing wrong at all with young filmmakers making exactly this sort of low budget indie, experimenting with forms, styles and genres, while – at least it feels very much that way to me – having quite a bit of fun doing so. There’s always time to become middle-aged and cynical later on.

It sure helps the film’s case that its inclusion of all kinds of techniques, even bits in the style of experimental cinema, also results in something that has no single boring shot in it – there’s at the very least always something interesting to look at. And why not throw in a random martial arts fight foreshadowed by one of Lily’s videos too?

Even better, quite often, said interesting thing you’re looking at does make sense in the film’s tale of, well, an impossible horror that’s just a couple of changes away from my beloved cosmic horror. The Scream and what it does to artists types is very much in the tradition, as is the film’s love for portraying weird changes in the way the world, physics and people work. On a metaphorical level, there’s some not always successful yet also not terribly unsuccessful business about artists becoming horrible human beings for their art, which I can take or leave.


Still, even in these moments, there’s a sense of excitement surrounding what’s going on on screen, a giddy “We! Are! Making! A! Film! Now!” that’s more than just a little infectious, and makes me really curious about what the people in front and behind the camera are going to do next.