You Might Be the Killer (2018)

You know the drill: a camp full of camp counsellors, a masked killer, physically improbable violence, self-conscious talk about the way slashers operate. But wait, don’t slink away yawning just yet, for Brett Simmons’s self-conscious slasher does actually have more than one good idea, and turns out to be a much better film than “ironic” slashers usually are. Perhaps because here, “ironic” isn’t a different way to write “lazy”.

Our protagonist and potential killer (see title, so nobody complain about spoilers please) Sam (Fran Kranz) reports the story of his very bad night at camp to his slasher-expert friend Chuck (Alyson Hannigan) over the phone while hiding from the killer (or is he?). He did actually call the sheriff before her, or really his voicemail, but the guy is old, has the voice of Keith David in grandfather mode, and really isn’t going to come around for hours at best. Chuck tries her best to help, but once Sam tells her of his curious lapses in memory and other incidences of the kind not wont to make a friend optimistic, she’s more the expert nerd delivering all the bad news. Let’s just say that definitely mild-mannered Sam just might have encountered a cursed mask, and just maybe do very bad things when he’s wearing it. And we all know what happens to the masked killer at the end of these films, right? So the story is until the final act when the timelines converge mostly told in flashbacks that aren’t necessarily trustworthy or in the right order.

At first, this approach, particularly with the film showing an actual body count on screen, seems rather too self-conscious and constructed but it quickly becomes clear that You Might Be the Killer actually uses this structure not only to point out how clever it is but to actually get a degree of suspense out of the samey genre that is the slasher. Sure, it says, we all know everyone of these guys except for the obvious final girl are going to die horribly, but let’s use our more self-conscious perspective on things to get a bit more into how all the deaths fit into the way the narrative is constructed. Yes, the film does indeed attempt to build a degree of suspense out of examining the way a slasher is actually put together; it also succeeds in this goal surprisingly well, mostly because it is indeed as clever as it thinks it is: that seemingly too-clever body count, for example, is not just as smug nod and the base for a couple of actually funny little gags, but also an actually clever way for the audience to orient itself in the flashbacks. So, obviously, the script by Simmons, Covis Berzoyne and Thomas P. Vitale has put rather a lot of thought into the structure of the film, even if it doesn’t appear that way at first.

But let’s get back to the gags, for this is, after all, billed as a horror comedy. Pleasantly, at least for my taste, it’s not one of these a joke every ten seconds affairs that tend to get tiresome fast. While there are some actual jokes, the film’s humour is based more on its general tone and its knowledge about the basic absurdity of the slasher genre, not so much making fun of as having fun with slasher clichés, avoiding to become a series of unfunny “funny” situations like for example the Hatchet films do by the simple power of good taste applied intelligently. It also helps that Simmons actually seems to like his characters and cares about their fates. So when it comes to post-slashers, the best comparison would probably be Final Girls, even though these are still two very different films.


Very much to its credit, You Might Be the Killer also manages to be fun horror film, never forgetting that the bloody business at hand is indeed supposed to be bloody, and that, even in a horror comedy, the actual supernatural threat needs to be threatening instead of clownish. Indeed, the killer and the mask are played perfectly straight, and there are a quite a few moments that are straightforwardly suspenseful. Simmons also really knows how to shoot a slasher-style wood and cabins set-up in Louisiana atmospherically; in fact, the way it is set up, there’s just a small step between this and a more traditional slasher movie, which makes the humour and the film’s perspective on the genre all the more effective.

In short: Animal (2014)

The by now for all practical purposes proverbial quintet of young, attractive friends (let’s just list Keke Palmer and Elizabeth Gillies) are making a short, day-long hike into the deep dark woods. Alas, when night breaks, an ugly, hungry monster makes its presence known, and soon the quintet’s not a quintet anymore. The thing chases the friends into the just as proverbial cabin in the woods. They are not alone in there, though, for the thing has already chased earlier victims into it who in their turn had already found parts of the house barricaded. Some of these people are even still alive, so everything’s set for a little siege scenario where every one of the character’s plans is thwarted and their numbers are slowly whittled down.

On the surface – and very often below it too – Brett Simmons’s Animal looks like a very generic monster movie like you might see on the SyFy Channel if their films had better photography. However, as I might have said before (and before, and before that) with this sort of traditional approach to horror film, a film wins or loses my eyes and heart with how well it executes the traditions. On that point, Animal does very well, with Simmons making excellent use of the claustrophobic situation, working from an exceedingly well paced script.

The character work is often a bit crude but I think something deeper and more complex would actually hurt this particular movie by slowing it down too much. At least, the characters are generally likeable (except for the one who isn’t supposed to be likeable at all), so I didn’t find myself rooting for the monster, and while there’s not really the feeling of watching real human beings under horrible pressure, they do engage one on more than just the level of pure monster fodder. Okay, there’s one strangely misplaced scene where Paul Iacono’s Sean feels the need to confess he had a crush on one of the other characters’ boyfriend that puzzles me by the sheer virtue of its uselessness for the proceedings, but if that’s the worst the film gets up to, I’m fine with it. And while the characterisation isn’t exactly original – at best slightly updating the spam in a cabin character clichés for 2014 – the film does take care to change up little things like the order in which they bite the bucket, even going as far as playing with who our actual hero is.

It’s, as I already said, not deep stuff, but it does keep Animal lively even when there’s no monster attack going on. And, since the monster attacks themselves are all engaging (and even fun), that’s all the character work needs to do.

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Three Films Make A Post: DO THE UNDEAD DEMONS OF HELL STILL ARISE TO TERRORIZE THE WORLD?

Killer Toon (2013): It seems strategically unsound to me to state one's theme - the collision between reality and fantasy with reality losing out quite badly - as outright as Kim Yong-gyoon's South Korean horror film does, when all the film then goes on to deliver is a series of boringly filmed, unimaginative horror set pieces we've seen a thousand times before done better. Delivering the trite is one thing, but delivering the trite after promising at least a bit of intelligence is quite a bit worse. My annoyance with the film did not decrease through its generous appliance of unfunny humour, nor with the time it spent on your usual cliché cops doing the usual cliché cop things without an inkling of verve or spirit (not to speak of things like dramatic tension, or rather their absence).

The Monkey's Paw (2013): Brett Simmons's adaptation of W.W. Jacobs's classic short story puts a bit more effort into changing the story for a full length film than I had expected, keeping the monkey's paw and its law of horrible consequences but going off into different directions, setting it in a Southern working class milieu you don't often get to see in horror movies, and doing some pretty decent character work. On the other hand, the milieu, the paw, and the characters are then used for what amounts to your typical psycho killer thriller with slight supernatural elements, which certainly is something Simmons is competent at directing, but which also isn't all that interesting or exciting, and really doesn't do anything with the philosophical implications of the story.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a more than decent film, I'm just irked when a film seems to consciously avoid everything I'd be excited about it exploring. Make the films I want, damn it!

Embrace of the Vampire (2013): I don't generally get too angry at remakes - at least I'm trying not to - but some of them just puzzle me. Why remake a softcore vampire romp whose only claim to fame are Alyssa Milano's breasts? There can really be only two reasons. The first one would be that director and writers have found something in the original to really latch onto and explore deeper, some theme or plot element that could really resonate in new and interesting ways twenty years later. Of course, once you've seen this particular film's mixture of tits, awkward acting and soap operatics, that explanation goes right out of the window, leaving me with reason number two. Namely, the people involved thought there just aren't enough naked young women in contemporary horror anymore and set out to help change it/milk it for all the money it's worth. In so far as it contains a lot of tits and some softcore sex, Embrace of the Vampire 2013 is a total success. Too bad it’s not the least bit entertaining.

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Husk (2010)

The traditional car full of young people (Devon Graye, Wes Chatham, C.J. Thomason, Tammin Sursok, Ben Easter) is going on a trip. Somewhere in the place of horror usually known as "the country", a gaggle of crows starts a kamikaze attack on the car's windscreen, causing it to crash by the side of a cornfield. Everyone loses consciousness for a while, but when they awake, one of them - Johnny - has disappeared. Surely, he has just made his way through the corn to the next farm for help and there's no need to worry?

Still, the more heroically inclined part of the group makes its way through the field in the hope of finding their friend, or possibly help. But something's not right at all. The field contains some peculiar scarecrows; they all look a bit too bulky to me, and are there supposed to be so many flies around them? The mood of wrongness doesn't improve when his friends find Johnny inside the otherwise empty farm. He's not talking and seems to have developed a sudden enthusiasm for mutely using an old-fashioned sewing machine in a not factory-approved way. Johnny also looks somewhat, well, dead. And of course there's something or someone lurking in the field too, something very fast that is bound to grab a horror movie character and do something unpleasant to him or her pretty damn soon.

You probably can't blame Brett Simmons's Husk for being very original. All the film's elements have been used before in other films in about the same combination. Consequently, not much of what's happening will be much of a surprise to anyone with even minor knowledge of the history of horror films.

Fortunately, you can get away with a lack in originality in genre cinema when you're able to pull off a satisfying execution, and Simmons is quite good at that part of his job. In the best B-movie tradition, Husk knows what it wants (first being creepy, then shouting "boo!" for a bit, then being exciting, then being loveable by not having a twist ending), knows what's relatively cheap and creepy (scarecrows, cornfields, things that come from behind, dilapidated farmhouses, the country), and knows how to use the latter to realize the former.

For large parts of the movie, Simmons is keeping the pacing just right, putting enough breathing space between the shocks to not fall into the carnival ride mode of lesser horror movies, but at the same time never stopping for too long to let his audience think too much, so that the usual complaint about the characters acting like idiots (which is, by the way, often enough how people act in real life) will probably not apply; unless you've come to nitpick instead to enjoy. The whole film carries with it a palpable love for the horror genre and its traditions, but does not seem to feel the need to show off with it; there is neither the ironic posturing ("look, I'm doing the same old shite as the laziest slasher films of the 80s, but I'm doing it ironically instead of trying to fix the form's problems") nor the "I'm just kidding, boobies, hurr-hurr" dumbness that can make certain parts of the contemporary horror landscape so completely fucking annoying. Husk prefers to be tight.

Simmons is also pretty good at the character bits. I'm not talking deep psychological exploration here (the film's too much of the fast and fun type of horror for that), but the stock characters as they are written here possess enough life to give the solid cast (now I'm sounding like Variety; just need to work on absurd, made-up words, "stock charcs?") something to work with. More interesting victims arise, and so the audience - hopefully - cares a little more about what happens to them.

On the nitpicking front, I only had my problems with the way the film provides the (un)necessary exposition on the background of the cursed farm it takes place on. Of course, giving one character random visions is still better than having everything explained by a diary found in the farm's attic, so I'm not going to grumble about this too loudly. I'm just not completely sure the film needs these explanations at all, and wouldn't fare better with either just dropping subtle visual clues or just letting the supernatural be inexplicable and without any knowable reason.

However, when the only thing I'm complaining about in a contemporary low budget horror movie is some minor part of its script's execution, it's a sign that I had a lot of fun watching it. Husk is just a very fine film, with exactly as much ambition as it can realistically realize, made by a director about whose future films I'm already excited.

 

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