Head Count (2018)

Evan (Isaac Jay) has come to the California desert to visit his brother Peyton (Cooper Rowe) who has some sort of straight edge drop out trailer dweller thing going on there. However, when they meet a group of college students on vacation out on a hike, Evan falls for one of them, Zoe (Ashleigh Morghan), rather hard, and since she seems to reciprocate, waltzes off with them to their isolated desert place to do the usual movie college kid debauchery.

Things between Evan and Zoe develop rather nicely, but an ill-chosen bit of campfire creepypasta seems to have dire consequences. Something focussed on groups of five seems to leech onto the group, sometimes taking on the form of one them when the original is just around the corner, and clearly planning something bad. Evan is picking up on this rather quickly, but since he’s basically a complete stranger, the rest of the group remains sceptical, and once they have reasons to be convinced, the situation will have escalated badly.

Inspired by the creepy little idea of a group’s headcount always seeming to come up a number too high known from goat man creepypasta (if you’re young) as well as some traditional weird tales (if you’re an old fart like me), Elle Callahan’s Head Count is a lovely example of how to use a simple core idea to make a fine, fun, horror movie. Callahan – who also co-wrote with Michael Nader – does of course add details to that core idea, but keeps those details at once close enough to the core (once you start with counting problems, you might as well make a number important) yet also vague enough to be fitting as well as creepy. This is not one of those movies of rules-based horror where everything is explained completely and you get the feeling of watching a peculiar kind of live action board game rulebook, but rather one satisfied with using monster rules to help create the proper mood of dread without going into too many details.

Hints are more interesting anyway; and showing the characters of a film not quite understanding how what they are up against operates simply increases the feeling of threat.

Callahan is rather great at building up to the climax, aiming for a feeling of disquiet for much of the movie that eventually becomes one of panic. So at first the film’s threat works through doppelgangers seen at the borders of the camera frame, and camera work that suggests something’s not quite right in this desert, making wonderful use of the horror of wide-open spaces here, until these doppelgangers step more and more into the centre of the frame, turning from silent presences into true copies of their originals. There’s a deftly created sense of creepiness running through nearly the whole of the film, a mood of things being not quite right and something always looking over the characters’ shoulders.

The character work is very solid, too. Relationships and character traits are clearly and easily introduced, and the more complex details of character relations are then deepened more by their physical position in the frame and the postures the young actors take than through dialogue. It’s very effectively done, still using archetypes yet avoiding to turn the group into a disposable cabin of meat to for the film to chew through without anyone caring.


Which adds up to a fine, focussed movie, at least in my book.