Three Films Make A Post: If you can't breathe, then you can't scream.

Reeker (2005): From time to time, Dave Payne’s low budget supernatural slasher hits on the set-up for a good scene or two. Invariably, said scene never is quite as good as it could be because it is shot and/or staged as the most clichéd bit of early 00s horror imaginable. The pacing is off as well, characters are the usual annoying clichés, and the ending goes for the worst plot twist. And yes, it’s exactly the twist a curiously large number of desert set horror movies use, and towards which I feel a particular dislike. It’s a pretty desert, at least.

What movie those among the film’s contemporary critics saw to speak of interesting characters and a smart script, I don’t know.

Black Wood (2022): This contemporary indie horror western directed and written by Chris Canfield, does actually feature rather better character writing than you’d expect, as well as a script that understands how to use elements of the – somewhat revisionist – western and horror genres well together. The acting’s a little off sometimes (in a way typical of very indie films), but the central performances by Tanajsia Slaughter and Bates Wilder are very strong. Plus, the film does manage to work as a western as well as a horror film, which isn’t actually that easy a thing to achieve.

Moloch (2022): There are a lot of things to like about this piece of folk horror from the Netherlands: peat bogs and bog bodies are sadly underused elements in horror at the best of times, and director Nico van den Brink does milk the locations for quite a bit of foggy mood building. The script (by van den Brink and Daan Bakker) has some fun ideas about how to include the central folk legend; I haven’t seen this sort of thing done in a sort of screwed-up child nativity version before, and it certainly works well with the way actual folk traditions radiate outwards from their sources.

The more typical horror moments are a bit too generic and jump scare-heavy for my tastes, but the film’s use of folklore and its attempts at speaking about family trauma via horror are more than enough to make up for that.