The Dead Inside (2005)

The years following World War II. Lola Morgandy (Bronwyn Lee) and John Katzen (Chuck Depape) have apparently been a team ever since she – working as a spy – saved him from Italian imprisonment. The two work as paranormal investigators in the more pulpy occult detective vein – there’s clearly some backstory there we’re never told.

Right now, they’ve been tasked to explain and more importantly end the disturbing occurrences in a large-ish mansion in Victoria, BC. It’s a really troubled place: people tend to move in, but then rather quickly disappear without a trace – certainly without taking their belongings. And even those who only spend a night or so there are plagued by nightmares too terrible to be normal. The laws of physics also don’t appear to be always working as they should in the house – there’s a gravitational anomaly in a certain corner that would probably break most physicists.

Because there’s science to be done they don’t feel quite up to, our heroes invite physicist Professor Fallstead (Theodore Trout), his assistant Betty (Bettina May), and scientist suffering from heavy SAN loss Dr Koeppler (Chris Tihor) to help them investigate.

Obviously, things will become dangerous rather quickly, because whatever slips through the cracks in our reality in the house is very dangerous indeed, and loves to attack people with nightmares and twisted visions of past traumatic experiences, something most of the characters have a considerable amount of.

This very indie Canadian production directed, written, produced, edited (and so on, we know how this kind of semi-professional production works) by Brian Clement is a rather fun film. Unlike many a movie on this budget and infrastructure level, The Dead Inside has little interest in presenting the holy duality of gore and tits, nor in working through much personal directorial angst. Instead, it attempts to tell a fun occult detective tale with certain Lovecraftian undertones, mixed with a bit of actual character psychology, in as effective a manner as it can get away with under the circumstances of production.

For my tastes, it succeeds rather well at this goal. The Dead Inside is certainly a much better paced film than most of its peers, getting in and out of scenes like a champ - which only sounds like faint praise to someone who hasn’t seen much independent genre cinema. The characters may be archetypes but are also consistent, have the degree of inner life needed for the film, and make sense as parts of the world of the film, while the actors are generally well capable of doing what the script asks of them – a couple, Lee most certainly, probably more.

In general, Dead Inside does have some rough visual edges – the framing tends to be a bit cramped, for example, I assume for production reasons rather than ones of lack of visual imagination. Yet there’s also a much more important sense of filmmakers putting love and effort on screen, an eye for the telling detail and how to get it into your scenes with little money, so there are some clever touches to production design, acting and writing, and a continuity in mood between scenes that makes them feel like parts of a whole.

In tone and style, the narrative does give off a bit of the vibe of a Call of Cthulhu RPG investigation. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that tabletop game had been an influence – Lovecraft is certainly mentioned in the credits and in spirit - though of course, a good dose of Hellboy and 30s and 40s pulp occult detective tales might as well explain it. This isn’t a complaint in any case: there’s nothing at all wrong with these influences, I love them all dearly, as regular visitors and random strangers know. In fact, I found the feeling of those influences to be a not inconsiderable part of the movie’s charm. There are, after all, not so very many occult detective movies in this vein around, and even fewer that are quite as much fun as this one is.