THE BARN (2016)

Halloween is the top day of the year for me. And when a filmmaker sets out to not just set his or her story on Halloween, but make Halloween a driving part of the story, looking back to its many myths and origins for its conflict, well, you’ve got my attention. And I want nothing more than for these filmmakers to succeed, so I may add it to my yearly pile of must-watch October viewing.

Strictly judged on this criterion, writer/director Justin Seaman succeeds.

The Barn, the newest in a long line of throwback slasher films, has its heart in the right place, which allows it to transcend the problems that most low-budget filmmaking inevitably displays. Featuring bit roles for ‘80s horror icons Linnea Quigley (Return of the Living Dead) and Ari Lehman (Young Jason from the original Friday the 13th as a hilariously strange television horror-host), The Barn takes place on Halloween night, 1989, and feels every bit like it. After its excellent opening, which lays down the legend of Hallowed Jack, Candycorn Scarecrow, and the Boogeyman (aka the Miner), we cut to “the present” and meet our usual group of kids who will get into kid hijinks and come face-to-face with an array of evil Halloween spirits.

If The Barn gets anything right, it’s the loyal devotion to Halloween. The first five minutes alone exude more October ambiance than all of Trick ‘r Treat, and the somewhat party store design of its movie maniacs easily call forth Conal Cochran’s trio of now-iconic masks from Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. When the screen is filled with costumed kids, cornfields, pumpkin fields, and those mid-western small town surroundings ripped straight from images conjured by the abstract term “Americana,” Halloween permeates through every square inch of the screen.

The Barn also makes good on its promise to present itself as a long-lost ‘80s horror slasher, from its VHS-warped opening logo, to the artificial grain and cigarette burns, to the Carpenter-ish synth score by composer Rocky Gray – but most satisfying, the wonderfully rendered practical effects. Heads are crushed, throats are cut – more people bite the big one in The Barn than in the first three Myers Halloween films combined. And every single death is done physically, in-camera. There’s no amateurish Final Cut Pro CGI to offend the eye. The last thing you should be doing when seeing a head get ripped off is smiling big-time, but damn it, the gruesome exploits of The Barn make you smile big-time.

Where The Barn falters is where many other low-budget films made by inexperienced filmmakers tend to falter. None of the performances are particularly note-worthy, with the few appearances of adult actors (including Linnea Quigley) coming off less convincing than that of their younger counterparts. (None of the cast seem to be teen-aged in reality, but they at least look the part, which is another plus.) This, along with the occasional overwrought line of dialogue, a lack of confidence behind the camera (some quick action shots don’t provide a clear picture of what’s going on), and some sequences of loose editing are what keep The Barn from being truly great.

Still, during weak performances or eye-rolling dialogue, what continues to keep The Barn powering through and overcoming these obstacles is its intent on being a fun and clever film and loyal to the holiday its honoring. It wants to be more than just another low-budget horror film, which by now feels like a rite of passage for any burgeoning filmmaker. Everyone involved with The Barn really, really worked hard, and that – above all else – comes across in every frame. And that’s what makes it consistently watchable.

The Barn may not stand toe-to-toe with its Halloween-inspired brethren, but it’s a worthy addition to the sub-genre and a more-than-welcome guest at the yearly Halloween party. With more money and resources, I am eager to see what writer/director Justin Seaman concocts next. I say check it out, and if you like what you see, throw some money toward the film crew as they embark on--you guessed it--The Barn 2.

EIGHT MORE DAYS

HELLIONS (2015)

Halloween is not exploited nearly enough for cinematic use, though, thanks to the huge success of 2018’s Halloween, the season has made a small comeback and will pervade theaters for at least the next two years with Halloween Kills (October 2020) and Halloween Ends (October 2021). If you want to get your Halloween fix, you’ve got to stay out of theaters and look for those smaller, quieter titles that received much less fanfare. 2015 was a prolific year for the beloved October day, seeing the release of the surprisingly good Nicolas Cage vehicle Pay the Ghost, the horror-filmmaker smörgåsbord Tales of Halloween, and Hellions, Bruce McDonald’s follow-up to his acclaimed zombie film, Pontypool. 

Seventeen-year-old Dora Vogel (Chloe Rose) is having a bummer of a Halloween. Not only has her evening gone from attending a party with her boyfriend Jace (Luke Bilyk) to practicing her confession to him that she’s four weeks pregnant, but a swath of demonic trick-or-treaters have descended upon her family’s somewhat isolated rural home intent on, in some way, and for some reason, stealing her unborn baby. After being marked by one of these children with a bloody handprint on her princess costume, this leads to a primarily one-location siege with Dora fending off one attack after another from these costumed monster kids.

Based just on the synopsis, Hellions would appear to be a fun Halloween-infused action/horror hybrid doubling as an allegory. It makes great use of the October aesthetic, littering the screen with pumpkin fields, Halloween decorations, and an army of deranged trick-or-treaters, and though its very loose plot seems to be harvesting Halloween’s own history rooted in sacrifice and pagan worship. Meanwhile, Hellions also seems to be about Dora’s fears for her future – of choosing to be a mother, or not. That she finds herself battling evil children on the same day she finds out she’s pregnant is too on the nose to ignore, which is abetted by the musical score by Todor Kobakov and Ian LeFeuvre, whose main theme evocative of “Silent Night” manifests in the audience’s minds Christmas tidings, which in turn manifests images of baby Jesus. (Abort Jesus? No way! He’s Jesus!) But soon the straightforwardness of the plot begins to dissipate and slowly transforms into a Lynchian nightmare, brought to life by the story’s surreal developments and McDonald’s use of pink-tinting infrared film.

Hellions can occasionally prove a frustrating experience, as McDonald knows the genre and understands how to craft a creepy image, but can’t seem to sustain it. Every trick-or-treater’s design has the power to pulse with appropriate shiverage, and seeing them stand in crowds outside windows, in front of a flaming police cruiser, or idly on a swing set, is effortlessly eerie. Their manipulated childlike voices that whisper commands through their scarecrow burlap masks or oversized button-eyed doll faces cause the hair on the back of your neck to prick up. So why, when McDonald’s capable of concocting such eerie images, does he resort to cheap tactics like horrific dream sequences? Why does he utilize lame jump scares consisting of characters bursting around the corner, or a suddenly screaming television, or eggs smashing against a window – not once, but twice? Why is McDonald smart enough to know when to reign back in his film just as it’s getting a little too stupid (the mirror gag with Chloe is atrocious), but not smart enough to avoid the stupidity in the first place? The alternating infrared film and the disappearing/reappearing hand print on Chloe’s princess costume would seem to indicate that McDonald doesn’t quite know what he’s doing, but the strong points of Hellions, and of Pontypool in its entirety, are enough to prove he does know what he’s doing. The problem is the audience doesn’t, and if these seeming “continuity errors” are part of unlocking the mystery, they’re just not enough of a clue, and could easily be misconstrued as the uneven hand of an untested director.

The abstract script by Pascal Trottier (The Colony) isn’t necessarily at fault; it wasn’t a matter of being accidentally scarce with details. It’s evident by how McDonald shoots Hellions that the story was designed from the beginning to provide just enough details to allow the audience to follow the narrative, but not enough to know, unfortunately, the most important pieces of the puzzle. Pieces like: Who are these demonic children? Where do they come from? Why is it they want Dora’s unborn child? How does Sheriff Mike (Robert Patrick) figure into all this, being that “this has happened before”? But there’s likely only one question Hellions wants its audience to ponder: Is everything we’re seeing happening for real, or is it all just a big, nasty, Halloween-inspired nightmare? That kind of ambiguity has been permeating the horror genre for literally a hundred years and isn’t necessarily out of place within Hellions' story, but the problem is many of its events leading up to its finale were already so ambiguous that they counteract whatever revelation the filmmakers had intended. To really keep in mind Dora’s pregnancy and let it work parallel against the appearances of the demonic children, and the broken down sheriff allows what’s essentially an allegory about abortion to play out in dreamy, unnatural ways. (The whole film, itself a messed up fairy tale, pays multiple homages to The Wizard of Oz: the lead heroine’s name being Dora, two of her attackers dressed in scarecrow and “tin man” [a metal bucket head] costumes, the basket-adorning bicycle she rides through town, the tornado-like storm that occurs inside her house, etc.)

The strong lead performance by Chloe Rose (uncanny in sight and sound to a Chasing Amy-era Joey Lauren Adams) makes Dora an empathetic hero, but her ability to command the screen is disregarded too often by the audience trying to decipher all the weirdness. Unavoidably, the final destination of “did-it or didn’t-it-happen?” – regardless if that had been the intended interpretation – doesn’t matter if the audience has no clue how they got there in the first place.

Some viewers may find Hellions’ message too preachy, and that’s fine – abortion is the most hot-button topic in today’s political world – but there’s no denying that McDonald and screenwriter Pascal Trottier have concocted a clever, unique, if somewhat uneven film to find a way to talk about it without really talking about it. In a pivotal scene preserving that sense of ambiguity, Dora peers down at a newborn baby in a hospital maternity ward. Is it hers? Is it someone else’s? How much time has passed? If everything she experienced was a Halloween-inspired nightmare, why does she have those scratches all over her arms?

Hellions provides no easy answers. Sometimes audiences don’t mind that, and sometimes they really do. It’s likely that Hellions will fall into that latter camp, as its events are very dreamy, very abstract, and difficult to accurately summarize. Concocted of scenes with genuine eeriness and clever story – and who doesn’t love a good Halloween yarn? – Hellions is one of those titles that could be yearly visited come that final October week, but it’ll likely be for the Halloween ambiance it invokes, rather than its bizarre and unclear storytelling. 

THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT 2 (2017)

The Houses October Built seemed like an unlikely candidate for a franchise starter. It was a reasonably well made found footage horror film back during the era when audiences still cared about those. It provided a handful of creepy moments, but honestly, overall, it was kind of a failure as a straight-up horror narrative. The five haunt-hopping characters in the film play fictionalized versions of themselves — they’re real people who traveled the country to document the various haunts and celebrations that spring up during the Halloween season. Personally, this is why I found enjoyment in the first film, and why I was able to mine some from its sequel.

Again, like the former, The Houses October Built 2, as a horror film, is a failure. It’s just not scary at all, and unlike the first one where there was an attempt to build suspense and slowly increase the terror, this time around, there’s very little of that. It plays out much like the first one — our characters traipse around the country in an RV, go to different haunts, and every once in a while they’ll hear from a haunt worker that there’s one haunt in particular they’ve definitely got to check out. Last year it was the Blue Skeleton, and this year, it’s Hell Bent.

You know that thing about being doomed to repeat history if you don’t learn from it?

Welcome to the sequel.

Again, like the first, the sequel is a documentary masquerading as a horror film. And I don’t mean that it’s a fake documentary or a mockumentary presenting itself as reality. Granted, a certain percentage of the film is fictionalized. But much of the footage captured is from real haunts and of real haunt actors, and this is why horror fans tend to look at these films as “boring” and “slow.” They’re not wrong to feel like that, because the films are definitely marketed as your typical found-footage horror scarefests; trickery is involved in getting people to watch.

The sequel throws a bit of variety into the batch, this time adding a Zombie 5K Run and even a trip to an “R-Rated” haunt, where its performers use ungodly amounts of profanity and walk around topless. “This way, assholes,” the haunt host says to our characters at one point, beckoning them into the entrance of the haunt, which offered a legit guffaw on my part.

The synopsis explains the rationale behind why these characters would ever go back out on the road after almost dying the last time as the characters “facing their fears,” but really, Brandy (Brandy Schaeffer) is the only one doing that. The other four members — all men — are doing it entirely for the money, as their notoriety has made them hot commodities in the haunt industry. Not only that, not a single one of them seems bothered by their experiences last time. One of them even admits, “I had a blast last year.” It’s…odd.

One thing The Houses October Built 2 has done to improve on its predecessor is its photography, mostly in the form of some beautiful sweeping drone footage that helps to capture very expansive looks at the different places they visit around the country. It’s most impressive during the Zombie 5K Run, whose grounds cover several acres and with very impressive set designs featuring demolished buildings and parking garages, some of which is flooded and dotted with submerged cars. But there are different forms of footage on display, from standard digital camera to phone footage.

Cautiously, I would recommend this sequel if you love Halloween, and its ambience, celebrations, and the different attractions out in the world. If you want to relive your own times spent at haunted houses or hayrides or Halloween parades but you’ve grown too curmudgeonly to leave the house anymore, these films do serve a purpose. Basically, if you’re here for the horror, look elsewhere. If you’re here to celebrate Halloween vicariously through our characters, “This way, assholes.”

EXTRAORDINARY TALES (2016)

Hey, have you heard of Edgar Allan Poe?

Good.

Because at this point in time, nearly 170 years after his mysterious death, there is nothing more that needs to be said about him. He is the Shakespeare of the macabre, and his prose remains as beautiful as it is intimidating. He’s been a constant source of inspiration for an array of artists – from H.R. Giger to Roger Corman – and he’s as popular today as he’s ever been. From the little seen but frankly wondrous episode of Masters of Horror entitled "The Black Cat," to the one-man show starring actor Jeffry Combs that production inspired, to the big budget The Raven (I didn't say they were all good), Poe-inspired projects are constantly coming along to whet the appetites of his legions of devotees.

Extraordinary Tales stands as one of the best. Five of Poe's most famous stories are told (separately), with very different animation techniques utilized to help suit each story as well as stress the anthological nature of the project. It does an excellent job of, if not fully covering the breadth of Poe's original stories, at least capturing their essence. Though Garcia hasn't transposed 100% of the text of each story, but he has captured what made those stories so powerful, and he's brought them to life using the same kind of striking imagery that's certainly worthy of the legendary texts they complement. Keeping it all contained is a somewhat awkward wraparound segment that sees the spirit of Poe embodied by - you guessed it - a raven, as he returns to what appears to be the cemetery of his legacies while he's pursued by Death, who seems to be speaking to him through the many tombstones baring the names of his most famous female creations. Though this segment doesn't quite work, and the raven itself looks somewhat cheap, the actual cemetery "set" is a gorgeous creation - what appears to be a digitized version of a handcrafted paper model.

The Fall of the House of Usher kicks things off with its use of what looks to be wooden models, made both blocky and somewhat angular with heightened features. Christopher Lee provides the narration as well as the voices of the story's sole two characters. The original text, much like the other stories to come, has been pared down, but also kept mostly intact. This isn't the case of a writer retelling the story while taking it in his own direction: the story as you remember it is the same as presented here, if in a somewhat truncated manner. The animation looks quite good, and the musical score by Sergio De La Puente (who scores every segment) is absolutely beautiful.

The Tell-Tale Heart switches to an all black-and-white aesthetic recently utilized by the likes of Sin City and the under-seen Renaissance, and is complemented by archival audio of Bela Lugosi. In terms of guest narrator impact, this one just might play the best, as the pops and hisses from the original recording (purposely left intact by the director) add an old-school charm and somehow helps to heighten the tension of this story. Unfortunately, the brief running time of this particular segment doesn't allow the original text to stretch its legs. The remarkable thing about the story is how unbearable the murder finds the old man's beating heart to be, growing terrified that the policemen in his house are going to hear it and arrest him for murder. But it's the story's short running time that severs a lot of this tension; the murder's confession is so immediate and surprising that any established tension immediately dissipates. Had it been longer, it would've been a highlight of the anthology.

The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valedemar utilizes the most clever of animation techniques, implanting the story in an EC Comics-come-to-life design in which every panel is colored relying only on vivid comic book colors. Being that Valedmar is one of Poe's most ghastly stories, and certainly the most drippy and gooey in the anthology, it was a perfect tactic to use. That the Mesmerist is clearly modeled after Vincent Price (who starred in a lot of Poe-inspired films and voiced many audio versions of his stories) is an awesome bonus and one geared directly to the super nerd. Julian Sands voices all the on-screen characters and does a commendable job.

The most surprising aspect of The Pit and the Pendulum is how much of a good job guest narrator Guillermo Del Toro does in bringing the story to life. His is not a voice one would typically think of in terms of narration, but he does a tremendous job in bringing a lot of emotion and tension to the story (and being that the story is about a man taken prisoner during the Spanish inquisition, he's also an appropriate choice). However, the adaptation of the story falls a little flat, being that it's mostly about a prisoner fighting off rats and then easily escaping from the swinging pendulum. (Spoiler?) Perhaps Pendulum is one of those stories that simply works best on the page. The animation is pretty impressive, however, brought to life by a near Pixar-level of quality, emboldened by a lot of detailed textures.

The Masque of the Red Death caps off the anthology in beautiful watercolor and is a largely narration-free story. Roger Corman, who directed several Poe adaptations with Vincent Price, gets exactly one line in the entire thing (and he does pretty good!), but the beauty of the images and how the camera moves about them more than aptly propels the story. (If the kids have been in the room during every segment up to this one, now's a good time to send them to bed. Unless you want them to see an animated orgy.)

The biggest bummer about Extraordinary Tales is its running time. Clocking in at a respectable 73 minutes, it's a shame that writer/director Raul Garcia (an animator for many famous Disney films) couldn't have added just one more story - or poem. (His artistic take on The Raven has the potential to be excellent.) It's also a shame that he couldn't have added just a few more minutes of running time to his adaptation of The Tell Tale Heart, as it really could have benefited from it.

Extraordinary Tales isn't the definitive take on the word of Edgar Allan Poe, although it may have come the closest in terms of preserving much of the author's original prose in the film medium. Poe remains a pop culture phenomenon even today, acting not just as the godfather of gothic literature, but also as a conduit of comfort for kids who don't quite feel like they connect with the rest of society (which Poe barely did). His emotional instability, as well as his equal parts egocentricity and inferiority complex influenced much of his writing, and it's also come to represent his reputation. His is an existence that will always prove different things to different kinds of people, but one thing remains certain: Poe had an uncanny ability for invoking sadness alongside more traditional horror iconography - he's probably the only author in existence who could write effectively about horror and despair - and, if nothing else, Extraordinary Tales ably captures that.