The Devil's Candy (2015)

The Devil's Candy was pretty much buried on Netflix, and it's only because I regularly make a pass through the horror section that its artwork caught my eye (see above - how could it not?). So I read the blurb, took a swift look at the IMDB and Letterboxd pages (more to see what its average user rating was than anything else) and that was enough. Onto the list it went.

This was written and directed by Sean Byrne, whose only other horror credit seems to be The Loved Ones. The plot revolves around a close family of three (mum, dad, daughter) moving into a new house and strange, dark forces at work both inside and out of their new home. 

Daughter and father metalheads 

The house seems to speak to those with an open enough mind to hear it, including dad Jesse (Ethan Embry - who has come a LONG way since Empire Records) and Raymond (Pruitt Taylor Vince), a troubled individual who used to live there.

Jesse is a struggling artist and takes over the garage/barn area of the new place to paint. However, even for a metal fan, what ends up being committed to his canvas in this new studio takes an extremely dark turn.

Going into rapture-like states to create these images, Jesse loses all track of time, painting solidly for hours on end and failing to pick up his daughter Zooey (Kiara Glasco) from school on more than one occasion.

The images he creates are frightening. The reason he's creating them, we learn eventually, is extremely tragic.

Taking place during an unnaturally hot Texas summer, this feels oppressive and intense. Jesse most of all is seen sweating and/or shirtless, a panicked and pained expression permanently on his face as he tries to make sense of what is threatening his family. 

❝He's no mask in a Halloween store, he's not what you see in the movies. He is an active, violent, anti-God personal reality. And as much as we refuse to admit it, he lives through us.❞
− TV Preacher

An "active, violent, anti-God personal reality" is a perfect description of the villain in this movie.

I could not shake how much Raymond looked like Harvey Weinstein, too. Just to add another layer of evil repulsiveness on top of an already detestable character.

It's not just in atmosphere that this film succeeds; stylistically too, The Devil's Candy knows what it's doing. Watch for the use of light in the final shot, and for the scene with cross-cutting between paint hitting the canvas and blood spilling from a murder. There really isn't much gore to be had in general here, with the more brutal stuff happening off camera, but the glimpses of a bathtub dismemberment are more than enough to unsettle. 

This one may be my favourite new discovery so far this month. Simple, satanic, stylish, and streaming on Netflix now. At 1hr19mins it's definitely worth the time commitment.

Baskin (2015)

Bathed in beautiful blues and reds, with an often pounding heartbeat of a soundtrack, Baskin is a nightmarish 1hr37min. You may well breathe a sigh of relief once it's done.

Directed by Can Evrenol as his first feature, this is the long-form version of his short film of the same name, describing the same events. Here's the Netflix blurb:

"A group of tough Turkish lawmen answer a call from a remote town and stumble into a gory Black Mass that appears to be occurring literally in Hell."

The intensity of that is well-deserved. As they venture further down into the darkness of the sub-levels of an abandoned building, these cops discover rooms of abhorrent acts, torture, mutilation, and satanic rituals.

Time for these men skips and loops, too, so along with some mind-bending and batshit encounters, we're forced to question too what is real, or what is happening when.

Initially with only their torchlight to guide them, we see slices of horrors before being able to take in the full tableau. Catching glimpses of incredibly fucked up shit is arguably worse, because your brain fills in the gaps.

Oh that's what she's doing!

And then comes the point where you're able to see everything that's happening, and you wish for the darkness and ignorance again.


Some horror films become more than simply "horrific"; those that use their imagery in such a way that it becomes a deeper level of offensive or taboo-breaking. Not just the subject matter, but the way it's presented. I found Baskin to be such a film. I'm not in the least bit religious, but there were things in this that disturbed me more than normal horror fare. The vibe of this film is evil. Its intensity and the blood-drenched, religious forward-motion of the characters reminded me of Martyrs (a film I like, but have never been able to watch more than once).

It's an understatement to say that Baskin is not for the squeamish, or the easily shocked. It's beautiful to look at, but what you are looking at is... well, deeply fucked up, a lot of the time! This is a serial killer's fever dream.

Streaming on Netflix at time of writing...

The Babadook (2014)

It's hard to believe it's taken me two years to see this. I remember the hype and positive buzz when it came out, and ever since it's been on my infamous "list". This October challenge is a great excuse to finally sit down and watch this and others like it.

The Babadook belongs to the "are they mad or is it real?" sub-genre of horror and if it's not counted as one of the best, at the very least it's a potent strain of it; having both a child as one of the main characters and managing to tap into some very primal fears.

Amelia is a single mother and a widow. Her husband died seven years ago in a grisly car crash driving to the hospital for her to give birth, and as she admits herself, she's "not been right" since this event. She never, for example, celebrates her son Samuel's birthday on the actual day. Amelia is still tortured by her loss, barely coping, and between an infected tooth, bitchy sister, depressing job and Samuel himself - who's understandably a bit odd - her normal setting for life is "struggling".

When Samuel starts obsessing over a monster in a children's book called Mister Babadook, things really start to unravel. 

Ba ba-ba dook dook

The Babadook is scary, no doubt about it, and we have a slow, wonderful build of unfortunate events leading us to question if this creature is indeed steadily infecting the house... or is it just Amelia's grief and depression that's isolating them and evolving into something dangerous, and ugly?

The use of colour in this film is fantastic and the house where much of the action/tension takes place is almost all the same colour. Not only is it just plain weird (are your bedroom, living-room and front door all the same shade?) but it's unnerving, making the house feel flat, like the set of a stage play or (relevantly) a storybook background.

Blues, greys and shadows, everywhere.

Similarly, Amelia is seen wearing the same couple of outfits, or colour combinations of clothes throughout. This serves to remove an unnecessary distraction of wardrobe, plus adding to the feeling of characters existing on top of a backdrop. Her pastel pink and cream colour palette also highlight muck and gore very well!

Light and shadow, too, are used to brilliant effect. This relates to the primal fear I mentioned before. There's a certain deep-rooted horror of what lies in the shadows; a flicker in the corner of the eye, a coat taking the shape of a person... It's something we can all relate to - it's something that undoubtedly has always been - and when such a universal fear is used and used well, it's a glorious thing. I fully expect to have a heart-stopping moment tonight when I wake up and sleepily glance across the room.

I'd also like to give mention to the female-heavy element to this movie. It's written and directed by Jennifer Kent (her first feature length film), with predominantly female characters and a frankly perfect performance from Essie Davis as Amelia. 

She's clearly an actress with impressive range, giving us heartbreakingly meek and exhausted, to defiantly gritting her teeth, all the way up to animalistic twitching and screaming at Samuel (Noah Wiseman). I found my sympathy, surprisingly, switch from mother to son and back again, as both character arcs developed.

Frankly I've grown unaccustomed to caring about more than one character, and it definitely ups the ante, as you wonder who is going to crawl out the other end of the 90min runtime in one piece.

"I've never seen a more terrifying film than THE BABADOOK. It will scare the hell out of you as it did me." 

 - William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist.

The guy has a point. I can imagine in the intense confines of the cinema, this film would've definitely had my heart in my throat. For the full experience this needs all lights off and volume up. The hype is justified!


Edited to add:
This film has definitely stuck with me, and I intend to revisit it. Thought I would share this review, I found, which is everything I hope to be in a horror blogger and more. So good. 

P2 (2007).

You know what I wish? I wish P2 was as awesome as its poster suggests.

That wonderful, gritty, hard-boiled eighties-ness. There's absolutely none of that in the film itself.

With an opening sequence jump-scare which genuinely got me, being set in one location (a within-the-genre favourite thing) and a nice colour motif running through the movie, this certainly seemed like it should be a winner...?

Despite all this, there wasn't much of a kick to be gotten from P2. It suffers from poor characterisation and pacing and to be honest I lost count of the number of times I checked how much was left of the run time. Never a good sign!

Angela (Rachel Nichols) is a hard-working businesswoman. Before embarking on her drive home for the holidays, she stays late at the office and when she's finally done, finds her car won't start. Odd but seemingly harmless (wuh-oh) parking attendant Thomas (Wes Bentley, elevating himself from "creepy guy in American Beauty" to "creepy annoying guy in P2") tries to help. 

What Thomas does not offer.

She accepts but then decides to cut her losses and get a cab. Only, when the cab arrives and she tries to exit the building, she finds all the doors locked and the rest of security nowhere to be found. The cab drives off as she looks on helplessly. The lights go out and she's left to wander nervously through the garage. Suddenly Thomas appears behind, grabs and sedates her.

She wakes up to find herself chained to a chair in his office, sat at a Christmas dinner table and wearing a low cut, flimsy satin dress.

What follows... well, you can guess. A game of cat and mouse as Angela escapes and gets re-captured by Thomas, who becomes increasingly more batshit as the film rolls on.

One of my main problems with this film is Thomas, actually. He's not a good villain; he's derivative, manages to somehow be both hysterical and bland, and to add insult to injury he's portrayed as an Elvis fan!

As a huge fan of both the king and horror, I'd be okay with this if he were a decent psycho... but he's not. The scene where he watches Angela on the CCTV monitors whilst lip-synching to 'Blue Christmas' was cringeworthy where it should have been creepy - or at least funny. Just, no.

For a film with only really two characters in it, one has to wonder how they both ended up so depthless. As entertaining as it may be watching the transformation from prim office worker to this:

...we just don't spend enough time with Angela to get very attached. We're shown nothing of consequence to connect with or particularly like about her. It's hard to get too involved with the torment when you feel ambivalent toward the tormented, y'know? If she were a complete bitch at least we could find it in ourselves (some of us) to cheer for her fear. As it stands, however, it's all a bit "...Meh." As the finish line of the 98mins was in sight, I just wanted it over with and didn't care who had to die to make it happen - though I wish that poor rottweiler hadn't met such a gruesome end :'(

Still, there are a couple of moments of nice gore.

See how the red of the blood really "pops" out of the image, there? It does that throughout the entire film. A basic technique I am a sucker for.

 

So it's not an exploitation picture as the promo artwork promises. Instead, the pendulum swings the other way, toward style over substance.

 

I wouldn't go so far as to say the look of P2 saves it from mediocrity completely, but it certainly sugars this Christmas cookie a little bit.

30 Days of Night (2007)

"When a man meets a force he can't destroy, he ends up destroying himself instead."

I didn't ask for much, just a modern horror. Something with a lil' slickness to it, something that took itself seriously and might yield a review which didn't involved the word "meh".

30 Days of Night was what I reached for. I wasn't expecting miracles and I didn't get them. But honestly? I have to say that on a couple of levels, this film still kind of blew me away.

The story takes place in Barrow, Alaska. It depicts how the city fares when attacked by vampires, during an annual occurrence of thirty days of complete darkness.

As if you needed telling, it doesn't fare very well.

The vamps knock the city's legs out from underneath it at the beginning of the blackout, proceeding to pick its bones for the rest. A small group of terrified survivors are left to fight for their lives, whilst counting down until the sunlight comes to save them.

Early on, the sequence showing the violent taking of Barrow got me extremely excited, as a fan of the aerial tracking shot. The camera travels rigidly along a main road, observing the tiny figures below, vampires and humans in bloody conflict: bodies strewn all over, snow sprayed red, cars alight.

The caps don't do it justice. It's a simple tableau and a short sequence in itself, but within moments conveys the devastation upon which the others will have to exist.

Clearly, these vampires are not the romantic, tortured, frilly-bloused type. Thank god.

They are more like animals, screaming, scratching and ripping out throats. The way they feed on their victims is reminiscent of a dog shaking a rabbit to death.

Barrow is completely isolated and this isolation becomes a villain itself. It aids the creatures in their capture of the city and serves to drive many of the leftover normal folk mad. Near the end of the film, at day 27, a policeman is found to have slain his family. His desperate thinking that he'd save them from a fate at the hands (well, mouths) of the invading monsters. He had three more days to get through, but instead he chose to put bullets in the brains of his wife and daughters.

Every group needs a leader, and a natural choice here is Sheriff Eben Oleson (Hartnett). He, more than any other character here, must overcome the shock of what is happening and face up to what he must do to survive it.

Just yer standard good-guy stuff in horror I know, but Hartnett - someone I formerly thought nothing of, to be honest - does a surprisingly good job. From heartbroken loner to axe-wielding hero to ultimately, a sacrificial lamb.

Speaking of the axe, I was pleased this one played quite a large part in the film, being Eb's weapon of choice. It's been a while since I watched a horror flick with decent axe action in it. Maybe I should do a series of axe-centric reviews...?

When Eb encounters a former towns person who has been turned, he takes drastic action and makes his first kill of someone he knew as a human. He... well he hacks the guy's head off. For something so brutal (it's off screen but c'mon, we can and do imagine it) the post-act shot is a thing of beauty.

This isn't an isolated incident, either. The film is chock full of stunningly composed images. This should come as no surprise, bearing in mind this film is based on a comic. It should look incredible, like art, in order to honour the medium that birthed it. It's fair to say this is achieved and then some.

Take a look at these, some breathtaking shots I simply had to share...

That last one... You could show me that, tell me nothing else about the movie it came from and I'd be sold.

As those images illustrate, the film follows the comic's lead, appearing in dark, muted colours. Until red appears, leaping out of the murk, often garish and startling.

Red, the only colour shown with any depth. Red: signifying blood, a warning of danger. Uh-oh.

The group of survivors whittles down to practically nothing. and then, then my friends, one of the most well done graphically violent scenes I think I've ever seen occurs. Be warned, I have obsessively capped this...!

As already discussed, Eb uses an axe throughout - but for the most part what he does with it is not shown on screen. As we near the film's climax, however, when the Sheriff finds himself faced with an act of killing his own deputy, we get an absolutely unflinching view of the beheading.

It is good, SO good. So horrifically, stomach-churningly good. Almost beautiful, actually. Should I be worried about myself, thinking this way? I got disturbingly carried away capping this. Oh dear. It's just such an incredible sequence, look:

I think this is a fair enough reaction for a bystander.

Do you have any words for that? Because I don't. I can't even really tell where the actor, prosthetic and CGI work cross over, it's just one gloriously horrendous collection of images, soundtracked with screaming and axe chopping heavily through thick flesh. THIS is why I love horror, moments like this!

Ahem, anyway.

Where can the film go after something like that? There's only one place really, destination Turn Hartnett Into A Vamp And Have Him Punch Through The Skull Of The Bad Guy.

It sounds worse than it is! Yeah it sits a little ridiculously next to what went before, and I did vocalise something like a "Say wha...?" when it happened. Thankfully though this double take of a plot development is sandwiched between two of a higher calibre: the wonderful beheading and an admirably low key, downbeat ending.

Eb's estranged wife Stella (Melissa George) holds him as he burns in the long awaited sunrise. Surprisingly powerful stuff.

I've thrown a bit of a spoiler party with this review haven't I? Apologies, but I assumed in my being three years late to see it, it was pretty much fair game.

Having not read the comic I haven't attempted a comparison in that respect, but as a film in its own right it entertains to a far higher standard than I anticipated - giving me two new 'favourite genre moments', in fact. It's well worth checking out.

Dead Silence (2007).

Let's just get this out of the way: I ♥ Leigh Whannell. I caught Saw - his and collaborator and friend James Wan's debut movie, released in 2004 - just about as soon as I could. I came out of the cinema crushing on him and then learnt that he'd co-written it, as well as starred. 'Kabooom' went my female horror-loving geek heart.

In any case, my crush aside I love Saw and will always try to defend it to the best of my ability. Yes, the franchise is huuuge now and questionable... Whannell and Wan have shuffled back into executive producer roles since the third installment, yadda yadda. I very much doubt any other number will entertain me the way the first one did, but I'll watch them all because I am a completest and a fool.

But anyway, I digress...!

Dead Silence is Whannell and Wan together again, working on their own project. I remember reading about this film when it was in post production and not being too excited by the idea, because it sounded to me like a Buffy episode. This ended up being something of a prophetic first impression for me to have.

Okay so it's no Saw... it didn't leave me shaken; however it is entertaining tale, told straight and relatively old-school with an enjoyably twisty ending. Also, Donnie Wahlberg looks good with a 'tache. Why don't more men have moustaches?

I won't lie to you though: the best thing about this film, is the look of it. It's a feast for the eyes, 92mins of constantly arresting red accented shots.

Here for your viewing pleasure, I am going to show you some of them...

Pretty tasty, eh?

The look of the thing aside, it may not be wholly to my taste but it's a fine effort with which to follow Saw. I like that Wan had a very different, thematically strong little monster in mind with this one and still wanted to test himself creatively.

Give the film a rent, on the strength of the visuals alone. If you find puppets scary then it's also guaranteed to give a few chills. Personally, I find doll-horror to be an odd bird and one more suited to a shorter running time (so, Buffy got it right). Yes, the things creep me out, but after an hour they kind of lose their eeriness. They're just dolls...!