The Loved Ones (2009)

I emerge from an unplanned break from horror, and The Loved Ones wasn't a brilliant one to come back with, but here we are.

This is from the same guy as The Devil's Candy but this grubby little Australian flick did not give me anything approaching the heart eyes 😻 that Candy did, sadly.

Sitting here wondering how to start this review, I was reflecting on our introduction to Lola, the main character, and it only further highlighted to me how aggravatingly one-dimensional she is. Robin McLeavy certain commits as this nightmare in a pink prom gown and Lola is never ever shown as anything other than delusional and psychopathic. Even when she appears by the locker of her crush Brent (Xavier Samuel), she's wide-eyed and manic. Always heightened, turned up to 11. That ended up being my main problem with The Loved Ones. Lola is annoying as shit, so I spent most of the time irritated and waiting for her to die - and even the death scene was annoying, too! More on that later.

There are two "dates" happening throughout this movie. Lola with a kidnapped Brent, and Brent's friend Jamie (Richard Wilson) with a sexy goth girl. This secondary story is ultimately revealed to be a tenuous (at best) link to the kidnapping and torture, and if its purpose was to serve as light relief or a way to break the tension of Brent's apparently hopeless situation, it doesn't really work. There's even a moment where we're led to believe the stories are about to interestingly converge... but it's a fake out. Thanks?

It's hard to imagine Lola existing in the real world well enough to successfully attend school and socialise, but we're shown that throughout her life, with the help of her father (who harbours incestuousness feelings for her) she's lived a cycle of crushes and rejection, followed by capture and torture in the name of her obsession.

Drills, forks, knives, syringes of bleach, a hidden pit under the kitchen; it's all here. Yet, I wasn't enjoying this ride.

When the moment finally came to see her die, she's treated like horror royalty in a Big Moment where time slows down. She watches her death approach, and we watch her watching. It goes on for-ev-er. This kind of end is fit for someone way more iconic and giving her this, when the writing and action have done nothing to flesh her out feels unwarranted and unearned.

The Loved Ones is streaming on Shudder at time of writing. Have I just woken up grumpy from my hiatus?!

The Borderlands / Final Prayer (2013)

2018 has been the year I don't quite understand what the fuss is about. See: Revenge, Hereditary (though that wasn't helped by a shitty viewing experience) and now that I've finally seen The Borderlands, this is the latest.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't hate or even dislike any of these movies. I just didn't seem to get from them what the vocal majority did. I know we're all allowed to have our own opinions, but it's pretty frustrating to be aware of a tidal wave of excitement over a movie that personally left you feeling more like "...that's it?".

So here we are at The Borderlands, or Final Prayer as it's been renamed for the US market. An English found footage flick and feature film directorial debut of Elliot Goldner (who also wrote it).

It follows a team of Vatican investigators as they set up camp in a small town to try and disprove a "miracle" that took place in the local church. The core group is made up of Deacon (Gordon Kennedy - always a pleasure to watch), Gray the tech guy (Robin Hill) and Mark, an uptight priest (Aidan McArdle).

They set up cameras all over the place and wear head-cams, so all of the footage we see is supposedly from these sources.

Which is fine... but the found footage aspect of this film seems more technique than theme, to be honest. There's no narrative book-ending or explanation as to how these cameras were found (a big question, given the denouement) or who edited it all together and/or what the purpose is of us watching it. I guess there doesn't always have to be a Blair Witch Project intro screen for these types of movies, but something to explain some context would be nice?

Nevertheless, we follow the investigations of these men as they scrutinise the church and hang out at their rented cottage. During the day there are weird happenings that Deacon and Mark, the most explicitly religious members of the group, are cynical of and try to explain away. Gray - who took this job purely for the money, and told a white lie about his faith - is way more spooked.

At night, more unsettling things happen, until ultimately the group find themselves performing a ceremony which doesn't exactly go to plan... culminating in a deeply uncomfortable final sequence. 

The main problem I had with this movie was that the gradual climb of the first two acts was too repetitive and slow. Despite definite moments of creepiness, the building of suspense just didn't hit the mark. The payoff here literally comes within the final few moments - rather than the entire film working as a whole in laying the groundwork, with an alarming finale as the cherry on top.

Perhaps on a re-watch I might feel differently?

Something The Borderlands did do successfully was make me miss the English countryside. We are shown a fair amount of it as the team drive around and traipse through fields. It gave me pangs!

I rented this one on Google Play, and I think it's available on Amazon, also. Give it a watch and tell me what I'm missing.

Hounds of Love (2016)

Content warning: Abduction, abuse, rape.

Hounds of Love is the debut feature from Australian writer/director Ben Young and another I'd heard whispers about from the festival circuit. It's been floating around on the edges of my radar ever since. There's a special kind of thrill when a movie you've had your eye on for a long while appears on a streaming service.

Anyway.

Supposedly based on several different true crime stories (I thought it echoed Fred and Rose West quite a lot) it most closely resembles the real-life experiences of Kate Moir, and her abduction and abuse by David and Catherine Birnie in Perth, Western Australia.

Like the Birnies, Evelyn and John White (Emma Booth and Stephen Curry) have a disturbing, mutually fucked up and co-dependent hobby of kidnapping, raping and murdering young girls. 

Their latest victim and the one whose story we see unfold in full is Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings), who almost immediately spots the weaknesses in the White's relationship. John, a rapist and probable paedophile with a violent temper, needs Evelyn's help to abduct and deal with the girls; Evelyn, seemingly a victim of abuse from an early age herself, is damaged and manipulated to the point of believing these horrifying deeds count as acts of love. There's an awful lot of awful stuff going on behind the closed doors of this house.

Maybe it's my true crime obsession showing, or that my resistance to bleakness is pretty high, but I didn't find this as soul-crushing as others seemed to (want bleak Australian realism/nihilism? May I suggest The Snowtown Murders. Note "suggest" and not "recommend"). 

Hounds of Love is some of the worst of what humans are capable of, shown convincingly and without exploitation (at least in tone, as Kate Moir has gone on record as saying she was upset at the startling similarities). All three leads are incredibly strong, with a special mention for Cummings, who manages to convey so much when most of the time she's bound and gagged.

Young's vision for this is pretty spectacular, given it was shot in 20 days and was his first feature. He knows what to linger on: the stillness, hopelessness, the surrounding suburban normality; and what is going to be more upsetting to imply than outright show: the detritus left after a rape, the killing of a dog ☹. The cinematography (hat tip to Michael McDermott) is beautiful, dare I say it. It's as stunning as the subject matter is stomach-churning, looking almost fashion editorial/music video perfect in some moments.

It's not without a problematic cloud around it, but if you don't mind that and feeling like your heart is in your throat for 90mins, it's streaming on Hulu now.

The Mutilator (1984)

Okay, I think I finally realised something. It's taken my entire history of watching horror movies for this to click, which is kind of embarrassing, but I think I just figured out that my approach to slasher films has been all wrong.

So my main complaint with a lot of these movies always seems to be the interminable downtime between the kills. For me to really enjoy a slasher film, there has to be something interesting happening to bridge the gaps between the blood being spilled. It doesn't have to be Citizen Kane over here, it just needs to hold my attention and, ideally, lay the groundwork for actually giving a shit about who survives and who doesn't. I don't necessarily mind a conveyor belt of victims steadily making their way toward death; I just want to care, just a little bit!

The Mutilator (original title: Fall Break) is a perfect example of the giddy highs and woefully bad lows of films like this.

Written and directed by first-timer Buddy Cooper - a film reviewer for a newspaper who wanted to make movies, so he did. I have to respect that! - this is part of what must have been a bloody cascade of films made after the success of Friday the 13th in 1980. In it, we see a group of college kids staying in a beach house and being murdered using a different weapon each time (hence that awesome tagline).

And the gore, courtesy of SFX man Mark Shostrom (Videodrome, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Evil Dead II, a couple of Phantasms) is really good, but the price of admission for it is TERRIBLE dialogue, DELIVERED TERRIBLY for extended amounts of time. 

At one point, we follow the worst character in the entire film (the "joker" of the friend group 😐) for fucking ages as he walks around looking for his mates. He cracks jokes and does voices and funny walks to no one in particular for soooo looooong until he's finally killed. There's no tension here at all, and just like in The Prowler, it gets boring and frustrating waiting through these slumps.

I found myself wishing I were a) more drunk, b) with a group of friends, or c) drunk with a group of friends. And that's when I realised that my sitting alone or with my husband just chilling and watching this stuff isn't how it was originally meant to be consumed. Stuff like this was meant to be drive-in fodder; where you're laughing and goofing around with friends and/or making out while the movie is playing. That's what passes the time while you're waiting for fucking Ralph to die. You're meant to be throwing popcorn, cracking open another beer or making snide comments - that's what makes this stuff bearable.

So, mental note for the next 80s stalk and slash that I suspect might be like this: cheap beer, funny friends are essential.

Unless you're coming to it armed with the above, I'd say The Mutilator is a "fast forward between the kills" kind of situation, as everything else is painful to sit through. The odd, melodramatic feel, the sluggish pacing, frankly insane theme song, the appalling acting... it's a lot.

Streaming on Shudder right now. What a waste of such an amazing tagline.

I ❤ U The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The Blair Witch Project hits Shudder US today! To celebrate, I thought I'd jot down a Zombie Cupcake "take" on the movie, since I never actually have. After a recent re-watch I've been having some feels about this one!

For years I felt kind of embarrassed admitting I loved this film, but not any more. Watching it through recently, and then again with the thoroughly entertaining and informative commentary track, it clarified that this is definitely one of my favourite horror films for a few reasons. Over the years I confess feeling a tinge of embarrassment whenever I've been asked to name the scariest film I've ever seen... because honestly, nothing has ever come close to terrifying me as much as this did when I saw it in '99.

Yes, it's been something of a divisive movie ever since its release. The "slowness" of the story; the shaky-cam; the "why are they still filming" aspect and Heather being a "bitch"... Ugh, I don't agree but I get it. Like I said in my Blair Witch review though, whatever your opinion of The Blair Witch Project, you have to admit it was a milestone in horror history. 

Coming out of nowhere, successfully creating mystery around itself - the cast’s IMDB profiles had the actors labeled as "missing, presumed dead" for a full year! - and using the internet in a way that was unheard of at the time. This shit went viral before viral even existed.

"Missing" poster as marketing for the film.

Written and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, the movie is a beautifully crafted piece of cinema where the more you learn about it, the more impressed you'll become. 

Compiled, as it claims to be, from the footage taken by Heather, Mike and Josh (Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard) The Blair Witch Project was mostly shot over six days as the actors camped and hiked in the woods, working off of personal "this is your motivation" prompt notes left by the crew. What we see today is thanks to intelligent guidance, expert editing (the Sundance screening apparently showed a different cut) and immersed, improvised acting. The breaking-point exhaustion we see as the film advances was real, and by the final days the three were only given bare minimum food rations to increase their irritability and encourage more anxiety and conflict on film.

Heather (Heather Donahue)

Heather Donahue's casting is called the single best decision of the entire project, and is a powerful but often maligned force of a character in this film. I always had a fondness for her, but my appreciation of the depiction of her has only grown as I've gotten older. Heather is something of a control freak, and she knows what she wants and how she wants it (umm, I can relate). The word "project" is right there in the film's title, and it's her project. Much of the movie is taken from her point of view as she's the one that insists on keeping her camera rolling, even after things take a sinister turn.

Mike (Michael C. Williams)

We meet Heather as a pitch perfect self-righteous film maker, and we leave her running through that house screaming - the audio accompanying her footage coming from Mike's camera making it all fantastically disjointed and unreal - and finally, she's on the floor of the basement. Fade to black.

Much we take for granted in this movie was actually a decision made by the actors (or a happy accident) as they were left to their own devices. If, after reviewing the day's footage Myrick and Sánchez thought someone needed guiding in a slightly different direction, then that was done. But generally they took what the actors gave them, discarded what they thought didn't work (much more, much nastier bickering between the men and Heather found its way to the cutting room floor in an effort to make the audience more sympathetic towards them) and then they spun indie horror movie gold with the rest.

Josh (Joshua Leonard) who lost that sick tooth necklace in the woods :(

Did you know that some of the townspeople at the start were real townspeople from the area? The actors presented themselves in-character so they got natural reactions from the public. Some were plants, too; actors hired and given a story to tell. The stand-out, the lady with the little kid who says "no!" was a real person who made her tale up on the spot (and had to be tracked down to sign a release form!).

Many clever shot set-ups were accidental or actor-driven, rather than anything suggested by the directors. Heather's iconic confession was self-scripted, and the framing of this shot was by mistake. The Blair Witch Project is a wonderful combination of glorious group effort and luck.

As for my personal reaction, marketing and trivia aside, it still creeps me out to this day. When I first saw it I don't remember necessarily thinking it was real, but I did get completely sucked in by the found-footage approach - and remain to this day a fan of imaginative found-footage movies. Whether I was just unaccustomed to horror (or this kind of horror) on the big screen or whatever the reason may have been, I was in full foetal position in my seat with a pounding heart by the end of the movie. Definitely one of those moments you love/hate and spend years trying to recapture!

Even watching the collection of alternative endings (spoiler: none of them work as well as the one they chose) spooked me. There's just something about that final sequence; the hysterical screaming, the house, that basement... I still find it frightening.

It's so cool that Shudder is adding this to their catalogue. But don't forget that there are some great extras on the Blu-ray if you feel like owning it permanently. There are so many amazing little details given in the commentary (the "taco" code word if anyone needed to break character; the stick-man affectionately named Chewbacca) so if you are a fan, it's an excellent investment.

The sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 also hits Shudder today. I remember not being wholly convinced when I saw it, thinking it felt too much like a studio cash-in. Kind of excited to watch it again and see if that still stands.

What's your opinion on the original, or even that 2000 sequel? Lover, hater? Let me know!

Tourist Trap (1979)

I think I'm having a bit of a "WTF did I just watch?" moment with this one.

The irresistible artwork of this lured me in, but I'm not sure I was completely won over by this quirky debut from from director David "Puppetmaster" Schmoeller.

The promises made by the poster (and that tagline!) sadly aren't kept by the actual reality of Tourist Trap.

The set-up: a group of nubile young things are on a trip when one of their cars breaks down, forcing the guy to take a walk to look for help. In the film's first horror sequence, we're treated to a bizarre scene of laughing mannequins and inanimate objects dancing around a locked room as he screams for help.

The fate of the poor motorist (Keith McDermott) is handled surprisingly well at the end of this chaos. After hammering on the door he suddenly stops dead from being speared through the back by a length of pipe. There's silence, and then a strange sound, revealed with a slow expansion of the shot to be his blood running through the pipe and hitting a metal container on the floor. This was one of my favourite death scenes in this film. Bit of a pity that it happens so soon after the opening credits.

The dead man's friends continue down the road, as yet unaware of what happened - and passing a vulture, always a great omen! - where their car also breaks down, so they seek help inside a nearby down-on-its-luck wax museum.

Everything is going to be FINE...

The place is weird, the owner Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors) is weird, and the house they are expressly told NOT to enter is... extremely weird. Mannequins fill the rooms and line the walls, some of them frighteningly lifelike. If that wasn't creepy enough, their eyes follow intruders, and occasionally they can be heard to talk.

❝There's something funny about that man...❞

Connors goes full-tilt with his scenery chewing as Mr. Slausen, swinging between innocently eccentric and bug-eyed bonkers. Slausen claims to be a widower (and has a mannequin/waxwork of his wife to prove it) with a talented brother who made all of the dolls on display, and then left him for a job in the city. But, of course, this man is much more than he claims to be. 

So, one by one the friends wander off alone, sometimes meeting a House of Wax-type fate, revealing the true origin of some, if not all, of the dolls in the house.

The killer, "Davy". Happy nightmares!

Molly (Jocelyn Jones), who could not be more symbolically virginal, with her dainty features, blonde hair and modest white summer dress (compared to the other females who are sexy, fun brunettes) is a classic final girl. She's less daring than the others, and initially trusting of everything she's told. Her character arc follows a pretty standard pattern as she gains the courage and strength needed to escape this unreal place.

Tanya Roberts (❤) as Becky and Jocelyn Jones as Molly.

I feel like pacing is such a common gripe for me with horror movies, and this one does suffer from extended periods of pretty uninteresting action in between the creepy mannequin scenes.

There's also the fact that the killer randomly and inexplicably appears to have telekinesis. No idea how, or why, but to be fair it does make for some of the most bizarre and enjoyable set pieces in the entire movie!

Mannequins are inherently scary, and they are used to mostly great effect here. 

Apparently the executive producer hated the score for Tourist Trap, and wanted something more like the atmospheric synth of Halloween. I can see his point; coupled with the largely hokey acting, the music, reaching pure melodrama on more than one occasion, makes the whole film seem a lot more quirky/weird and a lot less weird/scary.

This is streaming on Shudder at time of writing. I'm not going to fall over myself recommending this, but it might be fun in a cool double bill with Puppet Master or Maniac!

The Open House (2018)

As I'm sure you've noticed, Netflix are going hell for leather on their Originals lately, but the past couple of horror movies I've watched from this collection have been a hit and a miss. The Ritual - which I hope to get around to reviewing soon! - was a great "friends lost in the forest" occult tale. The Open House... didn't seem to have a clear enough idea what it was.

The plot isn't the worst... Recently bereaved mother (Piercey Dalton) and son (Dylan Minnette, who you'll recognise* from Don't Breathe and 13 Reasons Why) temporarily relocate to a beautiful mountain cabin after their husband/father's tragic death. The only catch for staying there for free, is to make themselves scarce every Sunday for an open house.

Logan Wallace: Have you ever thought about how, like, weird open houses are?
Naomi Wallace: What?
Logan Wallace: I mean, you give your keys to someone you hardly know, they stand in one room and welcome in a bunch of complete strangers, and those people just roam around the house. And the realtor doesn't check the house when it's done, right? They just... turn the lights off and go?

I feel like this was basically the pitch for this film.

And it looks great. There's pretty, atmospheric woods and streams close by. Inside the house and despite its huge size, there's still a sense of claustrophobia and tension, where shots are often made teasingly wide with room for someone or something else to appear. There are tense, slow pans toward doorways, as if it's us creeping around the house, either being stalked or doing the stalking.

It sounds good too, with a suitably sting-filled and moody score. From a visuals and "general vibe" point of view, The Open House works.

But here comes the "but"... for what amounts to a home invasion movie, there's so much thrown at us (the big deal made about Logan wearing glasses! A friendly/over friendly local! The neighbour who may or may not have Alzheimer's! The plumber! The estate agents! The mysterious death of the father!) so many details and red herrings that when the reveal finally does come, it feels too small to be satisfying.

This is streaming on Netflix now (obviously. Though I'd recommend The Ritual more).

*Does anyone else have that thing where you can't rest until you remember where you recognise an actor from? I have it SO bad and it's a curse!

The Blob (1988)

This was a pretty nice one to help ease into my October, as it was just the right balance of 80s cheese; "where have I seen this actor before?" moments, and lovely lovely gooey practical effects.

For the record, the actors I recognised were:

• Shawnee Smith (from the Saw franchise) as female lead Meg
• Kevin Dillon (Entourage) as bad boy Brian with the incredible mullet
• Jack Nance (Twin Peaks' Pete Martell) in a small role as a doctor
• Erika Eleniak (old school Baywatch) as a sleepy drunken date, Vicki

In this remake of the 1958 sci-fi horror classic - real talk: I've never seen that one - a meteorite crashes in a forest near the town of Arborville, California. It makes first contact with a local, and when some teens find him and take him to the hospital, they unwittingly start a series of events that are going to leave one of them, and a lot of the townspeople, dead.

The blob itself (reminding me very much of the psychomagnotheric slime from Ghostbusters 2, which was released a year later) is a lot more dangerous than it appears, and if you let it touch you, you're basically done for. Not great news for the locals, but awesome news for us...!

A whopping $9 million of this film's $19m budget was spent on FX, and it shows! Some bad green screen aside (which must have been inescapable in 1988), the practical effects for gore and blob shenanigans are really impressive and still stand up. The blob genuinely seems terrifying!

Who's going to look after his dog now? :(

In amongst the poor innocent victims of this gooey menace, is one who definitely deserved what he got... and even if his death scene wasn't one of the best, it warranted the biggest cheer. Back then I suppose this type of character was considered funny, if a bit of a slimeball, but watching it now, he just comes off as rapey. 

Parked in his car, complete with a fully stocked bar in the trunk, he's too busy getting gorgeous Vicki drunk to notice the approaching ooze (in a blob POV shot! Genius!). When she passes out, he doesn't think twice about "continuing" the date.

What a creep. Thankfully the blob has quietly made its way into the car, and unfortunately, into poor Vicki too, and it isn't long before this guy is kicking, screaming and dying. Byeeee!

The carnage continues, bravely killing off some characters I wasn't expecting, until a big showdown in the centre of town and a very obvious set-up for a sequel (that never happened due to this being a box office fail at the time).

In a cast of entertaining but still rather clichéd, one-dimensional characters (bad boy, weirdo priest, town sheriff, diner waitress, little brother...) Shawnee Smith's Meg is the most well-rounded, avoiding the trap of shrill female lead and instead emerging as a strong, likeable survivor.

The first time we see her she's a cheerleader, but refreshingly there's no big deal made of her also being a badass wielding a gun by the end. She's just able to do that too, because she's a multi-faceted, "get shit done" kind of person.

She's not technically a final girl, but she's the closest thing to it here, and she's cool.

Side note: I just came across a mention that Joss Whedon had this character in mind as inspiration for Buffy, which makes perfect sense if true.


So The Blob has plenty to recommend it for a pretty chilled out, but fun and pleasingly gross watch:

1. Goo. So much goo. And there's something eminently satisfying about watching the blob pump itself into a tiny enclosed space like a hazmat helmet.
2. A cheeky reference to another film within the horror genre, with the blatant Friday the 13th rip-off the kids are watching. Fact: The real Friday the 13th franchise was on its 7th film by the time this came out!
3. A character getting fatally sucked into a sink,
4. Lighting! Cool 80s lighting throughout, plus X-Files-y shots of huge shards of light cutting through a forest, and hazmat suits with the little light inside. 

Speaking of 80s, we've got a sweet closing credits power ballad, too. Enjoy!

We Are Still Here (2015)

You know what I love? I bloody love a title screen that jars against what came before. When everything is quiet and still, and the audience gets kind of comfortable with that, and then BAM the title slams up. It's one of my irrational loves. It brings me an absurd amount of joy.

We Are Still Here is a slow burn haunted house film. And rather like its title screen described above, it gets us used to its subdued ways before going pretty apeshit at the end and being a big old surprise. It's amazing. 

That's not to say all the bloodshed comes in the final act. It doesn't. Leading us along the path of "oh god!" and "what the hell?!" (I said both of these things out loud: a recommendation in itself) are some well executed jump scares and quick, gory moments to punctuate the white middle class normality.

The plot centres around a middle aged couple who've just moved into a house in a snowy, apparently sleepy New England town. Having tragically lost their son in a car accident not too long before their relocation, they're attempting to heal as best they can from such heartbreak. 

Only... the house almost immediately reacts to their inhabiting it; photos fall, doors open and close, and wife Anne swears she can feel the presence of their son Bobby in the house with them. Her husband Paul is a cynic, sympathetically indulging her until witnessing things he just cannot deny, leading him to literally exclaim: "I believe it all!".

It transpires that beneath the house lurks a deep evil, one that wakes every thirty years and must be fed. If a sacrifice isn't made, the entire town pays the price. The words of a shifty neighbour sounded sinister at the time he uttered them, but then become all too clear: This house needs a family. (Also serving as the film's tagline).

Dark, charred figures stalk the house, appearing both as visions and as direct threats. If they touch you, you burn. They can devour you, and they can punch right through your chest - but why do they seem to be sparing Paul and Anne?

Boldly, the film shows these early and often, but benefits from doing so.

So I'm finding it interesting that I enjoyed this film so much and found the similarly slow-into-bonkers Starry Eyes from a couple of days ago somehow disappointing.

Maybe it's because We Are Still Here is set in the 70s - and I mean flawlessly set in the 70s, they nail the vibe in my opinion - and many of the protagonists are older? Paul and Anne are a rather normal couple, older but still affectionate and unsteadily (realistically so) dealing with the loss of their son. Maybe it's just there was more emotional meat there. 

The set-up of such arguably mundane characters facing not only rampaging townsfolk but also cruel ghosts is, to be honest, delightful. There's a reason this type of narrative set-up is used so often: it works. Barricaded in the bedroom with nothing but a handful of small knives, Anne fumbles and drops one of them before the couple arm themselves, hands trembling. It's just a great little collection of scenes; their nervous defiance.

I remember pausing the film not long after this moment with about 15mins remaining, and having no idea where this was going to end up. The final part of the final act is a gloriously batshit bloodbath. If the violence from earlier were shots, this bit is a full-on keg stand.

The walls are quite literally soaked in blood as heads are blown off, stomachs are torn open and in two of my favourite moments: blood is belched from the crawlspace in the basement and an unfortunate fallen townsperson is climbed upon by one of the ghosts; each hand and foot placement creating a hot hissing sound as they make their way up to his head.

The house is hungry, and it feeds. People are sucked right into the foundations before our very eyes!

Throughout the film there are many prolonged shots of the snowy countryside surrounding the house. Bare branches and empty roads stretch out all around, giving us a sense of the isolation and claustrophobia inside.

Not to mention working as a counter to how hot the house is for the time of year (early on they complain of the basement being abnormally hot, putting it down to a faulty boiler). It's a great line-drawing technique of "in here" and "out there" as well as a cheeky spin on the trope of ghosts lowering the temperature around them. These spooks actually burn hot.

The ending may require some discussion (online or otherwise) or perhaps another viewing to fully wrap your head around things, and without having done much of either yet, I'll state that to some degree it seems open to interpretation. However I don't think this detracts from what a solid and remarkably enjoyable film this is.

Here's the poster art, just because I think it's worth seeing what a great job they did of this, too...

They Came Back / The Returned / Les Revenants (2004).

As someone who has relatively recently lost a loved one, the idea of this film resonated deeply with me.

The plot (and that of the TV show adaptation, which I'm still in two minds about watching) deals with a well trodden genre idea: the dead coming back to life. But here, it's not in a conventionally horrific way. This is all very civilised - which makes it that much more creepy, if you ask me.

The recently risen calmly stroll out of the cemetery in their pastel clothes.

It was the questions Les Revenants raised with me that I found interesting. Would you want a dead relative back, really? It's easy to jump to a "yes" response, but what about the small-print? What if they come back and they are "broken" in some way?

I was reminded of the Buffy episode Forever, where Dawn tries to bring her mum back from the dead with black magic. We never see Joyce reanimated, but the viewer is led to believe that it would be more of a zombie-Joyce than the lovely Summers matriarch we grew to love. Eventually Dawn realises this thing would not be the same as having her mother back, and breaks the spell before it appears.

So what if you could have your loved one back and they were nearly normal? Good enough? But what if they came back suddenly, without warning, after you have learned to live with your loss?

Of course you want not to have had a close relative die at all, but the "returned" here aren't jumping back to a time pre-death; this plot deals with them coming back after their demise (natural or not), after their families have grieved and gone some way to reconcile and move on. And these aren't violent zombies, they are recognisable enough as their old selves, and yet they aren't the same as before. Something is... off. They seem detached from the world. The town eventually decides to almost class them as a type of "disabled" citizen, as even though they can function in society to a degree, they can't carry out some roles. They have the knowledge they died with, however they cannot seem to learn and grow from that.

So how much do you want them back? Would you want that person returned to you, even if they weren't quite as before, as you remember and love them? How much is too much to put up with, for merely having them in your life again? It's a heartbreaking and terrifying series of questions. 

Two of the characters in this film are a married couple whose young son was tragically killed. When he returns, they deal in different ways with absorbing him back into their lives, especially once his behaviour starts to become increasingly (more) odd. His life was cut short and this is another chance - but at what cost?

For such an interesting premise, executed in the main with a very eerie and atmospheric build, the ending to this film ultimately fell flat for me. It was a bit of a Lost situation: I don't know what I expected, but I was still disappointed! However I would recommend this to anyone in the mood for a very still, thought-provoking film.

Anyone seen the TV show? Thoughts, comments on it? Does it explore what I have touched upon above, and more? I always thought a victim of murder would be an interesting returnee, too.