Valentimes: Horrorfest 2011, a review

Horrors: Dead Silence, Dawn of the Dead (2003), Subject 2

Reviews: Well, gentle readers, this was by far the best of the three years' worth of horrorfests. Some of you may remember last year's disastrous run-in with a terrible, terrible remake of the 1958 classic House on Haunted Hill. So many of the horror films I've watched in the last year have also been remakes of good films -- ones that should simply have been rewatched rather than redone -- and even ones I didn't know were remakes disappointed me. (Finding out The Collector was a remake, for instance, explained why the plot wasn't as clear as I wished it was, and why there was such a focus on the kind of gore that only modern technology can focus on.)

As a result, I was skeptical about including a remake in the lineup for Monday night. I was also skeptical about including Dead Silence, a movie by the makers of the Saw movies, since it was about (evil) dolls. I was torn on which of these potential disasters to inflict on myself and P.C., but shored up the choice by including Subject Two, a quiet, spare horror film I've seen twice on my own.

So we embarked on the horrorfest early, starting with Dead Silence.

True, it was a movie about evil dolls, but let's face it, dolls are creepy -- and the evil doll subgenre has been well established by Chucky and other shorter horror vignettes. True to the word of the back of the DVD box, this one did end with what I can only assume (because I haven't seen them yet) was a "Saw-like twist." There was some gimmickery, but one expects a certain amount of that in an evil-doll movie, and it really wasn't enough to remove the enjoyment of the twist at the end. It was also cleverly placed directly alongside the twist at the end, so that similar to the "spoonful of sugar" principle, you hardly even had time to groan in recognition of "what they did there" before you were once again enjoying the twistyness.

I also didn't realize until the end that the weird cop character was played by a New Kid on the Block. I'll let you guess which one -- or imdb it.

So Dead Silence was a winner, in comparison to many of the other horrors I've experienced. Even better, it made a nice lead-in to the even more surprisingly solid Dawn of the Dead.

I haven't seen the original Dawn of the Dead, though I am a fan (in the way people can be fans of old films or swimming lessons -- it takes extra prep but once you're in, you enjoy it) of Night of the Living Dead. But not having seen the original in the past has not necessarily prevented me from seeing the gaping errors in a remake; in fact, I suspect that many directors/screenwriters/producers re-making a classic horror film may fall into the trap of assuming the audience knows the story, and then attempting to depart from it to "make their mark" on the story, or to "do something a little different" (which is to say, "make a bad film"). Re-makes should be able to do justice to the original and the genre while still standing alone as good films in their own right.

So while I can't comment on whether Dawn of the Dead is in any way true to the original, I can say that it does stand on its own as a good zombie horror flick. As in the original Romero zombie movies, no one ever uses the word "zombie" -- since before Night of the Living Dead, zombies didn't really exist -- and as in the original Romero movies, there are no explanations of how scientific madness or hubris created this disease (think I Am Legend and 28 Days Later). Those are also modern concerns, but Romero's concern was over consumerism, the anti-individuality of cookie-cutter houses and the cookie-cutter products filling them and the cookie-cutter malls around them, and the way people crumble when faced with even a slow-moving hoard of the undead.

The director of the remake pointed out that remakes were a kind of offense (an attitude I was happy to have him share), that they had attempted to make a significantly different movie with the 2003 version than the original, which he thought was "perfect," and that one of the differences was that in 2003, the war that Romero had placed between people's individuality and agency, and the consumerism and lifestyle represented by the suburban mall, had already been lost. Malls are now a part of the common suburban psyche; it makes sense to us that people would run to a mall for survival. (After all, it's stocked with all kinds of provisions, and it's really one of the only public places left in suburbia.) The question in 2003 is less about whether we will become mindless consumers, defined by merchandise, and more about whether we can escape that label and become something else in addition.

It was a well-done zombie film, with plenty of gore and plenty of plot twists. It had fewer people that you wish would just die than some other recent zombie flicks (though it was not free of them). And more than the typical number of characters were well-defined, yet flexible enough to adapt, which gave them (and in some cases their deaths) more gravitas than, say, the teens in 28 Weeks Later. Yet the writer/director did not give in to the temptation to either keep all the favorites alive or have the "best" character become an obvious Christ-figure. (There is no "best" character, which is the sign of a solid script in this kind of film.)

If you watch this movie, you need to watch it all the way through, including the credits. The ending, for me, was the best connection to Romero's movies, which are purposefully bleak. The end of Night of the Living Dead is unflinchingly cruel, and while the DotD remake flinches, it seems also to offer little asylum to the viewer. There is no "homerun Jesus" for the zombie apocalypse.

And finally, post-apocalypse, P.C. stumbled on to the cold, bleak mountain winter of Subject Two. A reimagining, in my mind, of the Frankenstein story, the gorgeous setting of the film -- a cabin somewhere in a snowy mountain range -- gives the story both an attractive smallness (the characters being stuck in a cabin for warmth most of the time, though there are never snowstorms, and no cabin fever), and a sense of the largeness of the universe and of the scientific pursuits that are changing parts of it forever.

It's difficult to describe this film without giving parts of it away, but I approach it like a meditation: watching every frame, but reflectively rather than with the trepidation of a Nightmare on Elm Street, and allowing the ending to sink in fully. The screenplay is tight and effective, especially in its ending, but the efficiency of the plot is balanced and at times overwhelmed by the setting and the melancholy of the story -- as it should be. The story of Frankenstein's monster, after all, was a melodrama about a single post-human; so it is with Subject Two, minus the cloying Victorian phrases that make you as likely to want to punch the monster as sympathize with him. The snow cools all that off, leaving just the awareness of being alone, acutely and irretrievably alone, in the face of infinity.

So it was an excellent Valentimes, and I would recommend any of these movies to horror fans.

Hope yours was good, too.