¡Qué horror! 2015
Candidate #5
JAMIE MARKS IS DEAD
(January 2014)
It's been six years since Carter Smith's debut feature, The Ruins (which wound up on the ¡Qué horror! 2008 list), and he returns to these
parts with another adaptation, Jamie
Marks Is Dead, based on Christopher Barzak’s Locus nominated One For Sorrow.
Opening
with the discovery of the corpse of the titular Jamie Marks (Noah Silver), it takes
a while for the supernatural creeps to fully kick in, and when they do (at
around the 20 minute mark), they’re pretty low key and actually have a lot of longing
and aching poignancy in the mix.
But
this in no way diminishes their unsettling and disturbing potency. (Note that
the trailer is a tad misleading, seeming to suggest a fairly typical Hollywood ghost
story, when the actual film is most definitely an atypical tale of the restless
dead.)
Shot
with a wintry melancholy by Darren Lew (his first feature work) and with Penny Dreadful’s John Logan as one of
its executive producers, Jamie Marks Is
Dead may not even register as “horror” for some, but there’s a gripping
sadness here beneath the otherworldly elements that’s rooted in the horrors of
existence and memory, of the need to belong and to be wanted, wrenching emotions
that, sadly, even the quick are all too familiar with.
(Jamie Marks Is Dead OS’ courtesy of
impawards.com.)
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