¡QUÉ HORROR! 2017

Candidate #17

A DARK SONG

(July 2016)

"This is a serious undertakin'. It's not fuckin’ astral projection or runes. This is real stuff we’re playin’ with.

“Real angels, real demons.”

Writer/director Liam Gavin’s feature debut, A Dark Song, is a vastly impressive piece that sees Sophia (Dark Touch’s Catherine Walker) hire Joseph Solomon (Steve Oram from TV’s Glue and The Living and the Dead) to help her with a heavy-duty occult ritual.

Isolated along with the pair in a house in the Welsh countryside, we watch as they gradually move through the varying stages of the ritual, moving inexorably towards its culmination.

“Science describes the least of things. The least of what something is.

“Religion, magick… bows to the endless in everything. The mystery.”

This isn’t some Dr. Strange fancy-hand-gestures-with-spinning-CGI-sparklers-as-background magic, mind.

This is the exacting, torturous world of ritual magick we’ve stepped into, where tiny and seemingly innocuous signs are meant to be interpreted as supernatural portents of massive weight and undeniable gravity, manifestations of the divine (or the infernal).

A world where everything comes at a steep price.

And Gavin places us right in the middle of this occult crucible, compelled to watch as Sophia suffers the rite’s rigors, as she burns with the righteous flame of her personal desire.

“This is the price of our rage. Embrace it, don’t fear it. It’s you and it’s me.

“Poor us.”

(A Dark Song OS’ courtesy of comingsoon.net & screenanarchy.com.)

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2017

Candidate #16

IT COMES AT NIGHT

(April 2017)

Writer/director Trey Edward Shults' second feature film, It Comes at Night, sets us down in the middle of yet another post-apocalyptic scenario. To the film’s benefit, the narrative doesn’t play out as per your usual post-apocalypse de rigueur.

We don’t witness the catastrophe that triggers the collapse (and specific details are never really offered). All we really know is the unfortunate can become sick, and when that happens, drastic measures need to be taken.
Instead, the story’s focus is Paul (Joel Edgerton, also the film’s Executive Producer) and his family (wife, teen-aged son, and father-in-law’s dog, Stanley) living far away from the city.

Shults tells his story at a very slow and deliberate pace, and some may even wonder if this is actually a “horror movie.”

Since it’s in the running for a ¡Qué horror! 2017 slot, it’s safe to assume I believe it qualifies. Because, while the journey is a slow, low-key one, the ultimate destination is a harrowingly brutal gut punch, the horror, the kind that underscores the tragic hollowness of that most banal and grotesque of platitudes uttered in the face of mind-numbing, soul-crushing disaster: “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

(It Comes at Night OS’ courtesy of aintitcool.com & bloody-disgusting.com.)