Wer (2014), The Dead (2011)& Midnight Son (2011)
Werewolves, Zombies and Vampires, oh my!
The horror sub-genres of the slasher film, J-horror and found footage probably feel like they’ve been around for a long time, and to some extent they have. Bob Clarke’s 1974 Black Christmasis often thought to be the first slasher film (though arguments could and have been made for Psycho and Peeping Tom, both released in 1960, most of us are thinking late 70’s/early 80’s, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Sleepaway Camp and the like). In 1998, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu introduced American audiences to what would be commonly referred to as “J-Horror” (here again we can go all the way back to 1964’s Onibabaas one of the first popular Japanese horror films, but the term “J-Horror” wasn’t coined till the late 90’s). And, despite earlier examples of found footage horror like 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust, the genre didn’t kick into gear and find it’s footing until 1999’s Blair Witch Project.
And this is really what we’re talking about here, when did the ‘fad’ or the ‘craze’ begin? What one film spawned a quick succession of imitators? Whichever way you choose to look at it, chances are that all of these sub-genres feel pretty stale for most horror fans or even the casual fan. So, it tends to be quite a happy occasion when a new entry into one of the categories surprises us with something new, something fresh, a twist we haven’t seen before.
(See Final Prayer (2015) and The Houses October Built (2014) for solid found footage entries. The Editor (2014), Tragedy Girls (2017) and You’re Next (2013) are fantastic modern slasher films, and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is a fun pseudo-combo of both.)
Now, as long as these sub-genres have been around, and may or may not feel stale to you, they pale in comparison to the history of vampire, werewolf and zombie films. F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu was released almost 100 years ago in 1922 and its impact was felt then and has endured ever since. Universal Studio’s Dracula, directed by horror maestro Tod Browning, came out in 1931, spreading the vampire net even wider. There have literally been hundreds of vampire films made since, many of which star Christopher Lee.
The first werewolf film can be tracked all the way back to 1913, the year Woodrow Wilson became President (you remember him, right kids?), in the short silent film called…wait for it…The Werewolf. It wasn’t until 1941, however, that The Wolf Man, the fourth and final of the penultimate Universal monsters, along with Dracula, The Mummy and Frankenstein’s monster, brought universal attention (pun intended) to the man who transforms into a wolf at the coming of the full moon.
The start of the zombie film has three distinct milestones, each one as noteworthy as the other, and each getting progressively better. Zombie films kicked off with Bela Lugosi playing a voodoo doctor named Murder (yep!) who uses potions and other voodoo tricks to ‘zombify’ a young woman in 1932’s White Zombie (yes, this is where Rob got his band name from). In 1943, director Jacques Tourneur, just one year after his brilliant Cat People, brought us perhaps the first iconic image of a zombie, a haunting, shadowed figure standing amongst the cornfields in I Walked With a Zombie. This film also centered on voodoo traditions and myths, though dealt with a little more seriously than in White Zombie. The third and certainly most famous zombie film milestone is of course George A. Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, which literally displayed the reanimated dead crawling out of their graves. This was a big detour from the voodoo zombies before, and also laid forth a set of ‘rules’ that would be followed all the way up to today’s Walking Dead series; they eat the flesh of living humans and can only be killed by being shot or stabbed in the head (or a bevy of other imaginative ways to destroy the brain).
I Walked With a Zombie (1943)
So, coming up with something new, fresh or surprising in one of these classic horror sub-genres is far heavier a task than giving us an innovative found footage horror film. This makes my month of August all the more shocking and pleasantly surprising, because we happened to see one example (and in one case two) of each of these tropes bringing something new to the table: the werewolf, the zombie and the vampire.
My first horror film of the month is Wer, a 2014 film directed by William Brent Bell that is much, MUCH more than it sets out to be at the start. The movie starts with the French police questioning an American tourist, a woman in the hospital who is hanging on to life by a thread after an attack that left her husband and child viscously murdered, their bodies mauled. She happens to have video evidence of the attack, but what we see isn’t enough to say for sure who or what attacked them. All she could remember was a figure of a man.
The local police arrest Talan Gwynek (Brian Scott O’Connor), a hulking and beastly looking local man, despite the markings on the dead bodies clearly pointing to an animal. Katherine Moss (A.J. Cook), an American lawyer living and working in France, demands to represent Talan. She can’t believe that he (or any man) could be responsible for the murders. She brings on an animal expert, Dr. Gavin Flemyng (Simon Quarterman), to join her and her investigator Eric Sarin (Vik Sahay) to help prove Talan’s innocence.
There is romantic history between Katherine and Gavin that is clearly not resolved, and Eric is none to happy about the potential ramifications it could have on the case. However, all of this behind the scenes drama is ancillary to the heart of this film, which arteries burst from the seams the moment Talan is brought in for medical testing at a local hospital and the bloody horror of the film ignites.
From this moment on, Wer unleashes what’s been lying under the surface from the beginning; a (clearly) big budget, viscous and violent, high-octane horror bonanza that defies anything we’ve ever seen from a werewolf film before. The bulk of credit for this blitzkrieg of eye-popping impressiveness must be given to director Bell, the special effects team, the seamless visual effects, and as important as anything else, the casting of the superhuman looking O’Connor as Talan.
Brian Scott O’Connor
I don’t know who Brian Scott O’Connor is, and I’m not sure anyone else does either. There is literally not a single piece of information available on IMDB, which is simultaneously impressive, because his performance (as limited as the acting required may be) is flawless and immensely effecting, and disconcerting, because it calls into question how this human (?) came into existence. It is simply one of the most remarkable and memorable ‘monster’ performances in this history of horror cinema, with all due respect to Barrymore, Karloff, Chaney and Chaney Jr.
My second horror movie of the month is the fresh feeling zombie film The Dead. While the title is far from original, the setting and tone are both quite unique. The British produced film takes place solely in West Africa where a zombie epidemic has broken out and is spreading at an alarming rate. Lieutenant Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman) is a US Air Force engineer who struggles to survive after the evacuation plane he was on crashes and he’s the only one left alive.
Murphy traverses the hot, barren landscape on foot until he stumbles upon a deserted village, clearly already ravaged by the dead, and is able to fix up a stranded vehicle. From here he sets out in a haphazard direction in hopes of finding his way to another plane or somewhere where he can make contact with his team back at base. The roads, or sometimes just open terrain, are less than hospital to any vehicle and it’s no surprise when he finds himself stuck. As zombies start to appear, having been drawn by the noise, he finds himself in a dire situation until he is saved by mysterious gunfire.
The man who saved Murphy is Daniel Dembele (Prince David Osei), an African soldier who we briefly met before when he returned to his home to find his wife torn to pieces from an attack. He has since gone AWOL to find his son, who was rescued by the soldiers trying to save the village. The two men find themselves in a position where they can help each other achieve their goals. Daniel will lead Murphy to the nearest air force base where he will hopefully find a plane, and then Daniel will take the vehicle from there to go find his son.
Now, there wouldn’t be much of a movie if everything went according to plan, and this is where the movie really takes flight. Daniel and Murphy soon form a fast bond on their travels, sharing stories about family and each other. They look out for one another, ready to protect at every turn. Rob Freeman (who looks like a B-version young Warren Beatty in Ishtar) has the perfect look for Murphy and is serviceable in the physical aspects of his role, but doesn’t quite raise the bar in the emotional arena. However, his scenes with Osei, who is very effecting and empathetic, are rich and believable.
The zombies in The Dead are of the extra slow variety and the makeup is top notch. The opening scene, which is a flash-forward that we eventually return to, shows a hypnotic encounter between Murphy and a zombie with a shattered leg in which the visuals and sound design are truly exceptional. The location of Africa offers us a drove of things we haven’t had a chance to experience before in the sub-genre, from the stunning visuals of the heat-soaked landscapes, to the local villages and the people who inhabit them, giving us a different point of view from a socio-economical perspective as well as the realities of how few places there are to hide or barricade one’s self in.
Also, highly recommended, and a zombie film I could have easily written about, is The Battery, an ultra-low budget, but brilliantly produced road movie, written and directed by star Jeremy Gardner. The story is about two former baseball players, teammates but not friends, ‘former’ because the zombie apocalypse has already happened, who are driving across the state of Connecticut with the only goal in mind: to keep going. The dialogue heavy film is supremely entertaining from the first minute on, and the final 20-minutes are some of the most excruciating I’ve spent watching a film.
My final horror film of the month is 2011’s Midnight Son, a way-too-far under the radar, brilliantly conceived ‘vampire’ film by writer/director Scott Leberecht. The story is so original and the acting is so good, it’s ironic and frightening to think that I almost stopped it before it even got going.
Charlotte and I watch a lot of horror movies. Like a LOT! We have watched so many over the years that we have gotten to a point where we now have a second-hand, sometimes non-verbal way to communicate when we know it’s time to give up on a film. And we don’t give up easily either. It’s just with so many streaming options, and after making our way through so many ‘best of’ lists, we find ourselves taking stabs in the dark that sometimes don’t quite work out.
There are movies that are bad in a phenomenal way, like Pieces, Sweet Sixteen and The Night Evelyn Came Out of her Grave, movies that are (unintentionally) funnier than most comedies. But then there are movies that are just plain bad, so bad they are literally painful to watch. Some of the main identifiers I’ve narrowed it down to are:
Using a shitty camera that actually looks like a 30fps ‘video’ camera from back in the early 90’s
Amateur lighting that is so off-base it’s actually distracting
A bad sound mix, where the dialogue echoes or sounds like it’s being spoken into a tin can, or it sounds like you’re overhearing a secret recording but it’s not supposed to be secret
Bad acting. This can go both ways of course, but when the film has nothing else of any value, no humor or production value, it can be worse than watching a train wreck
Now, these are just some of the factors that can contribute to a bad-bad horror film. So, when we started watching Midnight Son and the camera didn’t seem quite right and the lighting was really dark, it was like two red flags warning us of a potential stoppage. That fear quickly evaporated when lead actor Zak Kilberg (Jacob) started speaking, sending a wave of sweet relief over us with his more than competent acting abilities. From there on out everything fell nicely into place.
The story is of Jacob, a peculiar young man who works as a nighttime security guard and has his apartment sealed up like a hobo’s hideout (hence the dark lighting). We come to learn that he has a rare skin disorder that he obtained when he was a child that prevents him from being in direct sunlight. Hmmm… Now, on paper that might sound a little over-the-head obvious, but the script is so deft that it plays as genuine and curious, almost not drawing your attention to the clear implications.
Working the graveyard shift and not being able to be in direct sunlight can really put a damper in one’s social life, and much is the case with the quite and introverted Jacob. He spends his days at home painting a dizzying array of versions of the sun (again handled supremely well) and is actually quite talented. One night he pushes himself out of his comfort zone to go out and actually do something, which is when he meets and falls for Mary, a bartender at a local bar who has something of a drug habit on her hands (and in her nose).
During his atypical and rocky courtship, Jacob is dealing with a sudden and severe illness that his doctor tells him is anemia. This apparent lack of red blood cells leads him down an unpredictable path for a cure, putting his job, his health, his financial status, and burgeoning relationship all at stake. To say much more would be to give away the joy of experiencing this truly imaginative and unconventional vampire story.
Wer, The Dead and Midnight Son are all available to stream on Amazon!
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