Without a Scare in the World — “The Gallows”

A metaphor for the film.

Minions is completely critic-proof – you know exactly what you’re going to get going in, so we’ll counter-program with a new horror movie this week: The Gallows. Found footage horror (or point-of-view horror) sometimes hides gems like The Last Exorcism, As Above, So Below or this year’s Unfriended. Unfortunately, The Gallows is not one of these.

The Gallows follows four Nebraskan high-school students the night before putting on a play. The play is infamous because it resulted in a student named Charlie getting hanged 22 years before. The Gallows is interesting for a little while because of its weakest element – the character holding the camera most of the time, Ryan, is a complete sociopath. Ryan’s best friend is Reese, who’s only slightly sociopathic. Ryan convinces Reese to break into the school and destroy the play the night before it opens so that the the lead actress, Pfeifer, will be so sad that she’ll turn to Reese for consolation. Yes, that really is the plot.

When they break into the school with Ryan’s even more sociopathic girlfriend Cassidy, it turns out the place is haunted by the ghost of Charlie. Big shock, I know. Unlike the drip-feed of information present in other horror movies, only one detail of consequence is discovered as the characters run from one side of the high school to the other and back again. It’s as if they’re caught in an endless Breakfast Club montage. The school itself is filled with hidden basements, towering rafters, and some sort of nonsensical back alley. Nobody ever questions these things, they just trip into them, realize it’s the wrong completely inexplicable back alley, film a wall for 20 seconds, and then turn around.

What’s most frustrating about The Gallows isn’t its plot or setting, though. Nearly everyone with access to a good camera makes some version of this movie in high school. There’s something appealing about kids running around a high school at night, facing down their fears. The plot doesn’t get old. We just came to see models in their 20s pretending to be high schoolers who meet with bad ends – it’s really not a high bar to pass.

Hey, this looks like a good program!

The frustration is all in the shoddy filmmaking. You want 30-second shots of a wooden floor while people argue in a much more interesting shot the audience doesn’t get to see? You got it. You want 30 seconds of staring at a dark screen with a red streak of light reflecting down a hallway while nothing at all happens? You’ve got that, too. In fact, if you love shaky shots of nothing while characters argue some place the camera isn’t pointing, this is your Citizen Kane. Walls, floors, walls that meet floors – The Gallows truly has it all.

It’s not helped by the editing. The four high schoolers seem to have special powers of growing more cameras at will. They start with two, but expand that number to four or five halfway through the film. There’s even a moment where the cell phone a character’s fixing is in the shot that’s being recorded by the cell phone that he’s supposed to be fixing. Figure that one out.

If you look at a successful POV horror film like As Above, So Below, what makes found footage effective is the staging and choreography that’s hidden within each scene. When characters themselves are holding the cameras, a single character taking a few steps can change the relation of every potential shot in the room. In a horror movie where everyone’s running around the whole time, the characters and their cameras change relation every second. When we switch between cameras, especially in darkly lit movies, we need to understand whose camera we’ve switched to and where everyone is in relation to her.

The audience can’t be struggling with whose perspective we’re witnessing. The editing needs to clearly imply whose view we’ve switched to and which characters are still in the scene. Without these two foundations, an audience is left shrugging at how certain characters come to be in certain sequences. “Wasn’t she just over there with her friend? Why’s she all alone now?” If you’re constantly asking these questions, something’s gone pretty wrong. As Above, So Below managed this expertly with eight characters in a crumbling ruin. The Gallows can’t manage it with only four in a pretty stationary high school.

Why chase and strangle them with a noose when you can magically throw them across a room when you’re not even there– oh, forget it!

What you’re left with as a viewer is the experience of shrugging your shoulders for 81 minutes. The characters run to and fro without a destination or a goal in mind. They’re never rewarded by the story for surviving long enough to discover something new. They’re never punished in a way that seems appropriate or deliciously ironic. There are long hallway shots that don’t even take advantage of having such a deep background for something to catch our eye. You can break any rule in horror you want, but you’ve got to understand the rules you’re breaking first. The Gallows has zero grasp on those rules. Even its supernatural beastie doesn’t seem to follow any particular logic outside of “Hey, I saw this in a scary movie once.”

The Gallows is a treasure trove of missed opportunities. The overall concept is decent. The ending is even smart, but it’s atrociously handled – no foreshadowing, no clues to excite or lead us to a moment, nothing to make the twist seem like it’s been earned. You can’t appreciate what little intelligence is in the film because it feels tacked on at the last second from some other movie, and then it’s filmed so badly that you start to miss those 30-second shots of floors.

My hope for a very long time was that the sociopaths in the group would stop screaming and start being sociopaths again. That would make an interesting movie: sociopaths trying to out-evil a supernatural horror that just isn’t prepared for how truly sociopathic these awful, awful kids are.

The Gallows also uses a prank war in its opening 20 minutes to pad out its brief, 81-minute length. It’s a useless B-plot, but for a long time, I also hoped that everything would be a giant prank – walls would pull back and reveal the entire cast, who were really teaching Ryan and Reese a lesson about the dangers of pranking. Everyone would freeze frame in a smile at the end as if they were in a Saved by the Bell episode.

Seriously, if it had all turned out to be a prank war, this would be the most glowing review you’ve ever read.

Heck, I even hoped at the end that they’d just hire Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles to pop into the school with shotguns blazing. They could all pretend this was a subpar episode of Supernatural the whole time. I kept hoping for something, anything beyond what I was actually watching because the horror movie I saw felt like it was pulling my leg. Something in it had to be a joke. The punch line never came.

I’ll say two things in its favor. The whole movie was made for $100,000, and it’s hard to make anything that hits theater screens for that little. A $10 million opening may not seem like much, but it’s already made 100 times its budget.

The second thing? The actors do a job. They’re not great, but they’re not bad. The roles are thankless and the filmmakers aren’t giving them much to work with. Pfeifer Brown, who plays Pfeifer, is particularly solid and helps carry the film during stretches when it’s otherwise collapsing in on itself.

Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?

This section uses the Bechdel Test as a foundation to discuss the representation of women in film. Read why I’m including this section here.

1. Does The Gallows have more than one woman in it?

Yes. Pfeifer Brown plays Pfeifer. Cassidy Gifford plays Cassidy.

2. Do they talk to each other?

Yes.

3. About something other than a man?

Yes. Mostly, Pfeifer and Cassidy scream about how sociopathic the other one is, but that’s OK. That’s mostly what the men scream at each other, too. When men and women scream between the sexes, it’s equal opportunity sociopathy all around.

In fact, the ghost strangling people doesn’t get much mention. Mostly, these sociopaths really just want the other sociopaths to know how sociopathic they are before they get strangled.

It’s like watching four teenage Daniel Plainviews each drinking the others’ milkshakes and shouting, “I drink your milkshake!” For an hour and a half. Except half the time we’re staring at the floor.

Right, Bechdel Test. The Gallows does fine along these lines. Women are represented as well as the men here. No particular gender issues are reinforced, and none are undermined.

Please never make me watch this again.

AC — “Unfriended” is Brilliant Horror That Hits Close to Home

I’m sure Unfriended was imagined as a quick cash-in – a horror movie based entirely around social networking. For cast and crew, especially those getting their first and perhaps only break, nothing’s just a cash-in. The people involved in this film took real risks in assembling the most important POV horror film since The Blair Witch Project.

What seems like a gimmick at first glance becomes a bold and experimental approach to storytelling on film. It doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s an intense and bittersweet allegory that’s one of the best films of the year. To read my review and Bechdel Test analysis:

“Unfriended” is Brilliant Horror That Hits Close to Home

– Gabe

Disaster of the Year — “The Pyramid”

by Gabriel Valdez

The Pyramid is a calamity of rare proportions. Sure, more expensive films have become greater disappointments because of the expectations we place in them. A largely point-of view horror movie, The Pyramid neither cost much to make nor had any expectations that it would be good. Yet very few movies so creatively find new ways to fail every 10 minutes.

The Pyramid is a pioneer into the depths of terrible – not simply content with mere badness, it keeps on discovering fresh ways to make you scratch your head and ask, “Really?” If it had slightly better intentions, I’d be tempted to place it in the Ed Wood Memorial Pantheon of movies that are so bad they’re good.

The premise is simple: a team of archaeologists and documentary filmmakers descend into an ancient pyramid to face cannibal zombie cats, an angry Egyptian god, kinda deadly traps, and most terrifying of all: a room full of the cannibal zombie cats’ droppings. But wait! There’s more:

Before making this movie, no one seems to have researched anything about archaeology (or medicine, or scriptwriting, or holding a camera, for that matter). Each character will whine at the others incessantly, only taking breaks to roll their eyes knowingly at the camera. This is annoying but acceptable – most of The Pyramid is found footage. The audience pretends this is real footage discovered later a la The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity.

Director Gregory Levasseur forgets his genre at hilariously random moments, switching between characters’ points of view and an omniscient cinematographer without reason or warning. The most crucial aspect of POV movies is to establish a rhythm with the audience that indicates to us whose perspective we’re viewing, even during frenetic action sequences that cut back and forth quickly. It’s a cinematic geography formed through staging and editing.

It’s not that there’s no rhythm in The Pyramid, it’s that there’s not even any awareness that there should be. I was often unsure of characters’ interactions during action scenes and that omniscient cinematographer pops up so frequently that you’ll repeatedly mistake it for a real character’s perspective. Levasseur’s is a ridiculous failure in understanding the basics of the genre in which he’s directing.

In terms of story, this is a cast that features no leaders, people with courage, or intelligence. I’m prepared for people to make stupid decisions in horror movies – sometimes that’s half the fun – but The Pyramid takes the phrase “stupid decision” as a challenge.

I briefly began wondering if the film realized how bad it was when it started delivering dialogue like, “Stop being an archaeologist and be a human being for once,” and “Robot guy just got killed by something we can’t identify!” There’s some choice cheese in here, but a series of increasingly tedious and inexplicable climaxes quickly dull any sense of fun that threatens to creep in. The ending is so bad, I wondered if the film was simply trolling its audience by trying to be the worst found footage movie it could be.

Compare The Pyramid to an underrated POV gem from earlier in the year: As Above, So Below. The earlier film boasted intelligent characters, including a fantastic leader. When things went wrong, they would slow the situation down and take stock of it. Injuries warranted field medicine and new strategies to accommodate the wounded. Impossible situations required puzzle solving and teamwork. To them, hopelessness and panic became as dangerous an enemy as anything lurking in the shadows. This situational give-and-take created a captivating one step forward, two steps back narrative that’s key to horror. It also gave me characters I was excited to cinematically follow into danger.

With the team of whining buffoons in The Pyramid, I was just rooting for the cannibal zombie cats to eat them already. Seriously, those cats looked pretty underfed. The deadly traps are only deadly because our heroes are complete imbeciles and “tragically” bump each other into them. The most terrifying thing about the angry Egyptian god is his cheap CGI – always opt for make-up effects when making budget horror. If you’re not predicting every jump scare to the millisecond by the time you’re halfway through The Pyramid, then you’ve never seen a horror movie before.

Some outlets request I give movies I review a score. I keep those off this site because I don’t think scores are useful shortcuts to judging art, but I gave The Pyramid half a star out of four, which is like giving it points for writing its name correctly at the top of the test. It’s terrible. Go rent As Above, So Below, or sit down with a more classic horror movie instead. (Here’s what we chose as Our Favorite Horrors back on Halloween.)

Personally, I break out John Carpenter’s The Thing every Winter to get in the proper freezing out of my mind spirit.

Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?

This section helps us discuss one aspect of movies that we’d like to see improved – the representation of women. Read why we’re including this section here.

1. Does The Pyramid have more than one woman in it?

Yes. Ashley Hinshaw plays Nora, the daughter of the lead archeologist and an archeologist herself. Christa Nicola plays the documentary’s director and narrator.

2. Do they talk to each other?

Yes.

3. About something other than a man?

Yes.

Horror may be the only genre in which it’s very difficult to not pass the Bechdel Test. As a genre, it seems to involve multiple women as main characters at a higher rate than any other. This isn’t always for the most noble reasons – horror movies need a number of characters so that many of them can be picked off over the course of a film. But the Bechdel Test isn’t about being noble, it’s about treating women like everyone else in the film, whatever that may entail.

There are, essentially, three main male characters, two main female characters, one supporting male character, and a buncha cannibal zombie cats. The Pyramid does include a brief lingerie scene for one of its female leads, so it’s momentarily exploitative without being equal opportunity about it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a cheesecake scene, but if you’re going to put one in, I’m sure a lot of women (and men) wouldn’t have minded Amir K with his shirt off.

That said, The Pyramid could have just included the women as monster fodder. Instead, it puts them in positions of professional power and expertise. That power and expertise may not be well written, but it’s not well written for the men either. The Pyramid deserves some credit for exposing every character to its awfulness equally.

A POV Standout — “As Above, So Below”

Mainstream critics tend to miss the boat when it comes to found footage movies, and they’ve done it again with As Above, So Below.

You can’t really blame them. Found footage (or POV horror) is a genre that requires victims of a horror movie to tote around cameras while running for their lives. You see everything from their point-of-view and some noble (or perverse) soul presumably cuts all of the footage together later on. The most famous example is, of course, The Blair Witch Project, although the Paranormal Activity franchise has become a low-budget juggernaut. And that’s the problem – for every good found footage movie, there are at least a half dozen bad ones.

Critics also aren’t trained to watch them with the analytical eye they would more cinematic narratives, and those born before music videos redefined the entire film industry in the 80s and 90s may not prize the genre’s best tool – aggressive jump-cut editing – as highly as those born after.

So you can’t blame the critical community, but you can call them out when they miss on a gem like As Above, So Below.

The strength of the film is Perdita Weeks, playing urban archaeologist Scarlett Marlowe. Her character’s a clear nod toward franchises like Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider. She’s introduced sneaking into an Iranian tomb that’s minutes from being blown up, searching for the Rose Key. This will allow her to translate the words on a gravestone back in Paris. Believing the mythical Philosopher’s Stone is hidden in the Paris catacombs, a warren of graves which stretch for miles below the city, she recruits a less-than-ideal team of cameraman, translator, and urban spelunkers. It’s a wing-ding of a plot, but no moreso than the kind we normally heap on Nicolas Cage, Harrison Ford, or Tom Hanks.

Like the ladykillers I just mentioned, Scarlett also has a roguelike history of using her charm to get others to risk their lives with her, and isn’t above leaving an ally in a Turkish jail if it gets her closer to a historical truth. Her infectious curiosity also makes the suspension of disbelief easier, even when her team discovers the gates of Hell buried beneath Paris.

She also brings an unabashedly British brand of cheer and determination rarely seen in horror movies. Climbing through a tunnel full of loose bones, she turns around to reassure her hyperventilating cameraman, “It’s really not too bad.” When terrifying sounds travel down a dusty corridor and her team cowers, she marches straight at the fresh terror with a resounding, “[Bleep] that, I’m going.” The horror genre as a whole has developed a bad habit of casting victims – no leaders. Scarlett is a refreshingly complete leader in a genre typically based around victims cowering into their cameras.

As Above, So Below does cheat a little. We see from every camera’s perspective, even those strapped to characters later lost to Hell. I don’t think the presumed editor of this all said to himself later on, “I’m going to run down to Hell real quick to grab the rest of the footage.” There’s also a much stronger editing hand than you typically see in found footage movies, especially as the scares ramp up. These cinematic cheats begin to make the movie a bit of a genre mash-up – it uses the techniques of found footage, but by the end, it’s really more concerned with being a movie than in creating a faux sense of “this really happened.”

There’s one more thing to like about the film – its pervasive sense of dread. There are jump scares here, but they aren’t as numerous as you’d suspect. The movie’s focus on rhythm, pace, and behind-the-scenes choreography lets those jump scares shine. I’m not a jumper, but this one had me going.

The film does break down a little toward the end, compiling too much action into too short a time – nearly all found footage films suffer from balancing the action of a climax without breaking the pseudo-reality they’ve established before. As Above, So Below has a clever ending, but it’s a 93-minute movie. Another 10 minutes to maintain the pace established earlier could have improved things.

It’s my favorite horror movie this year, and the best since last year’s You’re Next. It’s not exactly a cinematic triumph, and it’s ridiculous around the edges – I mean, read that plot again – but it’s very effective, and that’s what matters. If you don’t like POV horror, this won’t convert you, and if it makes you nauseous, the camerawork here is some of the shakiest around. If you are a genre fan, however, this is a very solid film in a year starved for good horror.

As Above, So Below is rated R for violence, terror, and language.