Posted in: Movies | Tagged: entertainment, film, horror

Two Horror Movies by People I Know – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Published Mon, 23 Nov 2015 10:15:33 -0600

Adi Tantimedh writes,

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb8ChWO3DWY[/youtube]

So I got contacted by a producer friend, who said, "Hey, why don't you go watch and write about Condemned by my friend Eli Morgan Gesner? Support an interesting indie filmmaker?" No hookers, cocaine or bribes sent my way, just a quick note. Sure, why not? I'm always up for watching a new movie, especially if a friend wants me to.

I'm being glib. Condemned does have things that interest me even before I saw it: it was shot in Downtown New York on the Lower East Side. It's about a middle class girl who visits her hipster musician boyfriend and his bandmates in their apartment in Downtown New York where they're all Bright Young Things living the glamourous dream of making it in New York City while broke and squatting so they have stories to tell later in life. The building her boyfriend squats in is one of those mythical shithouse that only young people would want to live in to appear hip. Its other tenants include drug dealers and addicts, trans hookers, BDSM-loving neo-Nazi gay couples and whatnot. Oh, the building itself is so unhygienic it's pretty much a toxic shithole. Things kick off when a synthetic designer drug gets flushed into the building's water system and the tenants start getting infected with boils and goo and start turning into homicidal, zombie-like maniacs. Don't you just hate it when that happens? The heroine and her boyfriend are then trapped in the building with the infected as the city cordons off the area, as you do. Cue lots of gory, gloopy violence. It's almost a typical Saturday night in some ungentrified parts of the Lower East Side.

This is not a movie that's going to win awards or set anyone's career on fire, but there's a glee and enthusiasm in it that's almost infectious, especially in the enthusiasm of the gory make-up effects and body horror. This is horror where the audience doesn't come to be scared, but to have a laugh at the gooey, gory effects. What makes it interesting to me is the underlying social commentary in the story, touching on the myth of living in glamourous squalor that would-be artists indulge in crashing into the realities of how awful things can get, especially when the neighbours become pus-oozing zombies who want to kill you.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD0KG5Km00k[/youtube]

Now onto a movie directed by my friend from film school Olly Blackburn. Kristy is a deceptively simple Girl-in-Peril slasher flick that has more interesting things happening under the hood than you expect.

A poor college student on a scholarship decides to spend the holiday weekend on campus because she can't afford a plane ticket to go visit family or a vacation like her middle-class boyfriend and classmates, and turns down their offers to pay for her ticket out of principle. Her solitude on an empty canvas in a small town that's largely dead during a holiday weekend puts her in the sights of a band of nihilistic spree killers who target young girls via the internet. They pick targets who they deem to be well-off, devout Christians, calling their victims "Kristy" (hence the movie's title) as they hunt and kill them. Like Condemned, there's an undertone of class conflict and privilege in the commentary here, where the working class heroine is mistaken for well-off girl and hunted for it.

Of course, I always rated Olly Blackburn's directorial prowess, and Kristy creates mood and suspense with its subtle widescreen camerawork and pacing, as well as actors' performances that feel lived-in. Olly has always had an interest in themes about kids and twentysomethings and what drives them, and social commentary, as seen in his first movie Donkey Punch and his work on the Channel Four youth-oriented murder mystery series Glue.

Good horror isn't just about jump-scares but taps into social anxieties. Both Condemned and Kristy touch upon the current state of the bad economy in America. Condemned has a middle-class heroine and her boyfriend slumming in a deprived part of town and paying the price for thinking it might be cool. Kristy touches upon class resentment, teenage rebellion and nihilism and the dark corners of social media where factors of angry, violent kids across the country share information on which girl to target and murder next for fun. There's also some commentary on gender: aside from the obvious slasher horror convention of a heroine as an identification figure for the audience, it features Ashley Green, almost unrecognisable with facial piercings and a sullen scowl hidden under a hoodie as the ringleader of the killers who acts out her own envy and loathing for girls she believes are better off than she is. Both movies have a certain apocalyptic vibe about, them, which is totally in keeping with the times.

Horror movies are seen as disreputable as ever, and that's how they should stay. They'll never attain mainstream acceptance and they shouldn't. The genre is still the last bastion of creative creative freedom because they don't need big stars or even big budgets, just good enough ideas for its audience to happily take in as they indulge in safe scares, exploring ideas and emotions they normally wouldn't otherwise get. They're a place where critic Manny Farber's definition of Termite Art – interesting, surprising, subversive content – can thrive. I'd rather see a scrappy B movie with interesting ideas than a bloated A-list blockbuster with nothing new in it.

Condemned is now on Video on Demand.

Kristy is now on Netflix.

Watching termite horror at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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