8/1/15 (Part One): Watching the Watcher

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Austin Wintory, automatic writing, best friends, cinema, Dark Summer, dramas, film reviews, films, flashbacks, Grace, Grace Phipps, hackers, horror, horror films, house arrest, Keir Gilchrist, Maestro Harrell, Mike Le, Movies, obsession, online stalking, Paul Solet, Peter Stormare, possession, seance, spells, stalkers, Stella Maeve, suicide, supernatural, teenagers, unrequited love, Zoran Popovic

David (Keir Gilchrist), a scrawny, unassuming 17-year-old, is under house arrest for the entire summer, a sentence eagerly enforced by ruthlessly eagle-eyed cop Stokes (Peter Stormare). His crime? Well, it seems that young David is much better at hacking online accounts than he is at talking to girls: as such, he’s been relentlessly stalking classmate Mona Wilson (Grace Phipps), harassment which has ended him up on the wrong side of the law.

Prohibited from using any computers or going online, drinking alcohol or hanging out with minors, David ends up in a prison that’s truly of his own making. Good thing his best buddies, Kevin (Maestro Harrell) and Abby (Stella Maeve), have as little regards for the rules as he does. Determined to keep their friend company, they bring over some booze, a little weed and, most importantly, a laptop.

Seems that the one thing Kevin couldn’t hack was Mona’s Cloud account, something that the unrepentant hacker still considers to be at the top of his “must-do” list. As David continues to try for complete access to Mona’s online life, he’s suddenly contacted by her via Skype: while David watches, in stunned silence, Mona kills herself, leaving him with the chilling statement that he will “feel what she feels.” As increasingly creepy things begin to happen around David, he can’t shake the feeling that the tables have turned: the watcher is now being watched…possibly from beyond the grave!

Paul Solet’s Dark Summer (2015) takes several disparate horror subgenres/themes (dead teens, social media, cyber-bullying, stalking, obsession, possession, haunted house films, ghosts, shut-ins, disbelieving authority figures) and manages to whip them into an effective, if fairly familiar, little chiller. While I won’t pretend to have my finger on the pulse of young horror fans, I could easily see the film striking a chord with them in the same way that something like It Follows (2014) or Unfriended (2014) might: think of Dark Summer as the iPod mash-up version of old “chestnuts” like Halloween (1978) or Black Christmas (1974).

As befits the filmmaker behind the visually-appealing undead baby drama Grace (2009), Dark Summer is endlessly stylish. Zoran Popovic, who also shot the aforementioned Grace, fills the screen with luxurious long takes and vibrant colors, making the most of a red and amber color palette that accentuates the deep shadows in the background of virtually every shot. There’s an inherent sense of claustrophobia to the film that’s only heightened by Popovic’s camerawork: it’s obvious that the pair make a good team.

The film is also full of solid acting, which becomes quite important given the extremely small cast and confined nature of the proceedings: for the most part, the entire film consists of Gilchrist, Harrell and Maeve hanging out, with Stormare and Phipps popping up to add spice to the dish, as needed. The scenes between the three friends have an easy sense of reality, similar to the aforementioned It Follows, and we get enough sense of Abby’s crush on David, organically, to avoid that plot point from seeming too contrived. For his part, Stormare is always a blast and adds both gravitas and a little smidgen of cynical cool to the proceedings.

For the most part, Dark Summer does everything it’s supposed to, hitting the required beats with efficiency, if something decidedly less than pure innovation. There are the requisite creep figures passing in front of the camera and behind the protagonists…the scene where the heroes uncover a creepy hidden room, full of occult weirdness (extra points for making the scene an homage to Hitchcock’s immortal Rear Window (1954) when it would have been much easier to just reference [REC] (2007))…the attempt to contact the offended spirit, via occult ceremony, that doesn’t turn out quite as expected…any and all of these beats can be found in any number of similar modern genre offerings, even though Solet does manage to incorporate all of them extremely smoothly.

If I have any real issues with Dark Summer, they come with the film’s ultimate resolution, a denouement that manages to completely absolve David of any wrongdoing, while turning Mona into the de facto villain. Suffice to say that some spoilers will follow, so discerning readers, please take note. It’s hard to deny that David, at least as portrayed by the extremely likable Gilchrist, is a very charismatic character: he’s soft-spoken, smart, sensitive, driven, inquisitive…pretty much the guy you want on your side, especially when supernatural shit starts to go down. Despite his inherent likability, however, we can’t forget that David is actually a stalker who may very well have been responsible for causing the object of his obsession to take her own life. No matter how you slice it, that’s a real shit cake, friends and neighbors, and certainly not something most of us would want a piece of.

Solet and writer Mike Le mitigate this unpleasantness by means of a late revelation that not only proves David is a “nice guy” but that Mona is mentally disturbed, dangerous and, quite possibly, a witch. Even before this twist, Kevin and Abby are firmly on David’s side (as does the film seem to be, as well), telling him that Mona was “weird” and a loner, implying that she kind of got what she deserved. While I’m not sure that Dark Summer necessarily qualifies as “victim-shaming,” there does seem to be a conscious effort to iron out any and all of David’s faults: by the final image, he’s not only the unmitigated hero but a tragic one, at that, which seems to increase the nature of Mona’s evil exponentially.

I can’t help but feel that removing any of David’s culpability also removes much of the film’s inherent power and any gut-punch that it might possess. A conflicted, tortured, far-from-perfect hero is a literary trope as old and reliable as the hills but there’s a reason for that: split the audience’s sympathies and it makes the drama stick in their craws that much more. By swinging David from “super creepy nice guy” to “total nice guy,” Solet automatically takes all of that potential conflict, drama and power off the table. Man Bites Dog (1992) is such a complete kick in the face because Ben is both a charismatic, effortlessly cool dude AND a terrifying, psychopathic serial killer: remove either one and the character just doesn’t have the same impact. The same, obviously, applies to David, even if he never gets so much as a foot on the bottom rung of the fetid ladder that Ben vaults up like a champion.

All in all, however, I enjoyed Dark Summer, even if I had issues with the ultimate presentation of Mona and David’s characters. The film always looked good, despite its obviously low-budget and minimal production, and there was a nice, measured pace that allowed chills to unspool as something more than amusement park jump scares: this is another film that handily earns its invitation to the New Wave of Atmospheric Horror (NWoAH) brunch, along with the rest of the usual suspects. The acting was always solid and Gilchrist, who was also prominently featured in It Follows, is rapidly turning into a modern genre star: he’s consistently good here. If the film is, ultimately, not quite the equal of its predecessor, well…that’s to be expected: it’s kind of hard to trump a dead, vampiric baby, after all. I have a feeling that Paul Solet will keep trying, however, which is really all that horror fans can ask for.

10/18/14 (Part Three): It Always Feels Like…Someone Is Watching Me

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1st person POV, 31 Days of Halloween, Adam Shapiro, Anna Margaret Hollyman, cinema, co-writers, computers, David Schlachtenhaufen, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, found-footage films, horror, horror movies, Hostel, Katija Pevec, Lauren Thompson, Melanie Papalia, modern technology, Movies, online chat rooms, online stalking, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, serial killer, The Den, torture porn, twist ending, video blogging, video chatting, webcams, writer-director, Zachary Donohue

Just about the time that it seems as if all found-footage/1st-person POV horror films will consist of riffs on The Blair Witch Project (1999) ad infinitum, along comes Zachary Donohue’s fairly original and rather disturbing feature-film debut, The Den (2013). Functioning as a cautionary tale, of sorts, about the ways in which our increasingly inter-connected world can end up connecting us to some pretty terrible shit, The Den expands the traditional notion of the 1st-person POV film to include instant messages, email, Google searches, website visits, video chats: in essence, we find ourselves interacting with the same sort of computer desktop interface that most audience members will probably be all to familiar with. Life as art? For our sake, let’s hope the parallels end there.

Our plucky young protagonist, Elizabeth (Melanie Papalia), is a college student who has just received a plum grant in order to study the online socialization habits of our modern world, focusing on the users of a social chatting site known as The Den. As part of her research, Elizabeth is determined to spend as much time on the site as possible and vows to accept any video-chat request she receives. As one can imagine, this leads to the usual variety of bored/horny/strange/naked encounters that one might have on something like ChatRoulette (is that even still around?), along with something a bit more unsettling: while hanging out with her best friend, Jenni (Katija Pevec), Elizabeth happens to stumble upon the user “PyaGrl16,” who’s chat screen consists of nothing more than a smiling still photo of a young woman. After a short, odd conversation, Elizabeth continues about her exploration, thinking nothing more about it.

Over the next few days, Elizabeth continues to have short, strange conversations with PyaGrl16, conversations which seem to vacillate between childlike curiosity and sinister bullying. The situation reaches a frightening, new level when the website appears to develop a mind of its own: Elizabeth’s laptop powers up on its own and PyaGrl16’s smiling avatar becomes an omnipresent force. One night, while Elizabeth is paid a visit by her randy boyfriend, Damien (David Schlachtenhaufen), the website powers up and appears to record their romp through the sheets, a video of which is later emailed to the faculty members responsible for her grant. Soon, Elizabeth finds herself needing to defend her character, all while PyaGrl16 becomes more and more aggressive. When Damien appears to be abducted from his vehicle while chatting with her, however, Elizabeth realizes that the situation may be more dire than she originally thought. She’s right, of course, as we soon see when everything spirals into a hideous web of abduction, torture, deceit and the cruelest of all forms of entertainment. As Elizabeth will come to learn, the dead eye of the webcam never really sleeps and we all might be horrified to realize just who’s hanging out on the other end.

Right off the bat, The Den’s structure and format ends up working wonders, breathing a fresh bit of air into a decidedly stagnant subgenre. The film clips along at a pretty breakneck pace, aided immeasurably by the constant flow of new information on the screen: while the various computer screens, instant messages, pictures-within-pictures, etc…start to feel overwhelming, at times, the narrative never feels clogged or unnecessarily convoluted. While I’m probably one of the least technologically savvy folks out there, I never felt lost in all of the discussions of social networking apps, catch-phrases, etc…it’s all integrated in a pretty seamless fashion and hooked me fairly easily.

One of the single most important aspects of a horror film, of course, should be the ability of said film to induce fear and it’s here that The Den finds its greatest strength: the film is genuinely scary, particularly for anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time online. There’s something inherently creepy about that eternally smiling picture of the young girl and Donohue uses it in a similar fashion to the creepy doll from the Saw series, as a harbinger of ill things to come. While parts of the film tend to devolve rather quickly into torture-porn nastiness, much of it is still more concerned with developing a claustrophobic sense of paranoia than forcing viewers to play chicken with the images on the screen: one of the most heart-stopping moments is the one where Elizabeth’s laptop suddenly turns on, right to that damn, smiling picture. It’s a great, subtle moment, one which, thankfully, isn’t a one-time occurence.

In fact, one of the single greatest strengths of The Den is the way in which its format effectively pulls the viewer into the film. In an era when more and more people are watching feature films on computer screens, The Den is one of the first films that practically demands to be seen this way: watch the movie on a laptop, in the dark, and see how often you end up looking over your shoulder. It’s a film that, like the best and most prevalent urban legends, preys on all of our worst fears and assumptions regarding the Internet: despite what we’re “told” we all “know” that there’s an army of faceless, anonymous predatory monsters just lurking on the other side of our computer monitors, waiting to drag us away into the shadows.

While the acting varies in effectiveness, ranging from pleasingly underplayed to obviously amateurish, Melanie Papalia is consistently likable as our inquisitive heroine, so much so that her inevitable fate feels more impactful than similar plot devices in similar films. Elizabeth never comes across as overbearing or obnoxious, character traits which can certainly be attributed to other found-footage protagonists: suffice to say that she’s a much better person to be lost in the woods with than Heather Donahue and we’ll leave it at that.

While The Den has a lot going for it, it’s also exceedingly unpleasant and, as mentioned above, more than a little torture-porny. The atmosphere is consistently grim and oppressive but it can almost be a bit too much, at times: there really isn’t anything here to lighten the mood (unless one counts Elizabeth’s silly, throw-away encounter with one of those “Nigerian prince” scammers, that is). That being said, this particular aspect is also what makes the film so effective as a horror movie: it’s utterly relentless, especially once the ground rules are established, and plunges at breakneck pace towards its effective (if slightly familiar) twist ending.

In a day and age when most found-footage/1st-person POV horror films seem content to take the lowest road possible, The Den bucks the trend and goes for something a little more ambitious. While the film probably won’t be considered a modern classic (it’s ultimately just a little too narrow-focused to be as effective as it could be), it’s a thoroughly effective, chilling and thought-provoking film and one that certainly bodes well for Donohue and co-writer Lauren Thompson’s future projects. If nothing else, The Den will surely give viewers something to think about the next time they get a friend request from some anonymous person and wonder just who might be on the other end of the ones and zeroes.