#StokerScore 2/10
Movies have been trying to scare people ever since they started putting images on celluloid. The invention was so totally mesmerizing to the first viewers that it didn't take the early directors long to decide to combine that feeling of awe with stuff that would also scare the living daylights out of the audience too.
The Germans were probably the best of the first bunch and the French could be pretty trippy as well. Early horror movies from the 1920's included classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu and The Phantom of The Opera. These movies are still held up as scary today and often get hailed as inspirational by modern day film makers, even though their special effects appear silly and the lack of gore makes them seem tame alongside the horror porn and splatterfests we are bombarded with these days. You just need to consider how they must have appeared to people who were still coming to terms with other inventions like cars.
Horror movies have generally grown since then, although there are enough examples to contradict that last statement. Directors have taken their influences and either tried to create something new, or just gone for the quick buck and churned out more of what people want to see. The latter style has resulted in ordinal numbers resembling rugby scores being added to the end of a movie's title. That these are now being called franchises adds some legitimacy to the studios' need to keep coining in the greenbacks from movie titles that would never usually see the light of day.
Then there is the argument over studio vs independent movie. The movies that are blessed with the budget to visually create cinema magic usually come from the studio system who use logarithms to decide that they know what audiences like (and by that I mean will make a pile of money). Indie movies struggle to get funding but are often considered more artistic because the director's vision reaches the screen unmolested.
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| The Babadook's budget was only $2m |
Personally I prefer story over special effects and adhere to the belief that what happens off camera can be way more disturbing than having a Rob Zombie/Eli Roth decapitation shown in all of its supposed glory. Hitchcock was constrained by the film censors of his time so had to find ways around those restrictions if he wanted to scare his audience. That didn't turn out too bad, did it?Alternatively, 1960's Hammer Studios added Technicolour blood to the 1930's Universal monsters and there will always be a market for that visceral horror. But there is also room for the cleverly paced, well acted and carefully scary horror movie too.
So when I saw the title The Monster and having understood the basic synopsis of a mother and daughter struggling against something nasty, I wasn't really expecting too much. I'd read nothing about it, knew nothing about it except that I'd heard of the director's first movie but still something intrigued me. Perhaps it was the poster, perhaps not.
The most disappointing part for me is that the first 40 minutes of the movie do a great job of looking at a dysfunctional mother and daughter relationship. It sets up the fact that the daughter is the emotionally stronger of the two. The inclusion of flashbacks to instances of family clashes go a long way towards investing us with some sympathy for the characters. If they had met nothing on that isolated road except their paranoid expectations, I'd have been happier than the actuality of the director suddenly changing from a solid, character-based story to a man-in-a-suit monster munch.
Seriously, if that was the movie that he'd wanted to make then he might as well have ditched the first forty minutes in favour of a back story involving genetic engineering, pods arriving from space or some sort of hybrid transformation (none of these are true, at least I don't think so) and then a stream of stereotypical victims. This movie had an estimated budget of nearly three million dollars but I can't say I can see that on the screen. It's as if there were two movies and two directors. Even the writing alters in the second half of the film, contradicting what we know of the characters.
I'm disappointed....
