It’s Hard to Hang with The Gallows

/ chrismicklos / Leave a comment

gallowsposter

In 1996, the movie Scream famously articulated the “rules” you needed to follow in order to survive a horror movie of that era. Nearly 20 years later, I would humbly revise those rules with some suggestions as to how today’s teens might avoid finding themselves trapped in a horror movie altogether.

  1. First and foremost, if your high school drama club stages a play and the lead actor dies on-stage under highly mysterious circumstances, do NOT star in a revival of the play, on the same stage, twenty years later.
  1. If by chance you violate rule # 1 and do star in the revival of the play, do NOT sneak into your school late at night the day before the play is to open—twenty years to the day after the tragic accident—and do mischievous things on the stage.
  1. And finally, and I can’t stress this enough, but if you do ignore rules # 1 and # 2, do NOT—and this is very, very important—do NOT make sure you have multiple video cameras running at all times in order to provide a seamless, minute-by-minute account of all the horrible things that follow.

Ironic, actually, that rule # 3 should include the word “horrible”, because as it turns out, each and every one of my three rules are broken in the horrible new found-footage horror flick called The Gallows.

Found-footage horror films have existed for years, long before they were made famous by The Blair Witch Project, the success of which was less about pioneering a new subgenre and more about its ingenious marketing effort. Since The Blair Witch Project, however, the found-footage approach has too often been not a creative choice, but rather an excuse for poor production values, bad acting, and lack of vision.

To be sure, there have been some top-notch found-footage films in recent years. Barry Levinson’s The Bay was interesting if not all that scary. Norway’s Trollhunter was creative, thrilling, and fun. And the anthology V/H/S hit hard and fast and was legitimately terrifying.

But for every V/H/S, there have been a dozen films like the promising but dreadful The Houses that October Built, The Amityville Haunting, and The Frankenstein Theory. (Bluntly, if The Frankenstein Theory had actually been an honest-to-goodness documentary, and at the end of the documentary you would actually see actual, verifiable footage of a REAL-LIFE, man-made monster walking the earth…this movie would still be all but impossible to sit through.)

Actually, make that a baker’s dozen and add The Gallows to the ledger on the dreadful side.

At the start of The Gallows, we see home video footage of a school production of a play called “The Gallows” (that’s the name of the movie!), shot from the back of a typical high school auditorium. In hushed whispers, a mom and dad talk over the action and roadmap out the proceedings for us: complimenting the fine construction work on the set’s gallows and obliquely referring to some mysterious “last minute change” that can only foreshadow disaster. (If you put these two on an airport runaway with a couple of flashlights, their pinpoint guidance would keep all the planes running on time, no doubt.) Of course, disaster does strike, and after little Charlie slips the gallows’ noose around his neck, something goes wrong and little Charlie dies. Turns out the construction work on the gallows was not quite as good as they thought…or maybe just a bit too good?

Fast-forward 20 years, and a new crop of theater students is in the final day of rehearsals for a revival of “The Gallows”. Due to a remarkable collision of convenient antics, longings, and lazy plot devices, four of them wind up locked in the school at the witching hour, and before long, the sinister, ghostly Hangman starts to stalk them.

hangman

The Gallows manages to conjure up one or two brief—very brief—unsettling images. And it manages to construct a few—very few—jolts and moments of suspense. But for a movie that clocks in at an economical 81 minutes, it is somewhat shocking how much time drags on at the beginning of this movie before anything interesting (and that’s a relative term here) happens. Despite featuring twice the number of writers and directors here as usual—Travis Cuff and Chris Lofing share both duties—The Gallows delivers less than half the scares. And that’s being generous.

In the end, the victims of the Hangman turned out to be the lucky ones: they didn’t have to stick around all the way to the end of The Gallows.

Escape from Tomorrow: Brilliant Filmmaking, Terrible Film

/ chrismicklos / Leave a comment

escapeposter

What do you get when you combine awful characters, awful scripting, and awful performances…and plop them down smack dab in the middle of the happiest place on earth? You get the incoherent, practically unwatchable—but yet maddeningly fascinating—Escape from Tomorrow.

First released in late 2013 but finding some (though very little) footing in theaters throughout 2014, Escape from Tomorrow is now available on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital (currently streaming on Netflix).

The film itself is largely unsuccessful in just about every way that you can consider, but there is a legitimately great story behind Escape from Tomorrow.

Ambitiously directed by first-time filmmaker Randy Moore, Escape from Tomorrow was shot over the course of roughly twenty-four days, guerrilla-style, at Walt Disney World and Disneyland…without receiving permission from the Walt Disney Company.

This approach required tremendous secrecy and creativity. Without the ability to use any lighting equipment, for example, months of planning went into the shoot to ensure that outdoor scenes were shot when the sun was at just the right point in the sky. The actors and filmmakers used their iPhones to review scripts. Portable audio recorders were strapped to the actors and left running all day. Footage was shot using video mode on Canon digital cameras so that the filmmakers would look like typical tourists snapping photos of their vacation. And the number of takes allowed for each shot and scene were limited in order to avoid suspicion from park employees and other visitors.

That is inspired, daring filmmaking that simply boggles the mind.

The movie itself, however—billed as a horror fantasy—does not live up to the legendary tale behind it.

family

A family from Bristol, Wisconsin (yay Wisconsin!) is winding down their vacation at Walt Disney World, when strange things begin to happen, primarily to the unhappy and unlikeable (more on this later) dad, Jim. After waking up one morning to a phone call from his boss telling him that he is losing his job, Jim enters the final days of the family vacation in an emotionally precarious state. Things only get worse when he begins to have disturbing, startling visions on the various Disney rides, and the minor trials and tribulations common to a family day at a theme park—hungry kids, scraped knees, closed rides—begin to take on ominous, threatening overtones.

Is Jim going crazy, or are there some sort of evil forces at play?

The problem with Escape from Tomorrow is that you simply don’t care.

Start with the family itself. They are all—parents and kids alike—thoroughly unlikeable and uninteresting. The kids go from emotionally dead to whining to screaming in less time than it takes to cannonball into an overcrowded resort pool. The mother is a caricature of the worst kind: a nagging, badgering shrew who is emotionally abusive toward her husband but a protective mother hen to her kids…right up to the point when she slaps her daughter for really no good reason. And dad Jim is not a character so much as a lecherous cliché. He follows two underage Parisian girls around the parks, leering and fantasizing over them like a low-rent Nabokov villain. He guzzles booze to the point that he ends up puking over the side of the boat on Epcot’s Gran Fiesta Tour. And he loses track of his kids multiple times as he stumbles through his narcissistic journey. Father of the Year material he ain’t.

jimfranch-chicks

It certainly does not help that the acting fails almost entirely across the board. While nobody in the cast stands out, Roy Abramsohn’s performance as Jim weighs the film down significantly. Asking Abramsohn to carry the film may well have been an unfair ask in the first place, considering his film and TV credits prior and subsequent to Escape from Tomorrow are almost entirely devoid of proper nouns. His recent roles include Subject #1, Reporter #2, Supervisor, Reporter #2 (different show!), Male Reporter, Man, Reporter #1, and Date #2. I could go on. Here, Abramsohn stammers, double takes, and grimaces through most of the movie, demonstrating that subtlety and nuance of a beer belch during a church service.

Even the bad acting, though, might have been palatable if the film itself were more interesting, but Escape from Tomorrow substitutes pretense for intelligence. The film presents itself (and it may even believe it) as having something profound to say, but it really doesn’t. American consumerism suffocating the family unit? No, not really. Corporate malfeasance disguised as good-natured family fun? Nope, that’s a miss. Male castration through marriage, fatherhood, and professional failure? Close, but no cigar.

Despite the audaciousness and ambition of the production, Escape from Tomorrow just isn’t very good. In fact, it’s downright bad. And it’s a shame. When you think about all the work, all the planning, all the ingenuity it took to make this movie, maybe they should have just gone the extra mile and made a good movie.

The making of Escape from Tomorrow will be a legendary story told in film schools and movie clubs for years and years to come, long after the movie itself is forgotten.

But in the end, Escape from Tomorrow is a just movie about four people who hate each other, and it is hard to blame them. After spending just 90 minutes with them, you will too.

Love & Mercy: Bad Vibrations, Great Movie

/ chrismicklos / 1 Comment

Love_&_Mercy_(poster)

I’m not a musician. I don’t play an instrument, don’t read music, and can’t really carry a tune. I don’t pretend to understand music theory or philosophy. But I do know how music gets under my skin, touches me, and powerfully affects me in ways that nothing else does.

And I know that the creative force behind some of the songs that do just that is Brian Wilson.

Wilson—the legendary co-founder, songwriter, and force-of-nature behind the Beach Boys—is the subject of the quasi-new, quasi-biopic Love & Mercy.

Unlike traditional musician biopics, Love & Mercy—released in 2014 but distributed widely just this summer—does not attempt to chronicle Wilson’s entire life and career, but rather focuses on two relatively narrowly-defined periods of Wilson’s life: the 1960’s and the 1980’s. In the earlier period, Wilson was producing the Beach Boys’ masterwork album, Pet Sounds, and beginning to struggle with the serious mental illness that eventually derailed his career and his life. In the later period, Wilson was falling in love with his second wife and would-be-savior—Melinda Ledbetter—while psychologically imprisoned and controlled by shady psychotherapist Eugene Landy.

Love & Mercy alternates back and forth between the two periods in Wilson’s life, with Paul Dano portraying the younger, faltering Wilson, and John Cusack filling the role of the older, broken Wilson. The unconventional approach—two different adult actors playing the same character at different points of his life—works in unexpected and riveting ways. After two decades of struggle with debilitating mental illness, drug abuse, and family turmoil, the fragile, dependent Wilson of the 1980’s indeed seems to have been a completely different man than the energetic, dynamic Wilson of the Pet Sounds era. Dano and Cusack famously did not coordinate their takes on Wilson and barely even met before or during the film’s production, and as a result their individual portrayals of the man are crafted and shaded in their own unique ways. And both shine.

dano2cusack

The always-reliable Dano disappears into his role, imbuing it with the same bursts of intensity and nuance that brought him critical acclaim in Little Miss Sunshine and There Will be Blood. Dano illuminates the screen as young Wilson, bringing a manic joy to the scenes in-studio as Wilson feels his way through Pet Sounds, and equal parts vulnerability and independence in the one-on-one emotional encounters with his father. In one early scene, Dano’s Wilson sits at a piano and plinks through his new composition God Only Knows—a song that Paul McCartney would later call his favorite song of all time—for his father, whom the Beach Boys had already fired as their manager. Desperate for his father’s approval but resolute in the rightness of his musical vision, Dano sets the table for the parallel relationship that Wilson would struggle with in later years with Landy.

It is Cusack, however, who is a bit of a revelation here, eschewing the easy charm that has defined the bulk of his career and hollowing out his character to its raw, desperate core. It’s not that Cusack outperforms Dano, per se, but rather that we see a performance from Cusack unlike any in his career so far. It is personal, powerful, and delivers a handful of heart-breaking moments that linger well beyond the closing credits. When Cusack’s Wilson meets Ledbetter and slips her a handwritten note that says simply “Lonely, Scared, Frightened,” it is a disarming and painful cry for help that Cusack spends the rest of the film echoing.

banks

Like Cusack, Elizabeth Banks surprises as Cadillac-saleswoman-turned-guardian-angel Melinda Ledbetter. When she comes across Wilson in her showroom, she circles him warily, unsure what to make of the emotionally reclusive teddy bear that he appears to be. Banks especially shines in her scenes with Paul Giamatti’s Landy, whose relationship with Wilson—by all accounts—was somewhat more complex than the one sketched out by the movie, but who here fills the role of villain with relish. At first, Banks’ Ledbetter defers to Landy. Later, she probingly challenges him. Finally, determined to break his hold on Wilson, she goes fully to battle with Landy and fills the screen with her strength and determination. Love & Mercy’s odd release schedule will likely do it no favors come awards season, but even in an acting showcase such as this, Banks’ performance stands apart and may be the one most likely to gain recognition down the road. If nothing else, it elevates Banks to a new level as a leading dramatic actress.

In a film that splits its main role between two actors, though, it seems only fitting that a third Brian Wilson—the real Brian Wilson—be introduced in the film’s closing moments. As the credits role, we see Brian Wilson himself in close up, at a piano, delivering a concert performance of his song Love and Mercy. The delicate, gentle strains of the song from the man himself offer a comforting, redemptive punctuation to the film. Brian Wilson still struggles, still hears the voices in his head, and still wrestles with the demons of his life.

But Brian has his music. He has Melinda. And he has survived.

Jurassic World: Bigger, Faster, Louder

/ chrismicklos / Leave a comment

jworld

Those of a certain age will remember the spectacle of seeing Jurassic Park on the big screen in 1993. The hype, the anticipation, and ultimately the payoff: the moment when the skeptics and scientists first look out over the park and see a field full of living, breathing dinosaurs. It was honestly awe-inspiring. It may seem silly today, but like those first visitors to the fictional Jurassic Park, real-world audiences were seeing something that they had never seen before.

The deployment of visual effects in Jurassic Park—not just the game-changing CGI but also its seamless blending with more traditional animatronics and live actors—was revolutionary. Think about the simplistic dinosaur effects that had come before: the prehistoric creatures of King Kong (1933), One Million Years B.C. (1940), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), The Lost World (1960), The Land that Time Forgot (1975), Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985), TV’s Land of the Lost (1974-77)…or even the pseudo-dinosaur men-in-suit approach of Godzilla (1954) and his descendants. Nothing that came before could prepare audiences for what they would see in Jurassic Park.

For the first time ever, the bones in the museum grew flesh and moved. The lost creatures that had fueled our imaginations since childhood were there, in front of us, interacting with real people. All of a sudden, cinematic dinosaurs seemed real.

When Sir Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond intoned his breathless “Welcome to Jurassic Park”, it marked a new era in film.

Twenty-two years and hundreds upon hundreds of CGI dinosaurs later, Jurassic World suggests that the new era has become passe’.

Apparently, twelve years after the disaster of the original film (and ignoring the existence of its two sequels), the dinosaur park finally opened as Jurassic World on the infamous Isla Nubar, and it has become an international sensation. We join the action ten years on, at a time when Jurassic World’s brain trust has decided that the only way to protect its market share (from what is never really clear) is to introduce new attractions: in this case, an ill-conceived genetic mishmash dubbed Indominus Rex that is bigger, badder, and more terrifying than any dinosaur that Mother Nature could come up with on her own.

Believe it or not, Indominus gets loose, and hijinks ensue.

Are there kids and scientists and heroes and villains? Sure. Are there plot twists and third act surprises? Sort of. Does any of it matter? Not really.

This is a movie about dinosaurs, dinosaurs, and more dinosaurs. Everything else is a distraction.

The whole bigger-badder-more-terrifying thing has been much remarked upon since the release of Jurassic World, primarily because the movie is so self-conscious about it. When Bryce Dallas Howard, as the park’s operations manager, explains to a group of investors that “just” dinosaurs isn’t enough anymore—focus groups have told them that consumers expect something bigger and more exciting—the scene might as well have cut away to a flashing neon sign saying “WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THE MOVIE BUSINESS!” Then again, one shouldn’t expect subtly from a movie about a genetically-engineered sociopathic dinosaur.

The shame of it, though, is that the filmmakers actually got the theme wrong. It’s not that audiences are demanding “bigger, faster, louder, better,” as Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow suggested in one interview. It’s that Hollywood has found that “bigger, faster, louder, better” is simply easier to make than “original, interesting, challenging, smart”. It’s an industry that thinks a $20 million movie is more of a risk than a $200 million movie, because at least with the latter they have a formula to follow: formulaic scripts, formulaic characters, formulaic effects, and formulaic marketing. So, in a sense, perhaps it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everything is a formula, then really the only way to stand out from the crowd IS “bigger, faster, louder”.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean better.

The original Jurassic Park carved out its place in film history because of the “wow” factor and its industry-changing visual effects. But that’s not what made it an effective movie that stands up to multiple viewings. Jurassic Park is a taut, suspenseful thriller with strong characters, terrific acting, and a world-class director at the top of his game. That film’s climactic kitchen scene—the velociraptors stalking the kids in the theme park’s pantry—remains one of the great suspense scenes ever put to film. The movie still holds up terrifically today, 22 years later.

Jurassic World will not have that kind of shelf life.

Trevorrow, himself—who had exactly one feature film credit to his name prior to Jurassic World—got his start by way of “original, interesting, challenging, smart”. His feature debut, Safety Not Guaranteed, is a little film about a trio of magazine employees who pursue a story about a guy who places a classified ad seeking a companion for time travel. If Jurassic World is a gargantuan T-Rex, then Safety Not Guaranteed is a tiny little baby pigeon, but it is absolutely terrific. Somewhere along the way from tiny to titanic, though, Trevorrow lost his way. (That is, if Jurassic World’s $524 million opening weekend can be considered losing his way. Safety Not Guarantee, by contrast, grossed just under $100,000 its first weekend.)

None of this is to suggest that Jurassic World is a film without merit.

The early scenes, especially, chronicling a day-in-the-life of a dinosaur theme park, are legitimately inspired. From the crowds pouring through the gates to the wonder in the eyes of the kids seeing their first dinosaurs, you really get a sense of what a theme park like this would actually be like. And it’s awesome. You may not even realize anything is different when you see the IMAX theater, the food franchises (Margaritaville, anyone? Ben & Jerry’s?), and gift shops. Pretty standard stuff. But then you take your kids to the Gentle Giants Petting Zoo and saddle up for a ride on a triceratops. You take a self-guided kayak trip down dinosaur dwelling river ways. And you settle in for a riveting Sea World –esque water show (didn’t these guys see Blackfish?) on steroids…climaxing with a gigantic, 60’ long Mosasaurus leaping out of the water to munch a shark hanging from a steal hook. Eat your heart out, Shamu! Jurassic World’s Jurassic World is truly a sight to behold, full of spectacle and clever imagination. (Check out the park’s fully fleshed out Website at www.jurassicworld.com.)

Considering the fact that there have been interminable lines forming outside Disney’s It’s a Small World ride since it first debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair, somehow it seems unbelievable that Jurassic World patrons have already grown “bored” after just ten years.

The again, one patron, at least, grew bored with Jurassic World in less than two hours.

But maybe that’s just me.

The Madness of Doctor X

/ chrismicklos / Leave a comment

doctorxposter

Mad scientists occupy a special place of honor in the pantheon of horror.

Sometimes misguided, sometimes megalomaniacs, sometimes simply evil for the sake of evil: mad scientists come in all shapes and sizes and have rivaled vampires, zombies, and giant monsters as the primary threat to cinematic civilizations for more than a century. The fear and mistrust inspired by horror cinema’s rich tradition of reckless experiments, out-of-control technology, and scientists determine to rule the world still impact our culture and politics today.

Henry Frankenstein (or Victor, if you’re a purist) may be the most famous: inspired to create life from dead tissue, he animated a creature so foul and monstrous that even he came to realize that it must be destroyed. But Frankenstein hardly stands alone. From Doctor Jekyll to Doctor Heiter: horror fans know all the names and all the schemes.

Which is why it was such a delight to stumble across Doctor X.

Released in 1932, Doctor X upped the ante on the still-young mad scientist subgenre by offering up five—count ‘em, five!—mad doctors for our viewing pleasure.

When New York City finds itself terrorized by a series of gruesome murders perpetrated under the pale light of the full moon, five colleagues at a prestigious medical research academy come under suspicion. It seems that the “Moon Killer” uses a special scalpel in his crimes that can only be found at that particular facility, meaning that one of the five researchers must be the fiend. Unfortunately, finding the actual killer proves to be a difficult task, as the five of them collectively tick off every transgressive box one can imagine: intellectual arrogance, delusions of grandeur, sexual perversion, fixation on the sinister power of moonlight, and even fascination with cannibalism. (Three of them—count ‘em, three!—have potentially cannibalistic tendencies, which must be a record for prestigious medical research academies.)

Given 48 hours by the police to root out the killer among them, Doctor Xavier—the head of the academy—whisks the sinister bunch off to his spooky, beach-side mansion. There, he intends to conduct an ethically-questionable psychological experiment: a re-enactment of the Moon Killer’s crimes designed to reveal guilty party.

There is other business to attend to, of course—Doctor Xavier’s beautiful daughter (a pre-King Kong Fay Wray), the meddling reporter (Lee Tracy), and the alternatively creepy (George Rosener) and comical (Leila Bennett) household staff—but for most of the film the focus remains locked exactly where it should be: on the five suspicious scientists and the race against time to unmask the Moon Killer.

Based on the movie’s title, it might appear that the mystery would be a particularly easy one to solve, but one of the most compelling things about this film is its ability to maintain suspense and to conceal the Moon Killer’s identity right up to the big reveal. Each of the five mad scientists stands alone as an interesting, compelling character, and their individual rivalries and quarrels ratchet up the tension and provide the conflict that keeps the plot moving forward. It is to the credit of the actors—first and foremost Lionel Atwill as Doctor X himself—that none of these characters comes off as stock or shallow.

Today, Atwill’s horror resume’ stands on its own, but at the time of Doctor X, he was still years away from his signature performances in films like Mark of the Vampire, Captain Blood, Son of Frankenstein, and as Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon. Here he headlines an outstanding cast that features Preston Foster, John Wray, Harry Beresford, and Arthur Edmund Carewe as the rest of the motley band of potential killers.

What really makes Doctor X an effective horror film, however, is the unflinchingly jagged edge of the material. Produced before aggressive implementation of the infamous Motion Picture Production Code, Doctor X deals openly with themes like cannibalism, rape, and brutal murder, themes that would soon be subject to censorship under the Code.

At the same time, the production design and direction (Michael Curtiz helmed this one) give full visual expression to the risque’ material. Shot in early Technicolor, the film’s awkward hues, urgent close-ups, and menacing set design fuel the film’s ability to maintain a sense of dread that drives it through a highly entertaining 76 minutes.

Laughing at the Shadows

/ chrismicklos / 1 Comment

shadows-quad

“There’s tension in any—any—flatting situation.”

Wise words, indeed, but then wisdom does come with age. And at 862 years old, Jermaine Clement’s vampire Vladislav—from the pitch-perfect What We do in the Shadows—has had centuries to hone his personal flatting philosophy.

The particular flatting situation at the heart of What We Do in the Shadows (now streaming at a variety of venues) involves four undead roommates who share a gothic old house in Wellington, New Zealand. Seemingly mismatched—there’s the swashbuckling Vladislav, the prissy Viago, the chore-slacker Deacon, and the crotchety 8000-year-old Petyr—these vampires bicker and snarl at each other from time-to-time, but have clearly fallen into an easy, pleasant co-existence. They’re friends. But their comfortable arrangement faces significant challenges when Petyr turns their servant’s vacuous ex-boyfriend Nick into a vampire. Nick promptly moves in with the boys and upsets the whole dynamic. Lucky for us, there is a film crew from the New Zealand Documentary Board on-hand to capture the evolving conflict.

Think MTV’s Real World but set in Victorian England but actually modern-day Wellington—so maybe a sort of pseudo-Victorian Wellington?—and you will have a good sense of what to expect. Together, the vampire pals discover the internet and the wonders of video chatting. They negotiate the exclusive Wellington club scene. And when they want to keep a low profile, they eschew flying across the countryside and instead take public transportation out for their night on the town.

Clement and Taika Waititi (as Viago) both pull triple-duty here: co-starring, co-writing, and co-directing. Although American audiences will know Clement best from two hilarious seasons of Flight of the Conchords (well, one hilarious season, and then a follow-up), their previous cinematic collaboration was 2007’s Eagle vs. Shark. In that film, Clement starred and Waititi wrote and directed. Where Eagle vs. Shark was charming but uneven, their work on What We Do in the Shadows represents much more confident, effective movie making.

Their script is sharp. Their cast—from the central characters to the walk-on parts, especially Rhys Darby as the alpha male among a pack of personally-conflicted rival werewolves—is spot-on. And what it lacks in story the movie more than makes up for with intelligent, character-driven humor, terrific visual gags and asides, and an obvious affection for the classics of the horror genre.

What We Do in the Shadows succeeds due in large part to that palpable love and appreciation of horror classics. Its humor may be modern, but its roots and inspiration burrow through more than a century of classic horror cinema. More Young Frankenstein than Scary Movie 5, Shadows’ affectionate take on the horror comedy offers equal parts satire and homage, with dashes of genuine melancholy and dread thrown in for good measure.

That tone represents a welcome departure from the current trend in horror comedy.

Comedy and horror have been kissing cousins since the early days of cinema. Moments of humor have been the go-to safety valve that horror filmmakers use consistently to relieve audience tension and to provide a break from the suspense and terror. But then a subgenre emerged and fused the horror film with the movie comedy.

The dark humor of The Bride of Frankenstein, for instance, eventually evolved into movies like An American Werewolf in London, The Evil Dead 2, and Re-Animator: horror movies first but with a wildly comic spin at the same time. Early full-throated horror satires like The Cat and the Canary, The Ghost Breakers, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (and the Mummy, and the Killer Boris Karloff, and on and on) eventually became Young Frankenstein and Ghostbusters.

But then something changed.

Over the past 20 years or so, any genuine appreciation of the genre has essentially disappeared from the horror-comedy. With the rare exception (say something like Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland), the modern horror-comedy either wants you to know how very hip and smart it is…or doesn’t really care how stupid it becomes.

Scream introduced the concept of “meta” into the horror genre, primarily by telling its audience over and over and over again just how “meta” it was. It is unclear if more damage was done in Scream by knife-wielding maniacs or by the main characters (and filmmakers, included) breaking their own arms by incessantly patting themselves on the back. That is not to say that Scream is a bad movie or that “meta” horror is all bad. Funny Games, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, and Cabin in the Woods are all interesting, fun (well, Funny Games isn’t fun at all), creative takes on “meta” horror.

At the other end of the spectrum is the brain-dead horror-comedy. The Wayans brothers are not entirely to blame here, but they have certainly done more to dumb-down the genre than any family in the history of cinema. Their Scary Movie(s) and Haunted House(s) take the lowest common denominator and somehow still manage to divide it by two. The audience isn’t so much expected to actually find these movies funny but simply to recognize that they are MEANT to be funny, and that is apparently good enough for them.

In that context, What We Do in the Shadows is more than a breath of fresh air.

It’s an instant classic.