A young couple drives through a dark forest at night. As
they drive through the twists and turns, they lose their way and danger sets in
as a terrifying stalker torments them. Sound familiar? It's a classic horror
story, re-told again and again. And yet, when done right, it never fails to
frighten.
Director Jeremy
Lovering put his actors through a horrifying ordeal to make their terror as
real as possible. While filming, they never saw the script, never knew what
would come next, and, most of all, never knew whether or not their characters
would survive. Lovering's process, while it may sound cruel, produced some serious
results. There are some truly unnerving moments riddled throughout this film,
and in between the big scares, the film maintains a truly unsettling
atmosphere. This is the kind of horror film where you sit forward the entire
time, never sitting completely still.
But as scary as this
movie is, it's time we talked about a persistent problem in horror. When will
we see a horror film where the characters are capable of making intelligent
decisions? I get that when a character makes bad decisions, they are more
likely to get into a situation where the big scares can occur. But I want to
see a movie where the protagonists are actually intelligent and still get tormented. Take, for instance,
a scene near the end of this film: Lucy (Alice Englert) has endured her
tormentor for a full night. She finally reaches the couple's initial
destination and finds that it is an abandoned hotel, more of a junkyard than
anything else. So when she sees this, why on earth would she continue to
explore it? At this point, the only intelligent thing to do is get the hell out
of dodge, but instead she stays there, practically begging for more horror.
It's time we see a film where the character actually thinks about her
well-being.
