Underseen Horror Gems of 2022

Awrite guv’na,

So a couple of years ago I went on the festival circuit in a major way for the first time, and found a whole lot of excellent new films that I couldn't wait to come out properly and persuade people to check out!

Alas, and also alack.

So as we stare down the barrel of 2024, I've decided to hold out hope some of 2023 films I loved will come out this year and look back to 2022.  I'm a big fan of paying for and supporting films, but some of these films may require knowledge of the high seas to attain.

Here we go:

Piggy dir. Carlota Pereda

I love myself a movie about a person who as to make a really complicated emotional choice, and at Piggy’s heart is a doozy.

Piggy concerns Sara (Laura Galan), a young teenager viciously bullied by her peers for her weight. One day, after an extended bullying session, Sara witnesses her tormentors being kidnapped. She should, of course, tell people what she has seen – but those girls had made her life hell, and likely would do if released. It’s one hell of a threshold to cross from adolescence to childhood.

One of the strengths of Pereda’s direction and script is that is very socially grounded. Sara, her parents, her neighbours, her tormentors – they exist in a community as well as separate beings. Pereda never loses sight of Sara’s internal struggle, but she helps you to understand that it is an external struggle too.

Plus, when it gets nasty (and it gets nasty), there’s a real emotion heft behind it.

Definitely the strongest recommendation on this list.

(Available on Now Cinema/VOD generally)

Hypochondriac dir. Addison Heimann

Sohome Horror Film Festival was a difficult moment for me. There’s low budget, and then there’s low budget. You know things that are helpful for reducing the budget? One location, bad actors, messy production; if nothing much happens in the plot, you don’t have to spend that much money.

So like a ray of light breaking through the storm, here comes a low budget gem. Hypochondriac is a performance, dialogue heavy film that feels very influenced by the 00s. It’s got a hip lowfi feel and a deliberate pace that never drags. Zach Villa is phenomenal as Will, which is just as well because he has got lots and lots of acting to do. Heimann has talked about the film having autobiographical elements to it, and right enough everything feels incredibly authentic about Hypochondriac, even as Will is being tormented by a demon wolfman.

(Loadsa VOD, it's only like a quid to rent on Apple TV or Prime)

Candy Landy dir. John Swab

On the strength of Candy Land, I attempt to watch another of John Swab’s dir/wri joints called Body Brokers. Body Brokers is turgid and clumsy and offensively mediocre, so who the fuck knows where Candy Land came from.

Candy Land is a slasher about a tight knit group of prostitutes that work at a truck stop somewhere in Americaland. They’re an incredibly likeable group of characters, and their easy relationships and dynamics are incredibly well realised. They’ve got a cool and fun community, although the film never lets you forget that sex worker is not exactly the most glamorous thing either.

One day a young woman is cast out by a weird christian-y cult, and she is taken in by the working women and men. Are they a threat to her? Is she a threat to them? Will the cult come back, or is there someone else with malicious intent? It’s all actually pretty predictable, but that doesn’t matter because the set pieces and character work so tight and deftly executed.

There’s also plenty of sleaze, so double bill it with X you randy freak.

(Yar me hearties!)

What is Buried Must Remain dir. Elias Matar

Set (and filmed) in a Lebanese refugee camp, a group of refugees set out to make a documentary in the abandoned estate of a French industrialist. Not being traditionally a fan of found footage myself, what really sold this experience to me was the way that the internal structure of the house itself begins to twist and mutate through subtle both in and out of camera tricks. The house itself becomes an amazing central character, and after a while its structure begins to feel almost impressionistic. There’re quite a few moments where the characters start making daft horror movie character decisions because it is a horror movie, but the sense of disorientation and genuinely well executed set-pieces really had me.

(I really hope everyone involved with making it is safe and well).

Matriarch dir. Ben Steiner

2022 was the year of naked old people. Men, X, Elderly, and Matriarch. I blame Ari Aster.

Matriarch is an earthy, witchy, English folk horror. It’s not a ground breaking premise; young woman returns to her rural birthplace after a trauma. Whilst there she discovers that there’s something amiss in the community. Rory Kinear is nowhere to be seen here, more’s the pity.

Released on Disney+ too very little fanfare, this little ditty ticked a lot of my boxes. It’s got some decent emotional stuff, is well paced (85 minutes!) and builds to a remarkably insane finale. If you’re a fellow folk horror pervert give it a look.

(Distributed by The Mouse)

Mad God dir. Phil Tippet

Cum, puss, phlegm, shit, saliva.

Why aren’t people talking about this film more?

(Shudder)

You Are Not My Mother dir. Kate Dolan

Babadook, dook, dook, push pineapple, shake the tree.

In retrospect The Babadook really did a number on horror. We were always culturally heading into a trauma obsessed world, but the continuing waves horrors where the monster-is-trauma has gained and gained momentum, especially after Heriditary proved they could make lots of money. Horror fans, it is fair to say, are sick them.

So it is with delight that I can describe You Are Not My Mother as a trauma-led metaphor horror movie. It’s also absolutely bloody excellent.

When, in the midst of a depressive breakdown, young Char’s (Hazel Doupe) mother goes missing the family fear for the worst. Good news is that she’s back now, and definitely not possessed by a demon.

There’s an excellent kitchen sink drama in here, which separates from many of the similar films. Characters don’t exist in hyperreal nightmare like Hereditary or The Babadook; people have extended families and can make friends and have to work and go to school. It lacks the bleak edge of many of these films – although at its most confronting matches them in power too. One hell of an opening scene too.

(Channel 4, bunch of VOD)

A Wounded Fawn dir. Travis Stevens

So during 2022 Frightfest the audience and I sat through a film that made them so angry people were shouting at the screen. ‘That was utter shit,’ remarked to the person on my right. ‘I hated that,’ said the person on my felt. Somewhere in the shadows of Cineworld’s seating a man was declaring it the worst thing he had ever seen.

Dear readers, I loved it.

I think someone needs to set-up a helpline for women who agree to go on a second date with a virtual stranger to a secluded cottage away from civilsation, because there seems to be a bit of it going around. I’m sure things will be different for Meredith (Sarah Lind) though. I mean, Bruce (Josh Ruben) keeps his red wine in a fridge, that’s definitely not the behaviour of a dangerous deviant.

A Wounded Fawn is shamblingly obvious with its themes. At one point, when Bruce puts his hand on Meredith’s knee they drive past red bunting flapping in the wind. No a bad thing I’d argue – I’d far rather a film be too obvious with its themes than not really engage with them. It is very artsily shot too, and never fails to take itself seriously, even when – and not to say too much – the film itself starts to devolve. The combination of beautifully shot, wildly imaginative, and basic and juvenile collide with spectacular effect. My pick of the bunch, although most certainly not for everyone.

(Shudder)

The Midnight Meat Train Review

There’s a pretty clear trend in the works of one Mr Clive Barker (a theme that I’m sympathetic with in real life) which goes as follows: heteronormative people are boring. The most obvious and outstanding example of this is Hellraiser/The Hellbound Heart, which obsesses over the way Frank and Julia transgress social norms and presents the BDSM devilangel Cenobites as the centrepiece of the movie; our literal main character, Kirsty, is there more out of a nod to the necessity of narrative structure. In the epic fantasy tale Weaveworld the evil witch Immacolata and her sisters, as well the shady salesman Shadwell, have personalities that dominate the narrative whenever they appear, compared to, again, literal main characters Cal and Suanna who practically vanish into the furnishings (if you’ll pard on the pun). In Cabal (and presumably Nightbreed) our straight main characters are made more engaging by portraying them in a heightened manner; Boone’s precarious mental state starts with him being gaslit into jabbering madness and his partner’s adoration for him is transformed into an obsession that feels perverse. More grounded characters like Kirsty and Cal allow the audiences to find a way into the story without identifying themselves with the freakish excesses, but that limits them and makes them so much more beige than the colourful world and people that surround them.

All of which is to say that it is very much in the spirit of Clive Barker’s works that the central couple of The Midnight Meat Train are boring as fuck. Leon (Bradley Cooper) is a freelance photographer who specialises in selling pictures of crime scenes to local newspapers. His work, however, is considered potentially more than just sensationalist sleaze - a local art curator (Brooke Shields) is interested in his work, but wants him to not shy away from capturing violence at its most brutal. When he encounters and stops an attempted rape happening in a subway station, only to find out that the woman he saved becomes a victim  of a string of disappearances happening in New Yorks subway trains, a door is opened to a world of greater violence that might serve his ambitions.

Notice how, through all of that, there is no mention of his girlfriend Maya (Leslie Bibb)? The emotional core of the movie hinges on their relationship, but she does very little beyond exist and work at a diner. Plot things move forward with or without her, and the characters are all sketched so thinly through the use of dialogue that manages the double header of generic and awkward, it is hard not to feel like their relationship (and her as a character) are inessential and unengaging. It is also entirely not in the original short story, which at under twenty pages long was admittedly going to need beefed up.

So if the emotional core of the movie fails utterly, is there anywhere where it succeeds? Back in the late 00s Gore Verbinski remade The Ring and decided that he wanted movies to look a little more like Kermit the Frog. The Ring was a sensation, children throughout the land whispered about the incredible levels of green it had attained, and as such everyone and their mother (if they were a nepo baby) started to slap heavy handed colour correction on films as a stylistic choice. Films from that era have a heightened unreality to them, which is always a little bit ugly.

Amongst a crowded field, The Midnight Meat Train is a particularly off looking example. It’s shiny neon grime and crushed shadows give the whole film and garish quality. The ridiculous CGI doesn’t help matters either, with dangling eyeballs and vibrant red entrails, often splattering towards the screen in a way that makes me think it was meant to be 3D. The first time we see Leon he is clearly chroma keyed against a backdrop, and it instantly sets the visual tone.

Clive Barker described it as “a beautifully stylish, scary movie”, which is true if your bar for scary and stylish is Looney Toon cartoons. When Vinny Jone’s villain character, wielding an absurdly shiny meat tenderiser, murders a woman her head whirls around so fast it literally made my friend burst out laughing.

This, perhaps, is the key to actually enjoying this movie: it’s cartoon nonsense, post-Raimi/Jackson splatterfest. The garish ugliness of the films aesthetic does confer a sense of sleaze and exploitativeness that cycles back to being kind of fun. There are even a couple of moments where the CGI gets out of the way and lets practical effects take over. Within the era of torture porn, these CGI-free moments are genuinely grisly and brutal. Director Ryuhei Kitamura doesn’t believe getting out of the way  of the story either, and there’s at least one fight scene that is so comically overdirected it cycles back around to being sort-of legitimately spectacular. The Midnight Meat Train undoubtedly embodies a heightened sensationalism and a sense of spectacle that gives it a real charm.

There’s a lot of legitimately entertaining aspects of The Midnight Meat Train, and even a thematic core that could have been something; photography of graphic violence as entertainment and so on. With more nuanced script it could really have been something, which is surprising since Barker himself is attached as an Exec Producer. Candyman this ain’t.

One of the least sleazy parts of the movie is a sex scene between Leon and Maya, which typifies the problem with them as characters and their relationship; it is over forced and tries way too hard, and as such mostly feels boring and superfluous. Ultimately, The Midnight Meat Train spends far too long lingering on an undercooked and bland central romance, and if the least sleazy part of your movie is the sex scenes, then something isn’t quite coming together.

The Boogeyman - Review

In a way it feels reductive to say that the entire direction of the canon of Western horror, especially in film form, can be drawn across the laylines laid down by one Stevie King, but to say otherwise would feel dishonest. It is upon his coke and alcohol fuelled blueprints we build our cities. He is the sewers and the plumbing; he is the cherubic gargoyles and the craggy grotesques. Upon watching Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman it felt almost pointless to learn later that the film is an adaptation of a King short. Even if it wasn’t, it still would be.

It is tempting, even outside of the shadowy monolith of Stephen King (of the lesbians), to talk of the prominent horror filmmakers whose finger prints can be found in The Boogeyman. Wan, Flanagan, Jennifer Kent. But what are we all if not the strange collection of inherited neurosis passed onto us by our parents (and that scene from It)? At some point The Boogeyman must stand on its own feet.

As must Sadie Harper (Sophie Thatcher), who has just lost her mother in an accident. Bullied at school, she finds herself herself with a younger sister who has developed a fear of the dark and a father who, despite being a therapist, refuses to open up to his daughters about his own loss. Compounding the difficulties, a strange man turns up at their house for a therapy session who may (read:will) be bad news.

In both life and movie making, there’s a lot to be said about specialisation. Being too general risks mediocrity. There’s a reason the English language idiom cautioning against being “all things to all people”. Try to please everyone and you risk pleasing no one.

So what is The Boogeyman? Based on director Rob Savage’s previous work it would be not unfair to expect a simple ghost train ride, something he has shown himself to be a dab hand at already. Indeed, there’s a lot of the demarcation of that style of storytelling in here: slow, dark camera crawls, set pieces that build towards jump scares, a monster costume that doesn’t quite hold up when you see too much of it. They’re well crafted too, with a real eye for imagery. Of special note is younger sister Sawyer (Vivian Lyra Blair)’s particular choice of lighting. But the script is too interested in the interiority of the characters to be a pure jump-scare fest, paced 

So is this a family drama? Certainly some of the stronger parts of the movie is the time taken, the patience of both tone and pacing, in creating the aforementioned sense of interiority with the characters. The pace is good too, a mid pace between slow lingering and twitchily overexcited.

When the family members interact it is easy to see a warmth behind the distance created by the tragedy they have suffered. There is, however, the problem that not only does the father figure basically just disappear for a chunk of the movie, but also the fact their interpersonal drama never really propels the narrative. Not many of the big moments in the movie are really about their relationship.

Wait! I hear you say - this is 2023! It must all be an artsy metaphor for trauma. There’s potential febrile ground there: the dramatic, as opposed to narrative, premise is that the film is about a family mourning the loss of their matriarch. Could this haunting be a manifestation of their grief? Thematically, the movie tips on the inert. Those themes are in there, but are not particularly explicitly or implicitly developed. There’s some great earthy bits of production design, and therapy and communication exists as a motif, but those dots aren’t connecting. When Sadie asks her father (Chris Messina) to talk to her, the movie is as reticent as her father to do anything substantial with the invitation.

There’s a lot in there to like, but all of the very decent pieces of the film have not been assembled into the best version of itself. The Boogeyman is, quite simply, a jack of all trades. In its own way it is fascinating for that. Here’s the finger prints of the way Wan and Wannel reshaped popcorn horror in the 00s, Flanagan’s tight writing and dramatic maturity, the “elevated” trauma porn of Hereditary and The Babadook: here’s a film which is the last ten or more years of a horror, and is not a particularly good example of any of it.

If this review seems rather negative, I’ll leave you with this: when I stepped out of the cinema, my friend immediately declared that it was “better than it needed to be.” For what it is worth, I agree, and there’s nothing wrong with that.