Not all “horror” movies are about shocks, scares, jolts, and suspense. OK, maybe 99% of them are about that stuff – but there’s a small subdivision that’s tucked deep down in the smarter and perhaps more sensitive section of the genre, and that’s where you find “speculative” horror fiction that’s 1/3 sci-fi, 1/3 drama, and 1/3 a clever rumination on what the word “creature” actually means.

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There are plenty of (usually independently produced) movies that take firm aim on the “chew ‘em up and spit ‘em out” nature of Hollywood. My favourites are Swimming with Sharks, Living in Oblivion, The Player and The Day of the Locust. But while those films are satirical and often very funny deconstructions of The Hollywood Machine, the new indie horror film Starry Eyes is sort of a kick straight to the nuts of the film industry.

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Mirrors are sort of fascinating – how they actually work, not just the ways in which mirrors can act as portals, creatures, and harbingers in fantasy and horror stories – but if you ask a horror movie aficionado about “that movie about the killer mirror, you’ll get a response like Mirrors (1995) or (dear lord) one of those awful “Mirror Mirror” junk piles. (I actually kind of liked the Kiefer Mirrors movie; crazy, I know.)
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A man (Sharlto Copley) wakes up in a hole in the ground filled with corpses, with no memory of who he is or how he got there – or how the dead people around him met their grisly fate. Helped out of the hole by a mysterious mute Asian woman, he makes his way to a house in the woods, where he finds a group of men and women also suffering from amnesia. Some have ID (so they know their names), some have suffered wounds and bruises, but none of them know how they came to be there – or what the hell is going on. Deeply suspicious of each other, and unable to contact anyone in the outside world, they explore the house they find themselves in, finding a calendar with a ring around a certain date (two days away), a cupboard full of guns and ammunition, and a library full of books about human anatomy. Looking for answers, they increase the scope of their search to the surrounding forest, where they discover more dead bodies, bound to trees by rope, and a haggard female – alive, but barely – chained up in a barn, raving incoherently. What is going on? What’s going to happen in two days? Who or what is responsible for the dead an injured? Who are the heroes, and who are the villains? And more importantly, since we’re about to commit 100 minutes of our lives to finding out, should we care?

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The common complaint about the first chapter of The ABCs of Death – or, fine, at least my main complaint – is not that the 26 shorts were weird, random, nasty, and sometimes nonsensical; it’s that there wasn’t much in the way of consistency. Yes, ABCs #1 did offer a solid handful of legitimately creative and/or creepy shorts, but it also presented a bigger handful of arbitrary, random… weirdness. Obviously a feature that is little more than a framework on which to hang 26 shorts is going to have its peaks and valleys, but ABCs #1 seemed a bit more interested in gross-out gags and bodily functions than in horror, suspense, or simple creepy storytelling.

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When everyone goes home for Thanksgiving, including her boyfriend Aaron (X-Men’s Lucas Till), flame-haired poetry major Justine (The Hole’s Haley Bennett) is left behind on a largely deserted campus, with only a security guard (Mathew St. Patrick) for company. Meanwhile, the search continues for missing teenager Heather Price, whose grisly fate at the hands of a group of hoodies we have already witnessed during the opening credits. Borrowing an absent friend’s BMW, Justine drives out to a convenience store, where a brunette with piercings and a faded red hoodie (Ashley Greene, aka theTwilight saga Alice Cullen) intimidates her; on the way back to campus, the hoodie’s car tries to run Justine off the road. Justine is understandably spooked, especially when she returns to find footage of a young woman being attacked randomly playing on her laptop. Minutes later, “red hoodie” appears in her room, calling her “Kristy” and telling her “she’s got it all.” Sensibly, Justine runs for the safety of the security station – but Wayne is attacked and killed before her horrified eyes by a second hoodie, who seems to have borrowed a mask from someone in The Purge (and then decorated it in Remedial Handicraft class using tinfoil and duct tape) and the head-tilt routine from Jason Voorhees (or a Yorkshire terrier).

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Flightless Turd

“Whatever happened to Flight 7500?”

It isn’t quite a mystery on the scale of, say, the disappearance of MH370, but horror fans may nevertheless have been wondering what happened to 7500, the CBS Films-produced horror film scripted by Craig Rosenberg (Half Light, The Uninvited, The Quiet Ones) and directed by Takashi Shimizu, best known as the director of Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), its 2003 sequel, its American remake (The Grudge, 2004) and its 2006 sequel.

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