Genre enthusiasts certainly enjoy a good apocalypse. Zombies are a pretty cool way to end the world, plus we also have some vampire and robot angles worth enjoying, but what’s wrong with a plain old (even eerily banal) sort of apocalypse? No zombies or vampires or robots (oh my) but just a stark and simple shift in Mother Nature’s plan? Surely that’s scary enough without all the metaphor-laden monsters banging on the doors.
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A good portion of American indie horror flicks deal with an outside (generally malevolent) force that impacts a person or a family unit. Lately I’m noticing a proclivity in smaller foreign genre flicks to go the other way: how a mundane “everyday” tragedy is the impetus for the terrors at hand. That’s a basic way of saying that the recent Swedish thriller Marianne is a dramatic piece, first and foremost, and a rather quietly engrossing one, too. But what’s most interesting is how the flick turns from domestic tragedy to legitimate horror tale without cutting any corners, tipping its hand, or cheating its audience.

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As more and more independent filmmakers get a taste for “found footage” storytelling, we start to see several common components that always seem to be included, regardless of whether or not the finished film is any good. The half-predictable and half-novel Skinwalkers (aka Skinwalker Ranch), for example, employs several of the faux documentary tropes that are found in everything from the brilliant [REC] to the most tiresome of found footage indies. Logically, the end result is a brief and familiar – but also kinda creepy and crafty – little sci-fi/horror hybrid..
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As usual: what was once the domain of indie filmmakers with more creativity than cash has become dominated by the major distributors. We’re talking about “found footage horror,” a storytelling gimmick that was resurrected by The Blair Witch Project several years ago, and has since become a sort of playground for indie filmmakers all over the world. But as soon as Paramount hit the super jackpot with their initial Paranormal Activity acquisition, the writing was on the wall: these movies are super cheap to make and even when they bomb they make good money. (Cue a laundry list of movies like Apollo 18, The Devil Inside, and four Paranormal Activity sequels – so far.)
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I look forward to a new Vincenzo Natali movie like most movie geeks anticipate the next feature from Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. Ever since I stumbled across his 1997 debut film Cube, which still stands up (despite its lesser sequels) as a very novel approach to cerebral horror or dark fantasy or violent sci-fi… I’m not exactly sure. From there he made Cypher (2002), Nothing (2003), and Splice (2009), all of which are (A) cool, (B) creepy, or (C) a combination of cool and creepy. So it was with much enthusiasm that I leapt into Mr. Natali’s latest effort, the haunted house story known simply as Haunter.

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When we horror fans take note of a new low-budget zombie movie (and we frequently do), our praise is often directed towards the film’s novel hook, energetic presentation, or impressive splatter effects. (All three if we’re really lucky.) But now comes a new low-budget zombie movie that’s not all that novel (indeed it’s virtually plotless), not very energetic at all (it’s actually pretty talky), and it’s not packing all that many zombie kills, truth be told.
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