Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 15, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
It has only taken the better part of a decade, but the children of The Blair Witch Project have come of age in the last year or so, and found-footage horror is flourishing on big and small screens. A handful of direct Blair Witch knockoffs/spoofs notwithstanding, the vérité form has only really been embraced very recently by fright filmmakers, ranging from old masters (George A. Romero with Diary of the Dead) to genre-feature first-timers (the Cloverfield gang), from foreign practitioners ([REC]’s Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza) to those remaking them (the Dowdle brothers of Quarantine). While the first-person approach can give screen terror an immediacy that traditional filmmaking styles cannot, it also carries the limitation of restricting what the audience-surrogate characters can plausibly capture on their cameras.
Home Movie (pictured above), the writing/directing debut of actor Christopher Denham, doesn’t quite get over that hurdle, but for a lot of its running time, it’s a damn disturbing and effective little tale of extreme family dysfunction. It just had its world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia film festival, which is also hosting The Butcher, a Korean example of the sub-subgenre of fake snuff films. This particular breed has significant limitations of its own, which writer/director Kim Jin-won is unable to surmount.
Denham cleverly structures Home Movie around a series of holidays both religious and secular, from Halloween to Easter—not only appropriate because David Poe (Adrian Pasdar) is a Lutheran pastor, but also lending a bit of metaphorical underscore to the events that occur on them. Halloween, it turns out, is also the birthday of Jack and Emily (Austin and Amber Williams), the twin children of David and his psychologist wife Clare (Cady McClain), both of whom wield the camcorder through which the story is told at the rural Connecticut home they’ve recently moved into. And from the moment we meet them, it’s clear that the 10-year-olds are a couple of dark and troubled spirits. They’re uncommunicative and sullen. They act up at the dinner table. And at first, one can’t entirely blame them, given that David seems a tad too enthusiastic about sticking the camera in their faces and turning them into unwilling stars of his home production.
Still, it’s a bit much when Jack throws a rock instead of a baseball and hits David in the head during a backyard batting practice. And the kids’ behavior becomes more malevolent from there—though it’s one of the movie’s strengths that at first, the motivations behind it aren’t any clearer to the audience than they are to the Poe parents. That’s a payoff of only allowing us to see what David and Clare see, as the father comes to believe that perhaps Jack and Emily have the devil in them, while the mother maintains that the problem can be solved via psychiatric treatment. And thus does the couple’s relationship start to fray as well, as Denham smartly balances the dual conflicts between David and Clare, and between the couple and their children. The tension hums with enough intensity that a couple of implausibilities can be forgiven (if your kids were demonstrating a violent streak, would you really show them how to pick locks and tie “knots you can’t get out of”?).
Another of Denham’s skills here is in leading us to believe one rationale for what’s going on, only to undercut and subvert our expectations. Just when you think the story is going one way, he surprises you by taking a different route, maintaining a consistent level of unease. Helping you believe in this Home Movie are the naturalistic performances of the four leads, with Pasdar quite effective in a change-of-pace role from his popular Heroes role and McClain even better as Clare, desperately clinging to her profession as her family plunges toward hell. The Williams siblings are already veterans of TV and movies (Austin was the young Matt Damon in The Good Shepherd and George Clooney’s son in Michael Clayton), but they’re remarkably unaffected, enacting scarily believable portraits of corrupted innocence—to the point where their real-life parents will probably be keeping a closer eye on them for a while.
Just how corrupt Jack and Emily are becomes clear as Home Movie enters its final act, and the Poe family’s situation spirals downward into the hopelessly horrific. Yet as under-the-skin creepy as these developments become, there’s also the nagging sense that no one in such extreme situations would keep the camera running. Indeed, one of Denham’s most effective devices in the early going is to only offer us quick flashes of the kids’ unpleasant handiwork before the camcorder is turned off in disgust by the parent holding it. Thus, it’s hard to believe that the Poes wouldn’t simply abandon taping altogether as things reach severe crisis mode. The filmmaker ultimately finds a way around that sticking point, however, and manages to betray our expectations one last time. Denham’s final achievement is that, even if it’s not always handled plausibly, the through-the-lens approach he takes to Home Movie feels crucial to his narrative and not like a gimmick.
The same can’t be said for The Butcher, since it doesn’t really have any narrative. Instead, it has a situation: several abducted people struggle against their bonds in a remote warehouse as their kidnappers prepare to bloodily murder them on video. The victims have cameras mounted on their heads, so that the masked killers’ activities can be captured on tape while they also record the mutilation and death they deal out, and we witness the goings-on from both points of view. Why the villains leave their captives’ cameras turned on long before they’re brought to the slaughter room, as we see in The Butcher, is never explained.
Perhaps the idea is that, since this allows us to watch the snuff filmmakers behind the scenes before they get down to their dirty work, we’ll get some insight into what motivates them, or perhaps a satirical or dramatic point will be made. Some of the chatter surrounding The Butcher suggests that it’s attempting a comment about these Koreans exploiting their fellow countrymen for the sake of gains to be made from overseas viewers of their product. That idea is addressed in about 30 seconds of onscreen dialogue, and never brought up again.
Instead, it’s eventually off to a plastic-sheeted chamber where a husband and wife are hideously mutilated at great, grotesque, screaming length. But what’s the point? If Kim is attempting to create the ultimate in screen horror, the result suggests a very limited understanding of what the genre entails. Simply documenting extreme suffering and brutality, unsupported by plot or characterization, inspires the viewer to turn off from the spectacle rather than become emotionally engaged in it. And the movie’s very form stacks the deck against it; there’s no suspense because you know that if the trapped characters don’t suffer grievous physical harm, there’s no reason for the film to exist.
Or perhaps The Butcher is meant as a reflexive comment on screen violence and those who get off on watching it. You like extreme gore?, the movie might be asking. How do you feel when you’re put in the victim’s position? But if Kim is presupposing that the audience is already there to enjoy the bloodshed for its own sake, and is aiming to implicitly criticize them for it, he wallows in the spurting red far too enthusiastically for his point to be made. I’ll admit that there are moments in The Butcher’s early going that got me in the gut, but it wears out its welcome long before the end of its brief 76-minute running time. Viewed as a horror film, The Butcher has little to add; seen as an attempted indictment of the genre’s excesses, it winds up becoming part of the problem rather than the solution.
