Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 29, 2004, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Of all the films in the last several years that have harked back to ’70s/early-’80s horror, Malevolence may be the one that makes the least fuss about it. Rather than recapture the aggressive shock tactics of the classics of that era, Stevan Mena’s directorial debut aims more to elicit a quieter sense of menace, punctuated by the occasional jolt. It’s unfortunate that a simple, measured approach to horror, unencumbered by gimmickry, out-of-place humor or pandering to modern youth trends, can be seen as a homage and thus an exception to the current genre rule, but so be it. Simply on its own terms, Malevolence is an effective exercise in methodical tension.
Malevolence may contain visual and stylistic echoes of several past chillers (most notably Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Town That Dreaded Sundown), but Mena isn’t after a nudge-nudge homage here. His storytelling is refreshingly direct as he follows a gang of bank robbers who flee a suburban heist, with plans to regroup later and divide the money at an abandoned rural house. Kurt (Richard Glover), one of the more volatile of the group, ends up carjacking a suburban mom (Samantha Dark) and her young daughter; they arrive at the meeting place ahead of everyone else, where the girl breaks free and flees into the countryside. What none of them know, though the audience does, is that there’s an abandoned slaughterhouse next door housing a demented fellow with a fetish for sharp objects. Once he makes his presence known, it’s “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” time.
From the opening scenes, Mena (who also produced, scripted and composed the score) elicits a spare rural atmosphere that nicely complements the sense of vulnerable isolation his characters feel. A rare current indie horror feature shot on 35mm, Malevolence has been photographed by Tsuyoshi Kimoto in a manner that brings a chilly tone even to the daytime exteriors, and suffuses the night scenes with shadowy menace. Mena takes his time building to the frights, and some viewers might become a little impatient waiting for the killer to strike. When he does, Mena’s careful establishing of tone and geography pays off as the characters flee from the house to the killer’s lair and back, falling victim in murder scenes that are brutal, though sparing on the gore.
One of Mena’s challenges was to maintain sympathy in a story where most of the maniac’s potential targets are criminals, which he handles by making two of them a couple with no other choice but to rob the bank, and who don’t really want to hurt anyone. The acting among this group is varied, but Dark provides a strong center as the mom struggling for her own life and her daughter’s, and who is Most Likely to Survive for the final confrontation with the killer. Refreshingly, the characters rarely indulge in the kind of contrived behavior required by some films of this type to keep the story moving; everyone has their own reasons for not simply bolting the place when it’s clear there’s danger around, or for avoiding calling the cops.
Malevolence is the kind of unpretentious but accomplished debut that points to big things in the future for its creator (Mena’s score, it should be added, effectively adds to the tension of his direction). The filmmaker has announced that his next projects will be a sequel and prequel to this feature, and while the movie tells a pretty self-contained story, it does so well enough to make one look forward to how Mena is going to expand on it.
