Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 28, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Even as it has become a cliché for the new wave of horror filmmakers to say that their projects aim for the spirit of ’70s chillers, movies that genuinely evoke that veneer are few and far between. There’s a certain vibe about the decade’s drive-in fare that’s hard to define and harder to capture, no matter how much gritty photography, explicit gore and cannibal-dinner-table setpieces one incorporates. One new production that gets it, and gets it right, is Plague Town (coming soon from Dark Sky Films), the feature writing/directing debut of David Gregory—perhaps not surprising, since he has previously made his name as a producer of documentaries and DVD extras celebrating films of the era, most notably Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth.
It’s also thus not surprising that Plague Town adopts the Texas Chainsaw template of a squabbling fivesome who travel into an unfamiliar rural area and find themselves in very deep trouble. Meet the Monohans, on vacation in Ireland (acceptably doubled by verdant Connecticut locations), during which dad Jerry (David Lombard) hopes his late-teen daughters will bond with his new girlfriend Annette (Lindsay Goranson). Blonde Jessica (Erica Rhodes) isn’t having any of it, and has taken out her frustration by inviting Robin (James Warke), a handsome bloke she has met earlier in the trip, to join them. There’s no one in a wheelchair, but second daughter Molly (Josslyn DeCrosta) has apparently been crippled by past mental troubles, which will inevitably make it harder for her to convince the rest of her family when she starts glimpsing fearsome faces in the woods around them.
Gregory and co-scripter John Cregan have loaded these travelers with more emotional baggage than physical, which allows for plenty of conflict to arise in the film’s opening act. As the protagonists of this kind of horror story, that refreshingly sets them apart from the usual van- or SUV-ful of sex-and-party-minded teens, though Jessica’s constant petulance does get a little wearying after a while, as does Annette’s insistence on overstating her thoughts. As any seasoned horror fan knows, though, this is all just the appetizer for the movie’s real meat—when the Monohans miss the last bus out of the area, night falls, they take shelter in an abandoned car and Gregory starts to get his creep on.
As suggested by the movie’s bluntly brutal prologue, this red-streaked region of the Emerald Isle has a little problem with its offspring. The local bloodlines have been contaminated, and the result is a population of deformed children who set upon the stranded group after they unwisely split up to seek help. And while the first murder sequence is a shocking eye-opener in more ways than one, the kids don’t just have killing on their minds. Their older relatives look upon the younger of the newcomers as “pure” breeding stock—and in a switch on the usual emphasis, it’s the male Robin who becomes the focus of this particular attention. Specifically, he winds up in the cottage of an elderly woman who wants him to spawn with her granddaughter Rosemary (Kate Aspinwall), a blind teenager with doll’s eyes covering her useless sockets.
With her staring plastic orbs and wordless demeanor, Rosemary and her scenes with Robin are the eeriest in a film that evokes the genuine feeling of a nightmare captured on celluloid. Combining cinematographer Brian Rigney Hubbard’s moody visuals with the unnerving sound design by composer Mark Raskin, Gregory immerses his protagonists and the viewer in a bizarre nocturnal environment where anything strange and horrible can happen, without the escape hatch of potential rescue or leavening laughs (beyond a few moments of humor of the blackest kind). As opposed to the chatty murderers—both young and old—overpopulating the genre these days, Plague Town’s youthful antagonists are more effective for being silent, sporting prosthetics (by Knock Knock’s Tate Steinsiek, I Sell the Dead’s Brian Spears et al.) that are equally evocative in their simplicity. The FX artists provide gory moments as well that get under the viewer’s skin as surely as they get under that of the unfortunate victims.
Plague Town may hew to a tried-and-true formula, yet it demonstrates that the proverbial devil is in the details, and an approach that elicits the dark and grisly spirit of fright films past—both American and British—without visibly straining for that effect. All his professional study of vintage low-budget shockers has clearly rubbed off on Gregory, and the result is a movie that would have been right at home on outdoor screens past, but also sports fresh tricks and terrors of its own. If he keeps this up as a filmmaker, he might well inspire an appreciative documentary himself sometime in the future.
