Penny Dreadful
SFX's high priestess of horror
This issue: absolutely everyone in horror movies is basically terrible.
SINGLE FRENCH FEMALE
I like to bang on about how horror isn’t mean-spirited and is actually all about hope and the will to survive. Well this month it’s not! If there’s a theme this month, it’s that everyone is awful. First of all there’s Greta, an enjoyably bonkers throwback to the “bitches be crazy’” subgenre which brought us Fatal Attraction, Single White Female and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. In this iteration the nutter is elegant, tiny French lady Isabelle Huppert, and the target of her obsession warm-hearted Chloë Grace Moretz, who makes the grave mistake of returning Huppert’s handbag after she leaves it on the subway. Huppert’s obviously having a marvellous time with the genre and the two play terrifically off each other, but the moral of the film does seem to be “only hang out with people your own age and don’t be nice to anyone, ever”. Highly silly, mildly offensive, worth a watch.
WELSH SCAREBIT
In further horror-moviestitled-with-girls’-namesbeginning-with-G news, wistful folk chiller Gwen is getting a limited theatrical release from 19 July. A very frustrating movie, this. Set in 19th century Wales, it’s absolutely gorgeous to look at and massively atmospheric as a young girl (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) and her mum (Maxine Peake) struggle to survive on their windswept farm after a mining company encroaches on their land. The movie keeps teasing that it’ll turn into something like The Witch at any minute but, believe me, no one in Gwen gets to live deliciously. It’s one of the bleakest movies I’ve seen this year, as disaster after disaster befalls the family and any glimmers of hope are squashed. And the big reveal at its heart is basically that people are utter bastards. Grim.
SILENCE: NOT GOLDEN
There’s a bit in new Netflix movie The Silence where the deaf girl, her mum and dad and her brother arrive at a house that looks very much like the house in A Quiet Place, and suddenly everything was too meta and my head exploded. It’s based on the novel by Tim Lebbon that has essentially the same plot and characters as A Quiet Place (deaf girl, hearing family, monsters attracted to sound). The book was first published in 2015, well before A Quiet Place, which went into pre-production in March 2017, while the movie of The Silence started preproduction in August 2017. Sad times for Lebbon all round, since the movie of his book is awful. Kiernan Shipka plays completely unconvincing deaf person Ally, while Stanley Tucci is her “mildly peeved in the face of a swarm of killer bat monsters” father. The Silence adds a crazy cult and a rapey bit to the mix, but even a sprinkling of Handmaid’s Tale can’t save it. I’m now reading Lebbon’s book as an act of solidarity.
BLACKWOODS GLANCE
The first trailer for We Have Always Lived In The Castle is with us, and I can’t wait! This is the adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s wonderful 1962 novel about sisters Merricat (Taissa Farmiga) and Constance (Alexandra Daddario) Blackwood, who live in an isolated mansion with their Uncle Julian and are hated by the local villagers after the suspicious poisoning of their parents. “The world is full of terrible people…” Merricat says in the trailer – yes, exactly! What I love about this story is the acceptance, bond and love between the two sisters. For a tense tale of escalating horror, it’s actually rather sweet and life-affirming. Done right this could be a delight.