IN GOTH WE TRUST ...
Teen girl discovers there’s a no-return policy on demons
With Christmas drawing near, and malls filling with both shoppers and cinemagoers, comes a horror movie that examines a very particular kind of buyer’s remorse. To wit: What if you summoned a demon and then changed your mind?
This is the quandary faced by Leah (Nicole Muñoz) in writerdirector Adam MacDonald’s assured second feature, Pyewacket. The Toronto high school student hangs with the Goth clique but isn’t overly serious about it. One senses she and her friends see it as more of a social club than anything truly dark.
We hear her occult incantation in the opening seconds of the movie, but don’t get back to it again until about a half hour in. By this time her mom (Laurie Holden) has decided to move them north of the city, earning Leah’s adolescent “I wish you were dead!” wrath. With spooky woods just outside their new home, it doesn’t take the kid long to put her fiendish plan into action.
The name Pyewacket has a deliciously twisted history. It’s the name of a cat in the Christmas-set 1958 rom-com Bell, Book and Candle. It was also used to creepier effect by William Friedkin in The Guardian (1990). But it was originally associated with 17th-century British official Matthew Hopkins, whose business cards read Witchfinder General.
Leah’s Pyewacket is a noisy, troublesome demon, but her presence is more about creating a mood than jump scares. One of the most effective scenes finds Leah’s friend seriously freaked out by the creature, though we’re never privy to just what she saw.
By the time a convenient occult expert gives Leah a lesson in how to unravel a hex, things have got pretty strange. But one of Pyewacket’s triumphs is the way it keeps its horrors grounded in reality, and its character in the forefront, proving you can be both smart and pretty scary — a good lesson for the genre.
MacDonald’s first feature, the excellent 2014 thriller Backcountry, posed the question: Does a bear scare the crap out of you in the woods? Pyewacket delivers another excellent query, and one with no easy answers.