HALLOWEEN HORROR: Old (2021)

Old was 2021's horror offering from the twistmeister himself, M. Night Shyamalan, only it's not really a twist - the central conceit revolves simply around something that happens to a gaggle of holidaymakers.

A disparate group of vacationers on an island break are directed to a secluded beach by the hotel staff, hidden beyond a cliff line of  strange rocks.

Only once there, strange - and often gruesome - things start to happen.

Quite quickly they deduce that there is something about the beach - probably the rock formations - that is distorting time, so that they all age about a year for every half-hour they spend on the beach.

Unfortunately, it's seemingly impossible to leave as well, as trying to pass beyond the influence of the mysterious rocks is like a diver suffering the bends, on land this means splitting headaches and staggering back onto the beach, at sea - trying to swim out against the current - this is much more fatal.

Although cuts, and other such wounds, heal themselves rapidly the adults eventually develop physical infirmities associated with old age.

But for the children the change is much more dramatic as their bodies grow and develop, while their mental age remains as it was.

Let's be honest, as if often the case with a Shyamalan horror film, the set-up for Old is genuinely intriguing, but at 100 minutes (plus almost 10 minutes of credits) you can't help feeling this would have worked way better as an hour-long episode of the Twilight Zone.

Written and directed by Shyamalan, based upon a graphic novel (Sandcastle) by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, the story gets to the meat of the action quite quickly, but because there are so many players on the beach it feels like it takes unnecessarily long to work through everyone's story arc.

Shyamalan also takes the odd decision, given that this is a 15-certificate horror movie, to not show several grim incidents that happen in the first half of the movie, instead relying entirely on the reaction of the other characters.

Therefore, for instance, we get the bizarre sequence where someone declares "the dog is dying" (one of the people brought their pet dog to the beach), people 'ooh' and 'urrgh', but we never see what it is they're looking at or how the area's special qualities actually affect the dog... nor is it ever seen (or mentioned) again.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to see a dog suffering from rapid onset ageing, but if you're going to write it out of the story so drastically, why bring it in in the first place?

If there is a message in Old, it's about not wasting your allotted time on Earth, carpe diem and all that.

There is a neat wrap-up to the narrative, and a major sci-fi infodump explaining what's going on and why, but the ultimate resolution feels a bit clumsy. While by no means a 'happy' ending, again it's a  decision that doesn't gel totally with the body horror vibe that Old gives off.

A darker, more shocking end might have given the story weight, with the horrific suggestion that it could still happen to others in the future.

SAW WEEK: Saw (2004)

Liberal use of the derogatory term "torture porn" is often used to throw Saw under the bus, lumping it in with lesser works of lower quality.

However, in truth, director James Wan has managed to pull off some Texas Chain Saw Massacre level sleight of hand that makes people remember seeing something that was far more gruesome than is actually shown on screen.

Sure, there's some nasty torture devices shown in Saw, creations of the enigmatic Jigsaw Killer, but the terror invariably comes from the suggestion of what the devices could do to their victims rather than graphically depicting it.

Saw is really a dark police procedural, striking a similar vein to Seven.

Here the mysterious antagonist is imprisoning people he believes are wasting their lives and, in his own sick way, is trying to make them appreciate what they have... or die trying.

Even the police's nom de guerre for the antagonist is a misnomer, as Jigsaw doesn't kill people in the film, rather he puts them in situations where they often end up killing themselves.

The bulk of the contemporary action in Saw centres around a pair of strangers - Adam (Saw scriptwriter Leigh Wannell) and Dr Lawrence Gordon (The Princess Bride's Cary Elwes) - waking up in a seedy bathroom with no idea of how they got there or how to escape.

Both are chained to strong pipes on opposite sides of the room and there's the corpse of a man, who appears to have blown his brains out, on the floor between them.

They soon realise they will have to work together to try and solve the puzzle they are trapped in.

As the story begins to introduce flashbacks into the men's lives, we are also drawn into the second main plot thread, that of the hunt by driven cop David Tapp (Danny Glover) to unmask the Jigsaw Killer... and his increasingly obsessive belief that Dr Gordon is his man.

Events culminate in one of the most memorable twists in modern horror since M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense.

You can only fully appreciate this the first time you experience it, but it's a masterstroke from director Wan and writer Wannell in both simultaneously laying out all the clues and totally misdirecting their audience.

Revisiting the film, you will then see all the Easter Eggs.

Definitely not the faint-hearted, Saw is as much a mystery movie as a game-changing horror.

Taking the maxim 'less is more' to heart, James Wan - in his first mainstream directing gig - gives viewers just enough for their imaginations to fill in the rest, cutting away before actually showing anything truly gruesome.

Those films that followed and sought to emulate its style often focussed too much on realising the suggested brutality and not enough on the mystery angle, but Saw still stands up 17 years later as a powerfully engaging crime thriller.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Watched (2024)

The trailer above, which I saw early last year, got me interested in seeing The Watched (aka The Watchers) and so I had been on the lookout for it ever since.

It finally arrived in Sky Cinema (in the UK), and at first I thought it was delivering on the potential suggested by the teaser trailer.

Dakota Fanning is Mina, a troubled American woman who works in a rare pet store in Galway, and gets lost in an unmapped wood while driving across Ireland to deliver a golden parrot (who she names Darwin) to a client.

Her car breaks down and she finds herself turned round and confused while searching for assistance, eventually being discovered by a woman called Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), who is hiding out in a strange building with a couple of other lost souls, Ciara (Lovely, Dark and Deep's Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan).

Mina quickly discovers that the mysterious woods are home to enigmatic, shapeshifting, supernatural monsters who are holding these people 'prisoner', governed by a strict set of rules, while they study them.

There are attempts to give all this spam-in-a-cabin fodder interesting backstories, but it doesn't really pay off or add much to the drama.

While the quartet are still zoo specimens for "the Watchers", The Watched has strong puzzle box elements - evoking FROM, Lost, and Jordan Peele's Us.

But then it segues rather conveniently into a (comparatively easy) escape sequence and a return to 'normality' that drags on purely just to seed in more - very obvious - plot twists.

There's an unavoidable feeling that a great mythology was dreamed up for the central monsters of the piece, but then a decent story couldn't really be hammered out to contain it. So, instead, we just get streams and streams of exposition as Mina moves from point A to point B, clicks on the right item, gets an info dump and moves on to point C.

While getting lost in scary, magical woods is a trope as old as storytelling, initially The Watched, written and directed by Ishana Shyamalan (daughter of M Night Shyamalan, who is a producer on this project), appeared to taking an interesting (if, probably not wholly original) approach to the subject matter.

Ultimately though it just got bogged down in a mundane and protracted resolution to a mediocre storyline.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Baskin (2015)

If you're looking for a memorable horror movie that feels like it was based on an HP Lovecraft story, but wasn't, then look no further than surreal Turkish splatterfest Baskin.

A generally unlikable, thuggish, group of police officers respond to a call for back-up in a rural area with a bad reputation.

Among the five-man team is Arda (Görkem Kasal), the newest recruit and the ward of the chief Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu).

As the freshest face in the unit, Arda has yet to be ground down, or corrupted, by the obviously hard work the men do.

Unfortunately on the way to the emergency, their van crashes.

The squad has to ask for directions from a strange group of "frog-hunters" they find camped at the edge of the lake their van ended up in.

A quick jaunt through the woods brings them to an abandoned Ottoman Empire-era police station.

The building appears to have been taken over by squatters, who have vandalised it with it peculiar graffiti and left evidence of all kinds of obscenities.

But it's only really as they descend into the lower levels of the building that the true horror of the building's current inhabitants becomes clear.

And the police officers soon find themselves in the clutches of a  terrifying, possibly sub-human, cult.

While Görkem Kasal's Arda is the nominal star of the story, the stand-out performance has to be the amazing Mehmet Cerrahoglu as the cult leader Baba (The Father).

Baba: The Father

A Turkish Clint Howard, Cerrahoglu's incredibly rare skin condition gives him a unique physical appearance that he draws amazing power from here in his first feature film role.

Forget all the splatterpunk Grand Guignol for a moment, Baba is the iconic image of Baskin that will endure.

Baskin (Turkish for 'Raid') was the first full-length movie from Can Evrenol, an extrapolation of his 11-minute short of the same name (which featured several of the same actors, including the magnificent Mehmet Cerrahoglu).

Buoyed along by a thumping, Carpenteresque, score, Baskin is Lovecraftian cosmic horror meets Hellraiser by way of The Void, Blair Witch, The Last Shift, In The Mouth Of Madness, and - for for better or for worse - Twin Peaks: The Return.

Even though it predates David Lynch's most recent visit to Twin Peaks, there's a key scene in Baskin - as well as its ending - that share important thematic, and stylistic, similarities and, I think, will ultimately decide whether you rate Evrenol's surreal shocker or not.

One thing I felt after viewing Baskin is that it is more of an experience than a coherent narrative. It's main purpose is to draw the audience into the mind-boggling ordeals that the policemen go through, rather than explaining too much or attaching it all to a traditional story structure.

Be warned, things do go a bit torture porn once the coppers are captured, but, for me, it's all about intent.

This isn't a bunch of wealthy businessmen torturing 'innocents' for shits and giggles, but an evil cult trying to transform its "chosen one" through arcane rituals handed down from their unknowable ancient deities.

Although the truly weird stuff doesn't start until the half-way mark of this 96-minute film, the pacing and rhythm are perfect so you're drawn in from the get-go, as the tension escalates and you try to figure out what the hell's going on.

Throughout Baskin there's talk about dreams (and dreams within dreams) and one - almost heavy-handed - shot of Arda nodding off in the van before everything goes sideways that I thought was the M. Night Shyamalan moment when the "it's-all-a-dream" twist was given away.

But, and I know some of you may consider this a spoiler, that's not what's going on. If it had all been a dream I would have been very annoyed and not nearly as smitten as I am by this flawed gem.

Much of Baskin has a dream-like nature, and dream-logic to its flow, but - as far as I'm concerned - what was happening to the protagonists was very real.

Having sat through much of the movie inner-monologuing "don't be a dream, don't be a dream", I'm now looking forward to going back and watching it again, comfortable in the knowledge that Baskin avoids that cop out (pun intended).

It is, however, genuinely the stuff of nightmares.

Knock At The Cabin (2023)

While staying at an idyllic, isolated, lakeside cabin, young Wen (Kristen Cui in her feature film debut) and her two dads, Andrew (Pennyworth's Ben Aldridge) and Eric (Hamilton's Jonathan Groff), have their vacation interrupted by the arrival of four strangers at the their door .

This group - Leonard (Guardians of The Galaxy and Dune's Dave Bautista), Sabrina (Avenue 5's Nikki Amuka-Bird), Adriane (Little Women's Abby Quinn) and Redmond (Harry Potter's Rupert Grint) - are the politest, most apologetic home invaders, but they are also quite insistent in their demands.

They explain that, while they were previously unknown to each other, they have been guided to the cabin by identical visions.

These told them that unless unless one of Andrew, Eric, or Wen is sacrificed by the other two, the entire population of the Earth will die in a series of plagues and disasters.

Naturally, Andrew and Eric don't believe this, with Andrew becoming increasingly convinced that this is a targeted, homophobic attack, especially when he thinks he recognises one of the intruders.

The couple are given four chances to choose a sacrifice and if they don't the consequences are - initially - rather unexpected.

However, if the ultimate sacrifice isn't made, only Andrew, Eric, and Wen will survive... to walk the desolate, post-apocalyptic Earth for the rest of their lives.

Straight off the bat, I have to say that I really enjoyed Knock at The Cabin. 

When I sit down to watch a movie where I strongly suspect there will be some kind of major twist, especially if it's an M. Night Shyamalan flick, I like to come to it with as little foreknowledge as possible... so I can be disappointed on my own terms, and not because some doofus has blabbed a key plot development online.

I'm glad that I knew nothing beyond the inciting set-up as Knock at The Cabin certainly delivers. This is a return to classic Shyamalan, with no stupid contrivances to undermine the powerful psychological horror at the heart of this story.

There's a modicum of violence in the film, although most occurs off camera as that's not how Shyamalan wants to unnerve his audience here, rather that's left to audience members contemplating the implications of choices that Andrew and Eric are being told they need to make. It's a more cerebral approach to horror than cheap jump scares, gruesome gore or scary monsters (all of which have their place, but it's nice to mix things up every now and again).

The story alludes to a pseudo-Biblical Apocalypse without being overly religious, drawing upon topical, real world fears, but ramping them up to 11 for the news coverage of the global drama unfolding beyond the confines of the cabin.

Based on Paul Tremblay's award-winning 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World (which is a far better name and I don't know why they didn't use it for the film), Knock At The Cabin could also easily be adapted to a stage play because of its clever and minimal use of locations.

All the core cast are on top form, being wholly convincing in their particular roles during the stressful scenario that kicks off almost immediately after the film begins.

There's no hanging around, the script (by director M. Night Shyamalan, co-written with Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman) throws us in the deep end, with a handful of brief flashbacks during the film's 100-minute runtime to fill in the protagonists' backstory.

The antagonists, however, we - like Andrew, Eric, and Wen - can only judge by their words and deeds.

I kept looking out for obvious, or predictable, grand scale Shyamalan twists, trying to second guess the plot, but I'm delighted to say I failed and got to live the ending as the characters did.

Split (2016)

Split is a strange film. Like its central character, it has multiple personalities. It begins as a Hitchcockian kidnap thriller, but very quickly starts to seed its narrative with suggestions of something more, something much more "superhero (or in this case 'supervillain') adjacent".

I've been burnt way too often by M. Night Shyamalan movies that I now tend to avoid them on principle, life being too short for repeated unnecessary disappointment or frustration.

Which is why I'd originally planned to give Split a wide berth, until it was revealed that Shymalan was working on a sequel to one of his superb early movies, the inventive superhero origin tale Unbreakable. However, this new film - Glass - was also going to be a sequel to Split.

Well, that I was it. I now had to see Split. And I'm glad I did... even if just for the final few seconds.

Three young students (Anya Taylor-Joy, Jessica Sula, and Haley Lu Richardson) are kidnapped and held prisoner by Kevin (James McAvoy), a man with 23 distinct personalities, each with its own voice, strengths, and weaknesses.

Gradually, the young girls learn that they are being prepared as sacrifices for a 24th personality - called The Beast - which is due to manifest soon.

Just shy of two hours in duration, there's no escaping the fact that Split is a patchy affair.

Possibly my total immersion was hobbled by the "Shyamalan Factor", I was always looking for that bonus plot twist (Is this real? Are the girl's real? Is his psychiatrist real? Is this is all a figment of one of the girls' imaginations?), when it's actually played pretty straight.

All the kidnapees are quite resourceful, but the Final Girl is clearly set up to be Taylor-Joy's outsider, Casey Cooke, as we learn more about the roots of her resourcefulness in flashbacks to hunting trips in her youth with her father and creepy uncle.

There's a lot of the claustrophobic horror of Silence Of The Lambs here, as well as moments that reminded me of Hannibal, but McAvoy's Kevin is drawn from the world of comic book science (like David Dunn) rather than the real world verisimilitude of Hannibal Lecter.

However, given that McAvoy is obviously the star of the feature, I found Casey's story dissatisfyingly unresolved, unless I missed a key point somewhere, particularly in respect to her vile uncle (Brad William Henke).

With the impending release of Glass, which unites the two movies, Split is the supervillain origin story to Unbreakable's superhero story, but it doesn't come across as a self-contained work.

Where the Bruce Willis movie feels like a self-contained work, Split feels like chapter of a longer story.

This makes me wonder if Casey is poised to return in Glass, tying up the loose threads of her story, along with Bruce Willis' David Dunn and James McAvoy's Kevin Crumb?

Unbreakable (2000)

Upfront, I have to lay my cards on the table and confess that I am not a big fan of the works of M. Night Shyamalan.

Sixth Sense was very good, but rather a one-trick pony signalling the writer/director's obsession with trying to be the new Hitchcock, rather than develop a unique style of his own. Signs was one of the most ridiculous films I'd ever seen and The Village wasn't much better (I never bothered with the Lady In The Water).

I think he puts too much emphasis on the "twist" rather than the story that leads to the twist. It's like he's saying "look how clever I am" and challenging his audience to second guess him, so you spend the entire film trying to guess the twist and not concentrating on the story.

Thankfully, Unbreakable isn't like that. I understand it was originally intended as the first part of a trilogy, but poor box office meant the studio put the kibosh on any sequels (perhaps people were just looking for a rehash of Sixth Sense!)

While still obviously Hitchcockian, Unbreakable does feature a kind of twist in the final scene but it is more akin to a standard plot revelation and therefore isn't all that the film is about.

Viewed in 2007 the film is almost a dry run, a pilot episode, for Heroes with its tale of an ordinary Joe (Bruce Willis as security guard David Dunn), who survives a train wreck and slowly - thanks to pestering from a strange art gallery owner and comic book obsessive Elijah Price (Samuel L Jackson) - begins to realise that he has "superpowers".

Certainly the best written of Shymalan's portfolio - the scene where David, having rescued some children from a murderer, silently reveals his "secret identity" to his son is incredible - yet the ending still seems slightly rushed, although on reflection it's growing on me.

The parallels between Dunn's developing realisation of his destiny and his troubled personal life are a particular gem - he can't find satisfaction in the latter until he accepts the former, however insane it sounds in a real world context.

The comic book nut, and budding storyteller, in me would like to see Shymalan and Willis revisit the story of David Dunn at some stage, let us know what happened in the "next issue", as it were.