Posts Tagged ‘Steven Sheil’

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1129428/

Dir. Steven Sheil

Since the start of this year I have been reading much of Stephen King’s library of novels, he has always been one of my favourite authors but there were many books I had overlooked. In going back to his work I reawakened my love of horror, of the supernatural or just plain disturbing. To his end I was drawn back to an old love of mine, horror films, and this happened to be the first one I have watched in a while.

Mum & Dad is a microbudget horror which tells the story of a young polish woman, Lena, who is kidnapped and ‘adopted’ into a horrific Texas-chainsaw style family with a penchant for torture and murder.

It’s a claustrophobic horror that rarely leaves the house in which Lena has been confined. This works well, both for the story and the £100,000 budget that the film was produced on, as it keeps you trapped inside the experience that Lena is going through. It’s disturbing and uncomfortable without ever using cheap “jump scares” or resorting to the Saw “torture-porn” style of staring at gore, it creates it’s horror in atmosphere, in confusion and in the mounting insanity of the situation Lena is experiencing. It is the kind of horror that never uses fantastical elements and keeps the sense that the events are possible, that there are people in this world who are that sick (Fred and Rosemary West being the prime example for this film) and that plays upon your mind when watching it.

It’s an exceptionally strong film given its low budget and mostly unknown actors, who all perform exceedingly well, and I never once felt that it suffered from a lack of funds. The direction was solid and confident, and I’m not just saying that because I’m getting taught by the director at the moment, it really does work well. The actors inhabit their characters perfectly, especially Perry Benson as Dad, and it has well thought out, impressive visuals throughout the whole movie.

The one element that I felt did not work was the visuals of the planes. They were supposed to evoke the setting of Heathrow Airport but they felt oddly unimportant as the film went on and acted more like screen wipes than settings.

This film, combined with my earlier horror reading, has planted the seed of what I want to do with my MA. I want to examine horror; I want to see how it works and what new kinds of presentation can be explored in a genre that has, in a very short time, acquired a very strict set of rules and clichés.