While I appreciate the idea of Shudder allowing Kier-La Janisse the chance to curate a seasonal selection of short spooky tales, in the tradition of the Christmas ghost story best appreciated beside a roaring fire and inky darkness pressing at your windows, I am a bit bemused as to the timescale.* This is the first tale presented, and one will be added every year, apparently. So we'll have ten to choose from if the idea of The Haunted Season, as it has been named, lasts for an entire decade.
Written and directed by Sean Hogan (someone very much worth your time/support), this is the tale of four men carrying a coffin on a lonely stretch of road as the day is turning into night. There's the Squire Marlow (Mark Carlisle), a man grieving the fact that his son is the one being buried, Pike (Richard Rowden), an assistant to the squire, Holt (Harry Roebuck), a young man who was a friend of the deceased, and Ransley (James Swanton), a local often hired for the unpleasant task of coffin transportation. Nerves are frayed and tensions run high as this foursome move along with more than just a corpse weighing on their shoulders.
People may be more familiar with Hogan nowadays for his writing than his film work (but if you're unaware of his writing then you should really change that). I've been a fan of his since he impressed me on two different occasions over a decade ago, with his work on Little Deaths and the superbly spooky The Devil's Business. Both of those films deserve to be rediscovered and re-appraised, by the way. Anyway, Hogan knows how to create tales that can unnerve you and chill your bones, while at the same time keeping you intrigued and entertained. He focuses on dialogue and atmosphere, and then helps himself by making great use of cast members who seem to clearly relish the words they're entrusted with.
Although viewers haven't often seen him looking as he normally looks, Swanton is arguably the most well-known of the central performers here. Horror fans will have seen him embodying a great number of strange and dark characters over the past few years (it would be too easy to refer to him as the British Doug Jones, but it also wouldn't be too inaccurate), yet he has lots of fun here with a wonderfully theatrical performance that serves as a reminder of his excellent one-man turn in Frankenstein's Creature. Whether already familiar with him or not, Swanton makes himself the star of the piece, but he's nicely complemented by Carlisle, Roebuck, and Rowden, who all chew on the material with great gusto.
Hogan doesn't have too much to keep layering over the spooky core of the film, which explains why it's only a 43-minute short, but he sketches out the characters and the group dynamic with attention and care, giving viewers more to appreciate and chew over than can be found in most horror movies, whatever their length. If this is a taster of more to come from him in the film world, I remain very enthusiastic to see anything and everything else he wants to present. I might even end up rewatching this before the year is over.
7/10
*EDIT: Someone rightly pointed out to me that the BBC has been doing the same thing for many years, of course, but the timescale never feels problematic there because they already have a nice backlog to rewatch and enjoy.
If you have enjoyed this, or any other, review on the blog then do
consider the following ways to show your appreciation. A
subscription/follow costs nothing, and ALL of the links you need are here - https://linktr.ee/raidersofthepodcast
Or you may have a couple of quid to throw at me, in Ko-fi form - https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews
Or Amazon is nice at this time of year - https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/Y1ZUCB13HLJD?ref_=wl_share
No comments:
Post a Comment