["Chew on This" is Bill Coffin’s column on horror cinema. See past columns here.]
There’s something going on over in Spain, because while the American movie industry has seemingly lost its ability to produce a decent creepy movie, Spanish filmmakers, led by Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) have produced a number of great horror movies, such as The Devil’s Backbone, [REC], and The Orphanage. (Pan’s Labyrinth qualifies as horror depending on who you talk to. I’d consider it dark fantasy, but it’s a fine line. Regardless, so see that one, too.) Shiver is no exception.
Directed by the same fellow who brought us the genuinely unsettling The Devil’s Backbone, Shiver is the kind of movie that in many ways is not all that original. It’s not super-shocking, and it’s not pressing the envelop anywhere. What it is, however, is very well executed. It’s smart. And it knows its audience. And as a result, this is a really effective film, and I found myself enjoying it way more than I ever thought I would. It is the kind of film best watched cold, like any good horror film, so that the fright of the story is as unanticipated to the viewer as it is to the characters. So if you like going into movies unprepared, just know I’m giving this one a 7. Starting with the next paragraph, here be spoilers.
Our story begins with Santi, a lonely teenager with an extraordinary allergy to sunlight. As it turns out, his canine teeth are growing at an unusual rate also, something the family doctor writes off as a side effect. In a lesser film, the story might get sidetracked on this and overplay the curious nature of Santi’s ailment. Is he really a vampire? Or does he just sort of look like one? Obviously, Santi’s life has been turned upside down by his condition, to the point where he and his mother must move someplace where there is not a lot of sun. Lapland is one option, but a Spaniard among reindeer is about as much against the natural order of things as any of Michael Bay’s recent remakes of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Amityville Horror and The Hitcher. So, Santi and his mom move to the north of Spain, where villages reside in deep woodland valleys. This provides the story with two staples that most horror has to strain to provide: plentiful darkness and non-existent mobile phone use.
Santi has been treated like a monster all his life, and only when he arrives at his new home, where it becomes clear that anybody who ventures into the surrounding woods is unlikely to ever come out again alive, does he see that there are real monsters afoot. Shiver spares no time getting into this, but it handles Santi’s move north, his inevitable inability to fit in, and the fact that local carnage is blamed on him with thankful economy. These are all cliches of the genre, but Shiver pays us the compliment of knowing that we know this, and that such turns of plot are necessary for this particular story. So it goes through them deftly and without trying to make them more than what they are.
Is Santi a vampire? The locals seem to think so. Those silly locals.
This is the hallmark not just of this but of all recent Spanish horror cinema. These movies don’t speak down to their audience. The stories are smart, the characters are smart (and thank God, they act intelligently) and they expect the same from the audience. It’s not that Shiver is a hard movie to follow. It just does us the favor of not turning stupid at any point. And this is really important, because the core reveal of this tale – what exactly is killing people in the woods? – is the sort of thing that were this movie to take itself too seriously, or were it to condescend to the audience, it would not work at all. I can see this film with American stars and in English playing at the local mall, and when the monster is revealed, the audience collectively laughing its ass off. And they would be right to do so. Which is why it always pays to see the foreign original of a recent American remake. But I digress.
Old people in small towns know more than they let on. Fact.
There are three classic themes this film taps, and it does it well, creating a sort of horror movie mash-up that works well despite the risk that so many story threads might entangle each other. The first is the Little Town with a Big Secret. We see this a lot; the isolated community that usually is either superficially friendly but secretly vicious in nature, or one that is wary of outsiders and harboring a pretty good reason for it. The town in this movie is of the second variety, but it is one of the most believable ones I’ve seen. It is…well, a small, rurual town that doesn’t get a lot of visitors. I’ve been to places like this. And they’re not bad people. They’re just used to being left alone and aren’t going to go out of their way to welcome newcomers. That Shiver bothers to try portraying a small, isolated town as it should be deserves some praise. I also have to note that this is one of the most darkly beautiful settings I’ve seen in a horror movie in some time. The cinematographers love this scenery, and it shows. The deep, shady woods and towering mountains of the scene serve to reinforce the claustrophobia and the grim darkness of the story. There is a fear over this town, and the very landscape both foments it and gives the sense that one is trapped. Which brings me to the second theme: The Dangerous Environment.
“Back in my day, we walked to school through monster-infested woods.”
Movies like Jaws, Alien and even the Texas Chainsaw Massacre all rely on the notion of the characters being trapped in a setting where they can run as much as they want, but it will never be far enough to escape what chases them. In Jaws, to confront the shark, you must meet it in the ocean, where the fish has every advantage. In Alien, you’re stuck in deep space with something that really wants to kill you. And in Chainsaw, you’re stuck in the remote backwoods, where the deep isolation makes it impossible to expect help. Horror films keep coming back to this concept because it works. Almost too well, really, and so it gets over used. Shiver is little different; the town is in a deep valley and the woods are everywhere. Even though the town is of a decent size, has a high school and some contact with the outside world, every road cuts through thick forest. Every walkway seems to have been a trail blazed by Little Red Riding Hood. And once the movie establishes, early on, that the evil to be confronted lives among the trees, you realize that there is no safe place to be had. It’s an old troupe, but again, it works here. The reason why is what brings me to the third theme: Urban Legend.
According to Spanish cinema, little children are not to be trusted.
In Shiver, you never get the feeling that there is something definitely supernatural in the woods. The townsfolk seem to know that something bad is out there, but they don’t have any ideas what. Could be wolves. Could be the Chupacabra. Point is, smart people stay in town, where they don’t have to think about it much. When you’re Santi, living in a house that’s pretty deep into monster country, you don’t have that luxury, and so the story takes off. Quickly Santi enlists the help of his weirdo friend he grew up with before moving out to the sticks to investigate what the hell is killing people (and always when Santi is around, which makes him unpopular both with the families of the slain as well as the local police). The cop problem lessens when the daughter of the local investigator takes a liking to Santi, and she joins the group to find out what the hell is going on. The speed and accuracy with which the kids unravel the mystery is refreshing, actually. They turn to the internet, as they ought to, and their research plays out pretty much like how it ought to, if armed with the evidence they begin with. But what also works is Santi himself; the medical condition he has that one could see being mistaken for true vampirism in a more primitive age drives him to seek a rational explanation for what’s going on. And he gets one without the movie leading us down needless blind alleys to try to complicate a mystery that doesn’t really need complicating. It is just smart storytelling. It’s not a really epic tale, or a very deep one. But it knows its points, it hits them and it doesn’t waste our time. And these days, these seem like rare qualities in a film genre such as this one.
The root of all evil in the film is ultimately the sort of thing you’ve already heard about, hence the Urban Legend thing. Thankfully, the use of this is not so overwrought that it loses credibility. A lot of Urban Legends are, in truth, somewhat creepy. Where they stop being so is when supposedly non-retarded people in movies start acting like they never heard of things everybody has heard of, or when they act like there is a whole lot more to these things than a weird set of circumstances and a compelling story to go with it. Once again, when Hollywood turns its Eyebeams of Ruination (TM) upon this film, it will spend way more time than it needs to exhausting and expounding upon the Urban Legend element of this thing. I can feel it.
This is the hot girl. She is here to help. And to fall down a lot.
Ultimately, Shiver’s final reveals aren’t very revealing, which is a weakness, and certain parts of the finale play out pretty much as you’d expect them to, which is a disappointment. Santi’s friends are easily foreseen archetypes – the geek whose unusual interests equip him to fight monsters (sort of) and the pretty girl who is there to help and get into trouble. The central villain of the story was something I kind of hoped would be something else – rather than one weird thing in the woods, I had hoped there was an entire family of them, an evil that had become as much a part of the neighborhood as the local butcher. And in at least one instance, our heroes literally stumble across critical information to the plot. And while it is well handled, the epilogue end up having to tell us the full deal of what’s really going on because the story somehow can’t quite get to it during its natural progression. On this last point, I’m of a mixed mind. On one hand, I appreciate that the film never veered into pointless exposition to explain things before they are resolved. On the other hand, having it explained after the fact always feels like the filmmakers are simply covering their bases. Had things been left unexplained, the story might have been much, much creepier – how deep to this town’s secrets run, anyway?
However, these letdowns all feel relatively minor because when you get right to it, this is a fun movie that is really well shot, doesn’t veer into stupidity and promises that if you don’t mind reading subtitles, there is a whole universe of great cinema out there for any genre fan, really, but especially for horror. Horror lends itself to this because most times, you can make a good horror movie for not a whole lot of money. And right now, the advent of cheap digital photography and post-production has enabled a gazillion foreign filmmakers who don’t have a big budget to work with. Horror, which rarely needs one, becomes a good outlet for all of this untapped creativity, which is why we see so much good horror coming from places like Japan, Thailand, England and now Spain. I’ve heard it said that in Hollywood, making a movie is like riding in a limousine driven by an idiot, whereas in most other countries, making a movie is having a race car pro at the wheel behind a POS hatchback. Personally, I’ll take the hatchback every time.
DYLMAG Rating: 7
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