American Gothic

American Gothic (1988)

Dir. John Hough

Written by Burt Wetanson, Michael Vines

Starring Rod Steiger, Yvonne DeCarlo, Sarah Torgov, Janet Wright, Michael J. Pollard, William Hootkins

            AMERICAN GOTHIC has been on my radar for very nearly 20 years now, ever since my first girlfriend back in high school told me that it was the absolute, bottom-of-the-barrel, worst movie ever made, in language so uncharacteristically salty that it stuck with me through the better part of two extremely eventful decades. I have a very clear memory of the VHS box taunting me from its high shelf in the horror section of the video store where was employed back then (my recollection is that it was the very first movie in that section, shelved alphabetically; we didn’t have ALICE, SWEET ALICE, and I believe THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES was in the “classics” section, even though it was only 28 years old at the time, younger than AMERICAN GOTHIC is today). At the time I was a budding cinephile with a neophyte’s earnest pretensions for the medium, and, lacking the jaded bemusement which would so endear terrible cinema to me later in life after all meaning and joy had leached from my dessicated soul, I was in no hurry to watch something which was supposed to be so terrible. But even so, I thought I had AMERICAN GOTHIC pretty well pegged. I mean, look at that cheesy box art. This looks like it would be a good companion piece to HEAD OF THE FAMILY or GHOULIES.

            Except, actually not. Because the first two things that happen in the movie demonstrate both why it is very much not in the same vein as those lovable Charles Band joints, and why someone might consider this to be a movie with some serious, perhaps movie-breaking tonal issues. I’ll let wikipedia describe the film’s opening:

“Cynthia [Sarah Torgov, MEATBALLS, in her last peformance before becoming an artist/illustrator] is traumatized by the death of her baby after leaving him in a bathtub, where he accidentally drowned. She and five of her friends, Jeff, Rob, Lynn, Paul and Terri decide to go on a vacation.”

A representative image from this movie called "AMERICAN GOTHIC"

            So right off the bat, we have, 1) holy shit, traumatic baby death, dealt with in a way which very much wants us to understand and take seriously that trauma. Not exactly a fun way to kick off the hacky bodycount slasher which is strongly suggested by the second sentence, which brings us to the more familiar territory of 2) a bunch of disposable white people behaving in an utterly alien manner (‘Cynthia, let’s go on a couples vacation to get your mind off that whole unpleasant business with your dead baby!’) on their way to meet their death in an isolated location. And for better or, --let’s face it-- probably for worse, this is not some kind of embarrassing miscalculation on the movie’s part, this is AMERICAN GOTHIC telling you what it’s all about. And what it’s all about is introducing weird, cartoonish, campy horror movie tropes and then treating them with absolutely dead seriousness that borders on misery porn. It shouldn’t work at all, but it’s so steadfastly committed to its mordant tone that I think it somehow sort of does. Not that it’s the kind of “working” that would necessarily suggest that you or anyone else would enjoy it.

In the cartoonish, campy corner, we find the basic premise: our six vacationing white people get stranded on an isolated island when their plane breaks down, and are surprised to find that the only inhabitants are a family of bizarre, eccentric misfits. “Ma and Pa” (Yvonne DeCarlo, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, SILENT SCREAM, and Rod Steiger, DR. ZHIVAGO) are puritanical religious zealots with three adult offspring (Janet Wright, McCABE AND MRS. MILLER, THE TALL MAN, William “Hoot” Hootkins, STAR WARS, and Michael J. Pollard, BONNIE AND CLYDE, THE ARRIVAL) who all behave like --and appear to believe they are-- prepubescent children. And, uh, not the kind of precocious, perceptive prepubescent children you usually get in movies, more like they smoked an eight-ball of meth and marathoned The Little Rascals and then based their entire personality and demeanor on what they remembered from it.

There is, I think, no denying the silliness of that basic setup. But in the dead serious corner, you have the relatively realistic violence that these nutcases eventually visit on our unsuspecting outsiders, which at some point makes a hard left turn from uncomfortable awkwardness to straight up THE HILLS HAVE EYES sadism. It seems like an insane choice for a premise this loopy, but the movie is absolutely resolute on this point. As absurd as the “kids” are, Steiger and DeCarlo are playing their severe, repressive roles with absolute 100% seriousness, and there’s a grounding realism to the direction which makes the broad, unhinged performances of the “kids” seem unsettling and perverse when it could easily slide into high camp. Most of the victims are not at the same level, and some of their corny hip kid dialogue threatens to sink the whole enterprise early on, but they start dying off pretty quick, and as the direness of their situation sets in it’s increasingly hard to laugh at them. Director John Hough (THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS, THE INCUBUS, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE) seems bound and determined to make this no fun at all, favoring a bleak, hopeless tone matched by the gloomy naturalism of DOP Harvey Harrison (who had just worked with Nicolas Roeg the previous year for a segment of ARIA, and would work with him again in 1990 for THE WITCHES). The craggy woodlands where most of the film takes place are perpetually overcast and full of a wet, sodden sense of decay which feels hostile and wild in the most Hobbesian sense (in fact, it strongly reminds me of another unexpectedly dour wilderness-set slasher, 1983’s THE FINAL TERROR).

The overall effect is a real downer. While creative, none of the kills are very “fun,” and the movie sets its sights on really getting you to understand the depth of these poor victims’ helplessness in the face of these psychotic, self-righteous freaks. This is a task at which is it, against all odds, largely effective; that it is an experience anyone would want to voluntarily subject themselves to is a somewhat different question. Not that it’s exactly wall-to-wall misery porn (though there is at least one incident so shocking it actually elicited gasps from the crowd I viewed it with); it’s just grotesque and miserable, lacking the blind adrenaline rush of THE HILLS HAVE EYES or THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (which it is clearly seeking to emulate) and just resulting in a dismal, hopeless march to the slaughter of characters who are too loosely sketched to care much about, but whose frantic misery is all too clearly articulated.

But again, this is not miscalculation on the movie’s part. It begins with grueling emotional trauma, and grueling emotional trauma is what it’s interested in. This provides no help at all for its anemic bodycount slasher section, but its centrality to the movie suddenly makes sense when it runs out of fresh victims early, leaving time for a thoroughly unexpected final act which changes directions considerably. Despite the unusually sour tone, watching the generic pretty people getting bumped off one by one plays more or less the way you expect of such a thing, which leaves us at around minute 70 with a comfortable assumption that our confirmed “final girl” will rally, confront her tormentors, and manage an unlikely escape. Instead (SPOILERS) she joins them. The trauma of all this is so great that instead of finding a hidden strength and resolve to overcome adversity, Cynthia’s mind simply snaps, and she comes to believe that she is the fourth “child” of the family, dressing in frilly little girl clothes and mimicking the exaggerated childlike affectations of her new “siblings.” You keep assuming it’s an act, that she’s just playing along and waiting for a moment to escape, but no, the old Cynthia really is gone, and not going to return.

(SPOILERS continue) But turnabout’s fair play. Just as “Ma” and “Pa” have honed their other “children” -- who we now learn are victims of the same brainwashing scheme which has now ensnared Cynthia-- into psychotic killers, the now-deranged Cynthia turns out to pose quite a bit of danger to the very people who made her what she has become. The sight of a desiccated baby corpse that Janet Wright is using as a dolly (!) stirs memories of her own dead child. In another movie, this flash of insight might restore her to sanity, but not here. Instead, it churns up her already fragile mental state into something primal and destructive. In short, it transformers her into a Jason-like slasher in her own right, and she wastes no time in butchering her entire adopted “Family” in a pleasingly sadistic manner. Not out of revenge, or desire to escape, but out of pure psychotic frenzy. Hey, you break it, you bought it, you fuck-o's. Cynthia’s tragic past as a baby-drowner is so over-the-top it threatens to get a laugh for much of the film (though actress Torgov is actually quite excellent in the role), but I like that it turns out to be the key to getting her to hulk out and murder everyone at the end. “Worth it” might be going a little far, but “helps redeem what was probably always a bad idea” comes closer.

Now, I’m not really sure what the point of it all is, which is kinda a problem for something this mean, especially when you posit the villains as ultra-religious conservatives haranguing about the debased outside world and all that, and especially especially when your movie is fucking called AMERICAN GOTHIC, for heaven’s sake. It seems like it’s supposed to be some kind of send-up of backwards, evangelical American repression, but the stuff that happens is so crazy and over-the-top that it’s hard to imagine what it’s getting at beyond “wow, conservative religious nutcases sure are scary, huh?” But I do like the implication that this iteration of the TEXAS CHAINSAW family isn’t trying to eat you, it’s trying to terrify and harass you until it breaks you and can subsume you. And in doing so, might turn you into something even worse. It’s interesting that whatever their faults, “Ma” and “Pa” are certainly not hypocrites; they’re true believers, and the film even ends with (SPOILERS) Steiger --upon arriving home to find his family butchered-- raging at God for betraying him after he did everything he was supposed to, which both the film and the actor treat with 100% sincerity and commitment.

Sincerity and commitment AMERICAN GOTHIC has; whether that’s enough to make it worthwhile is a pretty open question. On one hand, I have to admit, it says something that it affected me enough to provoke a reaction. On the other hand, that reaction was “well, this certainly is unpleasant.” So maybe my old girlfriend kind of had a point. Like all the John Hough films I’ve watched so far (including THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS, THE INCUBUS, TWINS OF EVIL and THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE) this one is competently assembled and deliberately paced, but also like all of those, it seems absolutely bound and determined to take a ridiculous premise and ensure it’s no fun at all. It’s not exactly boring, but it’s nowhere near exuberant enough to just get by as a meat-and-potatoes slasher. It has a great cast and some genuinely committed, effective performances, but it’s nowhere near interesting enough for that to do it any good. Fundamentally, it seems like a movie that doesn’t quite understand the reason for its own existence. Writers Burt Wetanson and Michael Vines have no other significant writing credits, and one is certainly tempted to imagine that they simply watched THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE make a bunch of money and figured “sure, I could write something like that.” Like so many other hucksters who were similarly disabused of that notion after their ill-conceived attempt at a ripoff crashed and burned (the miserable ISLAND OF DEATH comes to mind), they seem to have assumed the success of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was due to its sadism and depravity within a family dynamic, instead of its masterful sense of nightmarish intensity. Without that intensity, the sadism and depravity are lifeless objects on-screen, rousing disgust, perhaps, but never much more

Still, gotta give ol’ AMERICAN GOTHIC a little credit for being so fucking crazy hardcore when I assumed it was gonna be a straightforward genre lark. At one point they (SPOILER) rip a baby carcass in half while fighting over it. God damn, honkie. It’s not really very good, but at this point in my death march of horror movies, I’ll settle for “unexpected.”

Side note: Actor Mark Lindsey Chapman (who plays Rob, and, holy cow, was in TITANIC!) once played John Lennon in a biopic of Mark David Chapman called CHAPTER 27. What the everlovin' fuckity-fuck?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

  

TAGLINE	The Family That Slays together… stays together. Which is solid Horror taglineing at its finest, except that it absolutely does not accurately describe the tone of the movie at all.
TITLE ACCURACY	Meh. They don’t even mention the famous Grant Wood painting, which appears only in the VHS box art.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Nope
SEQUEL?	None.
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	IMDB says UK/Canada. It definitely seems to have been filmed in Canada.
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher, TCSM rip-off, “Evil Town”
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Rod Steiger, Yvonne DeCarlo
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Yvonne DeCarlo
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No.
THE UNDEAD?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	Oh hell yes.
EVIL CULT?	Well, technically these people are subscribers to one of the world’s major religions, but definitely of a sect which could be called cultish.
MADNESS?	Oh, certainly
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Some spying-on
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you suspect God would like you to butcher a bunch of vacationing teenagers, maybe switch to the New Testament for a little bit. (But not Revelations, and I’d stay away from Paul too, now that I think about it.)

Here, I figure you probably deserve a picture of Michael J. Pollard for your troubles.

The Ritual (2017)

The Ritual (2017)

Dir. David Bruckner

Written by Joe Barton, based on the book by Adam Nevill

Starring Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali, Robert James-Collier, Sam Troughton

            THE SIGNAL is a 2014 American science fiction thriller directed by William Euban and starring Brenton Thwaites and Laurence Fish… no wait, that’s not it, what I meant to say is THE SIGNAL is a 1998 road-trip dramedy about life on an American Indian reservation based on the stories of Sherman Alexi… wait, no, that’s, that’s SMOKE SIGNALS. What I’m actually thinking about is 2007’s horror-anthology THE SIGNAL, which found rookie directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry taking turns directing vignettes centering on the aftermath of a mysterious television signal which drives most of the population insane. If you are confused, I don’t blame you. This is why you give your movies original names, people.

            Anyway, THE SIGNAL (2007) was one of the most intense, effective modern horror movies I had seen in a good long time back when it came out, and I was really jazzed to see what each of the three directors would follow it up with. But it turned out to be a long wait. Gentry did a series of MTV movies called My Super Sweet Psycho 16 which sounded terrible and I never bothered with, Bush did some movie called THE RECONSTRUCTION OF WILLIAM ZERO in 2014 which I’m just now learning about as I’m writing this, and the dopey James Franco ghost/heist mash-up THE VAULT in 2017. And Bruckner, who did the obvious standout vignette in THE SIGNAL, did… almost nothing. A couple short films and anthology segments, but so little of note that I ended up forgetting all about him. And then, without any hype or anything, whammo, suddenly THE RITUAL is on Netflix.

            THE RITUAL is a 1977 survival/horror flick starring Hal Holbrook and... wait no, actually I mean THE RITUAL is a 2002 Tales From The Crypt movie with Jennifer Grey and Craig Sheffe… no no, scratch that, it’s a 2002 Filipino thriller, or.. Wait, wait, actually it’s a surrealistic 2015 Russian-German co-production, or… goddamn it, this is why you give your movies original names, people! There are well over 100 movies and TV shows with that name or a similar derivation of it listed on IMDB. And I bet none of those other ones ends with (mild spoiler?) a Scandinavian demigod that lives in a moose’s face (more on that later). I refuse to believe the makers of this movie thought the fact that a ritual happens was the most noteworthy thing here.

            (There were two movies named SOLO in 2018 alone. The cheap irony alone should have been enough to scare one of them off).

            Anyway, 2017’s THE RITUAL is Bruckner’s first-ever full-length directorial gig, and if it lacks the breathless ferocity of his segment in THE SIGNAL, it’s still an unusually strong and vivid little exercise, sticking comfortably to tried-and-true horror formula but providing enough texture and imagination to make it distinct. Considering Netflix’s extraordinary, almost unbelievable track record of taking exciting directors and facilitating turgid disappointments (Kim Jee-Woon, Duncan Jones, Jeremy Saulnier, Jonas Åkerlund, Martin Zandvliet, Adam Wingard and David Mackenzie are all among its victims), just having this come out pretty good seems almost like a miracle.

            The premise is simple enough: four old friends get together for a hiking trip in Sweden in the wake of the death of a fifth friend, who was fatally beaten during a random robbery while one of them (Luke, played by Rafe Spall, ANONYMOUS) watched helplessly (if it had been Steven Seagal in there, this movie would have gone in a very different direction). That’s already a pretty grim reason for a get-together, and the austere Swedish wilderness ain’t exactly lightening the mood, so there’s some tension brewing not very deep below the surface. Petulant, whiny loudmouth Dom (Sam Troughton AVP: ALIEN VS. PREDATOR) openly blames Luke for the tragedy, and while Phil (Arsher Ali, FOUR LIONS) and Hutch (Robert James-Collier, Downton Abby) seem to have more ambiguous feelings, it’s not exactly a cheery woodland jaunt even before they find a gutted elk hanging from a tree and a bunch of BLAIR WITCH style hanging totems.

For quite a long time, that’s what the movie offers: an emotionally fraught journey with four grieving men who aren’t in the habit of expressing themselves very openly, wandering through a strange, nebulously threatening wilderness. But it gradually, almost imperceptibly, migrates from drama to survival thriller to horror movie with a remarkable steady seamlessness, mostly through a deft control of tone and a mercilessly steady escalation of new and more explicit perils. This task is aided immeasurably by the excellent atmospheric photography of cinematographer Andrew Shulkind (THE VAULT), which does a phenomenal job of capturing exactly what’s so irresistibly scary about the woods at night, and also, a few vitally important times, what’s so comfortingly beautiful about nature during the day.

This is not a thing to be overlooked; many horror movies are set in the woods, but very, very few ever seem to have a good sense of how to shoot nature in a authentic way. Everything that something like IT’S IN THE BLOOD misses about the experience of being alone in a forest is vividly present here, especially in the night scenes, where the small circle of illuminated vertical tree trunks vanishing into an endless black abyss manages to feel both claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time. It ignites something very primal in the brain, a sense of being alone and helpless and vulnerable, surrounded by inchoate malevolence lurking just beyond perception. The effect is cumulative, and the longer the movie lingers, the more it builds a powerful feeling of helpless isolation, a sense of ancient, timeless horror hovering just on the outskirts of modernity. And the safety of the familiar, predictable modern world is never excessively remote –the hikers, of course, are only a few days’ trek from civilization!—but it is always hopelessly out of reach. You get the feeling that just over a few hills, there are trendy bars and shiny impersonal office buildings, but they might as well be a world away. It adds a hint of cruel irony to the usual feelings of backwoods helplessness; they’re so close to comforting society, but it helps them not at all.

            That’s important, because for most of the film, the vibe is the real star. The actors are uniformly capable, but like HEREDITARY --and, let’s be honest, a lot of these serious, slow-burn modern horror movies-- quite a bit of time is spent on character drama which doesn’t really link up, narratively, to what ends up happening. It’s a mildly interesting (if somewhat clichéd) detail that our protagonists are dealing with the death of their friend and processing the guilt and blame about Luke’s role in it, but for how much of the movie is devoted to this plot, it doesn’t turn out to really be important at all. You could replace it with basically any standard horror movie backstory and the plot here wouldn't change in any meaningful way. The best of these modern, drama-savvy horror movies, like THE BABADOOK or THE CANAL, bridge that gap, and make the character drama an intrinsic part of the movie’s central conflict. Others, like THE INVITATION or HEREDITARY, spend a lot of time with character details which seem to run parallel to their actual point. They’re not worthless, exactly, since they make their characters richer and more interesting to watch, but they are extraneous, which, to my mind, inevitably makes the whole weaker than it could be.

In the movie’s defense, the standard flashbacks to a traumatic event are handled with slightly more imagination than usual; rather than just flashing back to footage from the opening, the haunted Luke sees his trauma physically manifest in the reality around him. So every so often he’ll turn around and there will be a couple shelves of liquor and a line of fluorescent lights sitting there in the middle of the woods. It’s a pretty neat image, and I approve. The concept may not be even remotely fresh (it’s about as standard as these things come… looking at you, DARK WAS THE NIGHT), but at least the execution is. And the movie deserves a little respect for showing a distinctly multicultural England; a couple characters are not what you would think of when you imagine “Anglo-saxon” Brits, and it goes entirely uncommented upon. It’s no cheap morality lesson, just a clear-eyed view of the modern, diverse world. Bravo. Still, for how much time gets wasted on the interpersonal drama, I’m not convinced that any of it is very insightful or well-written. In fact, the writing (by Joe Barton [iBOY] based on the novel by Adam Nevill) actually feels pretty clunky from time to time, though the actors do a splendid job of selling it naturally.

But never mind that, because the atmosphere is more than sufficient to run defense for the movie’s dithering first act (at 94 minutes it's not egregiously lengthy, but would certainly not suffer from a bit of tightening up in the first half), and well before its sense of primal doom has lost its punch the movie shifts abruptly into one of the best goddam creature features I’ve seen in years, and any little missteps from before are immediately and wholly forgiven. The creature itself is a magnificent design, utterly unique, instinctively captivating, and thoroughly disquieting. There’s enough ungulate in there to comfortably guarantee Larry Fessenden a hard-on, but it’s not quite any one thing. Its appearance and nature are revealed gradually, but by the end you get a good long look, and you’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s a bit of a hodge-podge, but it deftly and decisively avoids the modern curse of overcomplicated, over-designed visual gibberish, instead cutting a distinct and elegantly comprehensible figure (heightened by the film’s clever decision to reveal it first in silhouette). It’s this huge thing, but there’s like, something inside it, something kind of human, that you can never quite make out. A god, I guess. A Son of Loki, they say? Tom Hiddleston, you ol’ dog.

The monster is so great that it almost doesn’t matter about anything else, but it’s a nice bonus that the story works, too. Not that it’s some sweeping literary marvel or anything --it’s cliché at best, and possibly just badly written-- but that doesn’t end up mattering one iota, and in fact its sturdy simplicity helps give it a mythic, timeless quality that suits the material splendidly. It’s the perfect example of basic material executed beautifully; it’s certainly easy to imagine a version of the exact same story which feels like the most imaginatively barren slog possible,* but thanks to Bruckner’s impeccable direction, that’s categorically not the case here. The story may be simple, but the telling squeezes it for all the tension it’s worth, tightening the vice so subtly that you can’t quite put your finger on the point where things shift from inconvenient to dire; things seem bad but manageable, then worse but manageable, and then somehow everything goes to hell without anyone quite realizing what has happened.

If you haven't seen the movie, I don't want to ruin it for you, so no picture of the critter in question.

 And while all the drama may not amount to much, it does humanize the character and make them relatable. In fact, the movie reminds me of what Elil Roth once inexplicably claimed** about gialli; these characters really do make decisions that anyone might make. They’re not idiots, they don’t have some hubristical comeuppance, they just make a few bad calls which could just as easily have turned out fine, and then they’re fucked. Given that, there is a bit of that old fatalism here (in fact, it’s arguably something of an “Evil Town” story, with our characters invisibly being herded towards their own doom), but at least they’re active, doing the best they can, and in the end (spoilers) our surviving buddy is finally rewarded for it. I’m usually of the philosophy that unlikely “happy endings” are the coward’s way out, but I make an exception for horror movie protagonists who’ve really been run through the gauntlet. Let’s give this poor guy one win at the end, huh? He earned it.

All this adds up to one inescapable conclusion: THE RITUAL is a truly top-notch lost-in-the-scary-woods journey with a real humdinger of a destination, and no amount of flabby character development can take that away from it. Whatever reservations I have about the way they want to take me there, I’m 100% on board for the ride. With its sturdy construction, wild climax, and iconic creature, I think this is a rare horror flick which might just earn a cult following over time...

 ...If only it had a name anyone would be able to remember two weeks from now. Oh well, at least it’s guaranteed a long, venerable existence of being called “you know, that one where there’s a Swedish guy who lives in a moose’s head. I think it’s called THE RITE?”

* In fact, the movie almost lost every bit of goodwill it had gained from me when I read that they cut the part from the book where our heroes are tormented by the members of a satanic black metal band called “Blood Frenzy.” What the fuck were you thinking, taking something like that out? That’s so metal just reading it may have given me lead poisoning! You’re damn lucky I liked your monster, fellas. Damn lucky.

* “[In gialli] The girls are always going on some trip somewhere and they're all very smart. They all make decisions the audience would make.” -- Eli Roth, in one of the most preposterously indefensible statements ever made on a public platform by anyone other than Donald Trump.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	They Should Have Gone To Vegas. Oh well, save it for the sequel?
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a ritual, but wouldn’t HELLMOOSE been a little more descriptive?
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, actually, from the 2011 novel by Adam Nevill (to be fair to the movie, the book is also titled “The Ritual”)
SEQUEL?	None yet, but it just came out last year (it had a festival release date in 2017, but premiered on Netflix in 2018). I’d be down for more.
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	UK production, but shot in Romania
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Creature feature, Evil Cult, “Evil Town,”
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	If you wanna count this thing as an animal, sure.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Yes
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	If your friend is ever bludgeoned to death in front of you, do not, I repeat, NOT give into the urge to go sadness-hiking in a grim Scandinavian forest with your three most emotionally repressed friends.