#Horror Review

3.5

Film Pulse Score

Horror_Tara_Subkoff_Movie_Poster
  • Save
Release Date: November 20, 2015 (Limited and VOD)
Director: Tara Subkoff
MPAA Rating: NR
Run Time: 101 Minutes

I didn’t look at Tara Subkoff’s directorial debut, #Horror, as the damning condemnation of toxic social media obsession that it was clearly aiming to be and instead viewed it as a cautionary tale to all parents to not raise their kids like assholes.

Sure, the film tries to wag its finger at today’s youth who are supposedly too disconnected from reality to truly respect the lives of others, but this is something we’ve seen several times before with films like The Bling Ring, and although I didn’t like that movie either, at least it didn’t have incessant “submit” button animation cutaways appearing every five minutes, slapping you in the face.

The film revolves around a group of bratty 12-year-old girls who gather for a sleepover at one of their homes, a ridiculously lavish piece of architecture in rural Connecticut. The girls do what all spoiled rich girls do in movies and mercilessly make fun of each other, try on expensive clothes and play around with their mother’s jewelry collection. Unbeknownst to them, there’s a killer on the prowl who already slit the throat of one of the parents and is aiming for them next.

Chloë Sevigny plays the matriarch of the house they are spending the night in, but due to her own selfish needs, she spends most of the film clearly not fulfilling her duties as a parent. Timothy Hutton plays the father of another one of the girls and his character is the first to realize something bad is happening in the house after the girls kick his daughter out, leaving her alone in the cold winter. Sevigny nails the role of the high-maintenance, perpetually medicated housewife, and Hutton’s character is comically over the top, screaming at the top of his lungs for nearly every scene he’s in.

horror-trailer
  • Save

While the children are a constant annoyance throughout the film, the most painfully terrible aspect of the movie were the constant cutaways to what were supposed to be cellphone screens submitting videos, photos and comments to social media. These look absolutely awful and happen so frequently that it detracts heavily from the surreal and sometimes confoundingly abstract aesthetic the film tries to employ.

I liked the weird, pulsating egg yolk painting, but what was the point? Was is supposed to represent the deteriorating reality the girls were causing around them as they plunged further down the rabbit hole of Twitter and Instagram? I wasn’t really sure, but then again, I cared so little for these deplorable little monsters that it didn’t really matter either way. (I disturbingly found myself breathing a sigh of relief every time one of them was killed just so there was one fewer that I would have to deal with.)

I fully subscribe to the fact that the youth of today are too enamored with social media, and it can become a toxic environment with the emergence of cyberbullying, but #Horror just reaffirms something we already knew: kids can be monsters and parents can be neglectful d-bags.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.