HALLOWEEN HORRORFEST 2020: Below (2002)

Our sponsor today is Evan from The Lurking Transmission podcast, providing music and creepy tales to entertain, chill and disturb you.  Listen to the latest episode, as well as previous episodes and ways to listen here.

Evan has chosen for me a very peculiar film that fell through the cracks in theaters, but has quite a pedigree.  It was the follow-up for Director/co-writer David Twohy after the success of Pitch Black, a ghost story/mystery set on a submarine during WWII, Below.

The USS Tiger Shark is ordered to pick up three survivors from a hospital ship blown up by a U-Boat.  The three include a British nurse, Claire (Olivia Williams, familiar to most of us Amurricans as the manager of the titular Dollhouse in the cult TV series*), which sets some of the crew on edge--you see, it is considered bad luck for a woman to be on a warship.  They dive to avoid a German Destroyer, who drops depth charges...and seems to set off a series of unfortunate events that could be just co-incidence, but might be what ‘Weird’ Willy (Zach Galifinakis, before anyone knew who he was) terms a ‘malediction'--a curse of sorts imposed by the space between heaven and hell--that might have something to do with the death of the Tiger Shark’s captain, the fate of the other three crewmen involved, and the increasingly erratic behavior of Lieutenant Brice (Bruce Greenwood).

As a fan of Twohy’s work going as far back as his first credited feature The Grand Tour (a.k.a. Timescape), I have come to think that he doesn’t do a project unless he considers it a challenge.  In this case, what it seems he is doing is creating his version of such films as The Haunting and The Nightcomers that relies primarily on atmosphere and implication, but in an unconventional setting.  And the idea of setting a ghost story on a military submarine is pretty clever, as it solves the problem of ‘why don’t these people leave?’ while also giving us an implicitly claustrophobic setting and a way for some of the characters to rationalize away what is happening.

There is nothing in the way of boo-scare special effects...in fact, there’s really only one clearly supernatural-seeming sequence, involving a mirror and Twohy playing with time.  That moment is so unsettling because you slowly realize what is entropic only a moment ahead of Matthew Davis’ Odell; it’s so effective that I was let down when Twohy decided to lean too far into it in the last seconds.  But most of the other scares are of the ‘is it or isn’t it?’ realm, with an emphasis on inexplicable sounds and the strange lines of the submarine set itself.  Twohy also takes advantage of the way the lighting in WWII subs being...iffy, and the usage of things such as the all red ‘night lighting’ to amplify the mood.  All of this is to frame what amounts to a ‘drawing room’ mystery and distract us from the simplicity of the story itself.

I will say this much--the film is too long for the story it wants to tell, and could have been cut down by five to ten minutes.  The undersea submarine and sea life CGI effects are, well, not very good and suffer from being mid-budget effects made in the early Oughts.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again--unless you have loads of money to funnel into your CGI, it’s going to date badly and very, very quickly.  What does rise above these drawbacks is an exceptional cast of actors doing their best--in addition to Greenwood, Williams and Galifinakis, there are great turns by Nick Chinlund and Jason Flemying--to give this film a veracity it might not otherwise have.  It’s those actors that keep the film anchored even when it threatens to be scuttled.

I am not sure what decision to give this film.  This is not for everyone.  I can easily imagine complaints about the lack of gore and action and low-key pacing.  The length seems excessive.  But it is watchable, and it is a successful application of a well-used concept to a novel setting.  I recommend it if you’re in the mood for something subtle and deliberate, something that will not throw stuff in your face.

Our sponsor tomorrow is another Domicile of Dread Patreon, Sean Foster!  Remember, if you become a Patreon at any level, you get to choose a film for this festival and any other event I run!  Sean has chosen the original Friday The 13th! I have not seen this before (honest!), and I am going to be very interested in seeing if I am right about its place in my 'Mario Bava giallo-to-slasher' theory.

There are other ways you can end up sponsoring a day during this Halloween Horrorfest besides becoming a Domicile of Dread Patreon!

1) You can buy me a coffee at Ko-Fi.  Suggested donation is $3

2) You can make a donation to Black Lives Matter.  Suggested donation is $10.  Please forward your receipt to me as proof.

3) You can choose to make a donation to the charity chosen by a sponsor on his/her/their day. Like with the third possibility, please forward me proof of donation.

As with last year, if I end up with more sponsors than there are days in October, I will go into Horrorfest Overtime, which means Halloween goes into November for me--and you!

 *--I happen to find Olivia Williams luuuuuuurvely.  But then, in Dollhouse, she was lost among the lovliness of the whole cast...well, maybe not Fran Kranz, but he's cool in his own way.