Friday night was one of those nights. I hung around at home but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I’d been home all day long. I’d blogged two or three times. I’d slept. I didn’t want to read anything. I’d watched some TV, but there’s never anything on Friday nights, especially now that I’ve totally become disinterested in Moonlight. I’ve got a couple hundred movies, but I couldn’t decide what to watch.
So I popped in The Messengers, but watched it with the audio commentary, which I hadn’t done yet. It was Kristen Stewart, Dustin Milligan, two producers, the visual effects guy, and one of the writers. It was a great commentary. I learned a ton about the making of the movie, the original script, what the Pang brothers did when they came on board — originally there were to be no supernatural components, but rather more like The Shining — but they wanted a good, simple ghost story.
And I came away really, really liking this movie. I originally saw it because of the cast, and because I am a fan of the psychological scary movies, but I like it so much more than I did originally.
It truly scared me. The slasher movie faithful claim it’s unbelievable and unrealistic. Yeah, and a guy with knives for fingers that kills you in your dreams is totally believable. I don’t believe in ghosts for a minute — not at all — and I was still totally creeped out by The Messengers.
Listening to the commentary, I saw more why that was the case. For one thing, the writers who adapted the Japanese original gave it a pretty plausible plot and back story rather than just throw a bunch of characters in a creepy setting and subject them to a bunch of blood-and-guts horror. In the typical horror movie, there’s hardly any characterization, and the plot development — if any — is usually an afterthought.
For another, they decided — very brilliantly, may I add — not to go the usual D-list horror movie casting route. (Seriously? Paris Hilton and Chad Michael Murray were supposed to be convincing in The House of Wax? Seriously?) All of these actors are established, and are good. Dylan McDermott. John Corbett. Penelope Ann Miller. (Forget that I said she couldn’t act. I’ve changed my mind after watching the movie again.) Kristen Stewart. Even Dustin Milligan, who was so cute in In the Land of Women, and the two-year-old twins cast as Ben are good.
Kristen’s performance is actually one of the reasons that I was so scared. She is one of those actors who inhabit every role she’s in. It doesn’t look like she’s just, you know, acting to get a paycheck. She really becomes her characters. And she wears terrified well. There were scenes that are typical of a scary movie and could’ve been totally cliched, and she made them work. She is an absolute rockstar. She was getting in trouble because she was doing too many of her own stunts and getting hurt in the process.
She nailed the emotional scenes, and I just roll my eyes when people say otherwise.
As I’ve said countless times, I hate slasher movies. I think movies like Friday the 13th and Halloween define lame. I think that’s one of the reasons Scream did so well — it totally bagged on movies like that. But movies like The Shining and The Messengers and The Ring scare the everliving crap out of me. Especially when you have some of the creepy spookiness The Messengers delivers in frakking broad daylight.
Cerebral, subtle terror is so much scarier than blood-and-guts. Anyone who says otherwise has been desensitized by crap.
This is perhaps the scene that freaked me out the most — and it does even more now after I listened to them in the commentary describe how they shot it. (Can I just go on record as saying that little boy is ADORABLE? They got some pretty good performances from him, especially since he was not quite two.)
