It’s pretty interesting to see the differences between the two major horror films being released this Halloween weekend because I think they speak to two different attitudes within the arthouse-adjacent horror audiences. The first, Edgar Wright’s swell Last Night in Soho, is getting a muted response for a number of reasons: I openly acknowledge that the film’s a total mess, but it is a beautiful and interesting one, but I think it’s also because modern horror wears its influences so heavily on its sleeve nowadays that if one recognizes it as being derivative of, say, Mario Bava or Dario Argento, there’s an inherent assumption of either clumsy thievery/homage or, more importantly, a sense of patronization on the part of the educated viewer for having recognized the reference and a subsequent frustration that they’re being (unintentionally) condescended to. On the other hand, Scott Cooper’s Antlers is a normal kind of bad Elevated Horror movie, what with its prestige-ish treatment from the hands of Searchlight and its Guillermo Del Toro producer credit. That is to say it’s a whole lot of jump scares and furious gore, with absolutely nothing at its center.
Based on Nick Antosca’s “The Quiet Boy,” Antlers is about how the ills of one Oregon community come to personally affect a little boy named Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas), whose mother passed away long ago, and whose father (Scott Haze) and younger brother are sick. Not ordinary sick, mind you: thanks to Dad’s choice of an abandoned mine to cook meth in, the pair of them have been spiritually infected by that long-term stalker of native dreams and communities: The Wendigo. So, Lucas keeps the pair of them locked in their house while attending school and foraging for food, and no one wants to notice because, well, having a known meth-head for a dad, it’s sometimes worse for them to intervene than it isn’t (I guess?). But his new teacher Julia (Keri Russell), a victim of abuse herself at the hands of her father, begins to actively try to help the boy out. Her brother Paul (Jesse Plemons), the sheriff of the small town, doesn’t want her getting any more involved than she has to, but he’s also nursing resentments towards her for abandoning him with Dad all of those years ago when she fled the house for California. Yet the pair of them — and the whole town — will be forced to acknowledge what’s going on behind closed doors when Lucas’s dad escapes from their house, and begins a rampage in the community, cloaked in the hazy Oregon air under the indifferent stars.
Cooper falls into dozens of the traps laid before him as if the metaphorical flattened corpses of other horror-trying prestige filmmakers didn’t deter him from continuing onward down his chosen path through this haunted temple. Above any and all other concerns — specifically within the narrative and his characters, which I’ll get to in a minute — his direction feels strangely anonymous. Despite the rural-ish setting and references to the environmental and social ills plaguing that neglected area of our country, it’s almost as if he feels keen to hide behind the kind of unremarkable direction that often manifests itself as budgetary-constrained boredom, window-dressing meant to stress relevance that is more visually unremarkable than pressing. Nowhere is this better applied than in the form of the Wendigo itself, which, much like Bruce the Shark, is only occasionally glimpsed until it’s threatening to consume the protagonist(s) near the end of the film. When it is seen, it’s usually just CGI antlers striking someone in a jump scare or moving away speedily in the foggy distance. This is a shame because the kind of puppetry/live-action combo that Cooper went with in order to realize his monster is actually kind of cool in practice (it’s all mangled bones and antlers, wearing the face of the man it used to be) and it would have been nice to see it deployed in service of more inventive kills. For those familiar with multiplayer FPS games, this monster is a spawn-camper: two of the movie’s biggest deaths/attacks occur in the exact same spot, with the hulking brute surprising his victims from behind in the entryway of a shack. This is Antlers, where you can watch losers get murked in a doorway by an unseen monster.
That kind of malaise extends to the script, which Cooper co-wrote, with which all of the actors struggle. Plemons and Russell try their best to extend what’s there for them on the page, but they’re often locked together in frustrating circular arguments, and/or scaring the other when they’re not expecting it (a well-spring that Cooper often returns to for a fresh drink in the first half). Their resolution is unfulfilling, as well, with the abuse metaphor, as it applies to them, running out of gas well before the sequel-teasing ending. Its usage of Native folklore, as well, feels ill-considered, and though it wants to depict another case of white people fucking around and finding out, its specific application here is weightless and neither just nor tragic in its meting out of consequences. The threads of environmentalism or social decay that he so desperately wants to establish are inconsequential, and, perhaps most importantly, he bungles what should be the most central character in the entire film. He has no idea how to portray Lucas, unable to decide whether to show him as a sympathetic and tragic figure or as some wilder-child held at a remove from the rest of society that we are supposed to ultimately fear. Regardless, we’re supposed to be suspicious of him and his motivations at all times — unlike the story it’s based on! — and the emotions lurking behind his detached attitude, as well as the general glowering silence his character is defined by, can’t only be supplied by Thomas’ weary, wide eyes. If anything, its producer should know better, but as far as Del Toro is concerned, the cares and comforts that he extends to his child characters are reserved only for his own filmography, not of those whose work he shepherds into the world (Mama, The Orphanage, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Scary Stories).
It feels like we’re starting to hit a saturation point with a kind of aesthetically-minded “elevated horror” that tries to be all things to all viewers through vague and occasionally compelling imagery that is in service of the most misguided and basic storytelling imaginable. There are so many different ways that Cooper might have used something in Antlers to really dig into uncomfortable elements in the story’s text: For instance, what does it mean that the first time young Lucas has a protective father-figure in his life is when his Dad has been transformed into an inhuman monster from legend? Does he get any joy out of watching his pa tear through the local bully in the forest one day after school, or is he upset? Then again, these points aren’t easy to communicate visually when you’re working with the well-trod ground of elevated horror, where if it can’t be played as if it were in a silent film, or exploited by popular Twitter accounts in search of faces in the forest backgrounds or something, it’s sort of meaningless to even try. The supposed “lower” horror films that this genre intends to replace in the viewing diets of the high-minded were never as flat or uninteresting or as trashy as they seemed, and I would give my bottom dollar to see them return if it meant that a premium was placed on making either good storytelling or engaging entertainment. Stuff like Antlers is neither.