I can hardly keep up with the endless permutations of the MCU never mind keeping up with the various iterations and side hustles of horror series such as The Conjuring and this. So I tend to come at these fresh, as if they are an entirely new movie and I don’t have to spare a thought for how this ties in with what’s gone before. It was only when it was over I realized I had been tensed up the entire time, my heart constantly in my mouth, such was the dexterity with which the material was handled.
And while this isn’t in the same league as this year’s horror breakouts Backrooms and Obsession, it follows a similar line in that threat rather than gore is the keyword. Perhaps the one stroke of genius is to set parts of this in a dentist’s surgery, a place where our incipient fear never goes away, probably the only medical professional whose attentions we desperately try to avoid, whether that’s because, regardless of any soothing words, treatment is accompanied by pain, or whether, mouth willingly or reluctantly open, we are inviting invasion.
Momentarily in the middle of the picture it gets stuck in low gear as exposition takes center stage and we transition from haunted house to what was previously known as the “astral plane” but here is known as “The Further”, a kind of limbo where the dead, with the right guide, can return to Earth. And they’re not planning, having regained life, to subsist on blood so that’s a mercy, and they’re not, either, the sexy teenagers who abound in the genre. They’re old and decrepit, might require tanks of oxygen to survive.
Single mom Gemma Hall (Amelia Eve) still lives in the house where her mother went mad and seemingly committed suicide in conspicuously violent fashion 20 years before. The neighbourhood is beginning to be occupied by odd types, three old crones wheeling oxygen tanks. Gemma is beset by nightmares, one of which echoes the Backrooms notion of crawling further and further into intimidating confined space, entered not through a mysterious door in a wall as with Backrooms, but in something as un-mysterious as the makeshift den concocted by daughter Maya (Island Austin).
There’s another door in the proceedings, the Red Door that formed the title of the previous episode, but to be honest, I couldn’t recall its purpose in the prequel, and fact, here, it turns out (cue another IP involving other doors denoted by other colors) not to be the only one.
One awful crone turns up at the surgery and from his mouth Gemma draws a long string of human hair and various other bits of gunge from his decrepit teeth before discovering he has two sets of gnashers. Gradually, she realizes she is a conduit to this other world, with the help of tattooist-cum-mystic Claire (Maisie Richardson-Sellers).
The exposition, always a bit dodgy, leads her to believe that she can enter The Further and get back out of it without much ado, but that’s a misconception and in quick succession three generations of Halls are caught up in the scary proceedings with the steel-fingered monster leading a gang of trapped people back to life. Gemma’s boyfriend Nick (Brandon Perea), a cop, is on hand mainly to prove that you can’t trust a man to do a woman’s job.
All told, I found this riveting stuff, especially the nightmares that turned into supernatural reality and the gradual encroaching on the normal by every shade of abnormality. There were a number of standout sequences, including the long crawl behind the sofa, the excavation of the terrible mouth and the onslaught of creatures from The Further.
Sometimes in horror films, just as the main criteria of presenters of cookery shows is too ooh and aah convincingly, all the heroine has to do is provide a varied register of screams but like the main characters in Backrooms and Obsessions, Amelia Eve (The Blind, 2023) is several levels above the basic.
Director and co-writer Jacob Chase (Come Play, 2023) helps make this a banner year for horror.
Stomach-clutching.
The Magnificent 60s 