Movies
Knife Edge (UK)
“The audience is left with a brilliantly directed haunted house movie that’s crippled by a messy, convoluted mystery-movie narrative.”
With most haunted house movies, only the first half is scary. Why? Because all of the ghostly activity is completely unexplained in the first half. There are banging noises and creepy whispers and flickering lights and bass-voiced toddlers, and nobody knows what the hell is going on. But then the second half rolls around, and of course the ghost needs a back story, and the ghost’s death needs to be avenged, and before you know it the ghost is reduced to a nagging spiritual presence, needing all this random shit done like your wife on Saturday morning, and the whole movie just stops being frightening. With few exceptions, the modern haunted house movie serves the ghost rather than the audience.
Knife Edge, a recent DVD release from the U.K., pours a little too neatly into that oh-so-common haunted house movie mold. With his business flourishing, Frenchman Henri spontaneously moves his new wife and young stepson from New York out to a bulging mansion just outside of London. He secretly purchased the mansion several years before, after the previous tenants suddenly abandoned it. While Henri occupied with his flourishing business, his wife Emma is frequently left at home alone with her young son. It doesn’t take long for her to begin to suspect that the spacious mansion might be haunted.
At first the paranormal signs are relatively benign. Some quiet whispers in the hallways. The faraway sound of a child crying out for its mother. Images of bloody violence flashing behind Emma in the bathroom mirror. She might be going crazy. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s all real. It’s certainly hard to tell when you’re watching a movie that’s this downright manipulative.
Like most successful haunted house movies, Knife Edge is unabashedly frightening during its first half. The early scares are genuine, with eerie sounds and bloody images that really work their way under your skin. Staged with an impressive finesse by veteran horror director Anthony Hickox (Hellraiser II: Hell on Earth), these inspired first-reel scenes are convincing enough to compel you to watch the film all the way to the end. Too bad the movie as a whole is so overloaded with perfunctory haunted house subplots—Emma has a miscarriage, a mysterious nanny (Joan Plowright) appears on the scene to dispatch dubious advice, the young son forges an imaginary friendship with an ugly doll—that the later plot twists bear little impact. The audience is left with a brilliantly directed haunted house movie that’s crippled by a messy, convoluted mystery-movie narrative.
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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