Editorials
Irish Slasher ‘Shrooms’ Shines By Experimenting With Horror Movie Tradition [Horrors Elsewhere]
Horrors Elsewhere is a recurring column that spotlights a variety of movies from all around the globe, particularly those not from the United States. Fears may not always be universal, but one thing is for sure — a scream is understood, always and everywhere.
Neither leprechauns nor banshees can be found in Paddy Breathnach’s Irish slasher Shrooms. Cinematic travelers instead see American tourists cross the Atlantic in search of magic mushrooms on the Emerald Isle. Their trip quickly goes from fun to bad, though, when a sinister local legend comes to fruition and one by one, the vacationers fall prey to the infamous Black Brother.
Shot in Monaghan, Armagh and Derry but set in Glengarriff, Shrooms is fully immersed in its bucolic and picturesque surroundings. The woodlands become a gray labyrinth where secrets are obscured by thick vegetation and shadows. The main characters find terror not only in their immediate dilemma but also themselves. Tara (Lindsey Haun) and her friends enter a remote Irish forest looking for a natural high; psilocybin mushrooms are in season. The group’s guide Jake (Jack Huston) instructs them to stay away from one specific shroom, yet as things always go in these movies, forbidden fruit never stays that way for long. One character’s mistaken ingestion, along with Jake’s persuasive campfire tale, sets things in motion.
Writer Pearse Elliott based his story on a real-life bad trip. The film is a mix of hallucinogenic horror and timeless slasher tropes, but it didn’t start out that way. By pursuing the psychological potential found in the original and more straightforward script — there was talk of having cannibals at one point — Breathnach helped distinguish the movie from others like it. Despite the director having always wanted to do horror, he was only offered comedies until Shrooms. His first outing in the genre is teeming with vistas courtesy of Nanu Segal, whose D.P. work stands out in Donkey Punch and The Children, and borrowings from Asian horror like Hideo Nakata’s Ring. Breathnach drew from those films’ tapered sense of humor and distinctive imagery including the skittering, phantom-like movements of the villain, scenes involving water, and prehensile hair.
It appears unusual for an Irish movie to feature a predominantly American cast, but this foreign element heightens the already unshakable uncertainty anyone might feel in a new and faraway place. And with this being a slasher about young people dying in the woods, it only makes sense for the cast to be full of established horror archetypes; Bluto (Robert Hoffman) is the aggressive jock; Lisa (Maya Hazen) is the uninhibited “mean girl;” Troy (Max Kasch) is the easygoing stoner while girlfriend Holly (Alice Greczyn) is an animal-loving free spirit. As always, it never makes sense how people with such disparate personalities become friends, yet their infighting paves the way for drama and later, carnage.
Then there is Tara, Shrooms’ central character whose innate virtue is crucial to the movie’s denouement. What undoubtedly becomes the film’s throughline is the idea of what might happen if someone completely released their inhibitions with a little help from Mother Earth. Tara fits the “final girl” role to a T; she’s inexperienced and a bit moralizing, not to mention fairly conservative as a result of her religious upbringing. She’s thoughtful of others and looks after people. Her less prim best friend Lisa teases her about eventually marrying a Catholic boy, but it’s obvious Tara has fuzzy feelings for the group’s shroom guide and her long-distance friend, Jake. Addressing those emotions, however, proves difficult for someone with her apprehension and system of beliefs.
Bypassing Ireland’s inherent and rich mythology for something more mundane like a bloodthirsty maniac may seem like a missed opportunity, but the delocalization makes Shrooms all the more accessible, as well as somewhat plausible. Huston’s character frightens the others with a rural legend concerning Glengarriff House, a place where underage boys were sent when they committed crimes. The home was run by a religious order of men known as the Black Knights of Colmcille, and among them was one particularly sadistic member who lived to torture. As retribution for killing his twin and scarring his own face, a boy dubbed “The Lonely Twin” secretly fed his abuser death mushrooms. This plan backfired because the Black Brother turned even more violent and acted on every pent-up desire; the result was a 78-body massacre where the only survivors, the Lonely Twin and the Black Brother, were left unaccounted for.
With 2000s horror being so trained to drop giant plot twists on the way out, it should be of no surprise Shrooms jumped on the bandwagon. Breathnach and Elliott’s own cunning upheaval defies slasher decorum and does the unthinkable. Those who have seen the film are likely split on the colossal revelation; the ultimate conclusion can be seen as a wrong move that betrays the audience. Looking back, the movie hinted at things to come. An unfortunate coincidence for all involved, Tara’s life parallels themes in Jake’s ghost story. She mentions earlier she was always afraid her father would send her away to a place like Glengarriff House after her mother died. It’s a neglected but important comment seeing as the home was made for misbehaving children — are viewers supposed to assume Tara’s restraint and piety are hiding something menacing? What viewers believe are premonitions of her friends’ deaths, caused by the verboten deathcaps, are really Tara manifesting her own subdued feelings and yearnings. It’s a crafty turn of events pulled off only because of Haun’s convincing performance.
Not a lot of rural slasher movies are as eye-catching as this one; it features one of the best nature tours in horror. The story ventures into the same neck of the woods as past films while still switching things up where it truly counts. However one might feel about the big reveal, they can’t dispute its intended shock value even if it doesn’t hold up in repeated viewings. The decade accused of lowest-denominator scares and excessive remaking was also an incredible time for international horror. Shrooms came and went without much fuss, but with all the turnaround happening for 2000s horror, it may be time to appreciate the movie’s ability to experiment with tradition.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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