PicoBlog

The Void came about because of the intersection of a few strange, disparate sources: Guillermo del Toro, David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, and a crowdfunding campaign. Directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski — founders of the Canadian production company Astron-6, which specializes in low-budget, horror-comedies inspired by 80s films — were the assistant art director and special makeup effects artists, respectively, on the 2016 DC superhero film. Much of the crew from Suicide Squad ended up coming over to help with the creature effects on The Void. Gillespie, at another point, was working on a film at Pinewood Studios one floor below del Toro, who was working on his since-shelved adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. While sneaking around trying to catch a glimpse at the Oscar-winning director’s project, Gillespie found the inspiration to do his own Lovecraftian riff.

Of course, the ultimate reason things were able to come together for Gillespie and Kostanski was because of their Indiegogo campaign, which managed to rack up $82,510 for their intended usage of practical effects — 158% of the original goal. And, well, that money shows. The Void is a retro, stomach-churning, body horror homage to directors like Carpenter, Cronenberg, and Fulci, with a side of Event Horizon and a sprinkling of Grave Encounters (the latter is really just my own correlation), and it uses an unprecedented amount of practical FX for a modern film. Disheartened by the overabundance CGI and disavowal of most practical creature effects for horror movie monsters in recent years, the directing duo set out to make a film that went back to their favored FX roots, while creating a bizarre mythology that raised more questions than it answered.

While on duty, Deputy Sheriff Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) finds an injured man crawling in the middle of the road. Carter is unenthusiastic about having to deliver the man to the local hospital where his estranged wife works, the two of them having separated shortly after the accidental death of their child at birth. But Carter quickly realizes that he has no other choice that night than to visit Marsh County Memorial Hospital. The graveyard shift crew — comprised of Dr. Richard Powell (Kenneth Welsh), bored, inexperienced intern Kim (Ellen Wong), nurse Beverly (Stephanie Belding), and Carter’s ex-wife, nurse Allison (Kathleen Munroe) — assists the man, James (Evan Stern), a junkie who shrieks and writhes wildly and attempts to resist treatment. Meanwhile, very pregnant teenager Maggie (Grace Munro) idles nervously in the waiting room with her grandfather, Ben (James Millington).

State Trooper Mitchell (Art Hindle) arrives at the hospital to collect James, revealing James’ alleged connection to a bloody farmhouse scene Mitchell was called to earlier that same night — a scene witnessed at the very opening of the film, in which two men set a woman on fire while James managed to escape. But it’s not long after Mitchell’s arrival that shit starts to hit the fan. Beverly kills a patient and flays her own face, Carter shoots her dead then begins experiencing strange visions, and suddenly the hospital is surrounded by figures in hooded cloaks bearing a black triangle symbol and butcher knives.

The next thing you know, Beverly’s corpse has transformed into a nightmare tentacle monster that essentially uses her dead body as a ghoulish mask. The men from the opening farmhouse scene, Simon (Mik Byskov) and Vincent (Daniel Fathers), enter the hospital lobby brandishing firearms and hold the crew and Carter at gunpoint. They demand to see James so that they can finish the job we saw them start. James proceeds to take Maggie hostage in retaliation and stabs Powell to death. Then the Beverly-monster drags Mitchell away. Then Powell’s body disappears.

Spoiler, I guess, if you haven’t seen the film (although I believe this reveal even comes before the halfway mark) but we quickly learn that people are being infected (possessed?) in some way by Powell. The humble doctor has managed to cheat death through an indeterminate association with an unknown school of the occult that involves sex, drugs, a degree of black magic, and perverting peoples’ bodies into gargantuan tentacled demons from another dimension. The thrust of this unholy involvement has to do with the death of Powell’s teenage daughter some time ago, a trauma which has compelled him to find ways to not just extend life, but to bring his daughter back. Of course, his obsession with corrupting the flesh comes with a great price, and he has deluded himself into believing that such acts against God are a way of eclipsing both the body and death itself.

The result of Gillespie and Kostanski’s little experiment is mostly successful, but I’m pretty easy to please. The Void ends up scratching a lot of my own, personal itches. I like horror movies written and directed by people who understand the effectiveness in leaving things up for interpretation, who don’t hit you over the head and ruin the horror of their own film with blunt-force subtext (although, that stuff is in here, albeit to a mostly negligible scope).

I prefer practical effects over CGI, I love body horror, and I love love love a sweet 90-minute run time. This one is incredibly specific, but I like horror movies that exploit the architecture of a building to disorient, create a sense of claustrophobia, and open portals between worlds via occult magicks. This is where my comparison to Grave Encounters comes in, a movie also set in a hospital warped by a depraved, black magic-dabbling doctor. And I like the idea which ties into my fondness for Event Horizon about opening a portal into, not just another dimension, but into a hostile hellword that was never meant to be seen by human eyes.

Furthermore, one of the best sequences in the film cross-cuts between Carter, Vincent, Simon, and James coming face-to-face with disfigured, reanimated corpses, while unqualified Kim is tasked with delivering Maggie’s baby. Tension is exacerbated by Kim’s panicked realization that she might have to perform a cesarean section on her own, which matches — and occasionally surpasses — the house-of-horrors zombie parade in the hospital’s otherworldly sub-basement.

But the film is not without its faults, chiefly the camerawork and the way it frames the body horror. A handheld approach and overreliance on fast cuts and flashing lights tend to obscure our view of Gillespie and Kostanski’s glorious practical effects. Perhaps, it was meant as a way to leave more up to the imagination in the same way Gillespie and Kostanski keep us guessing as to the origins and machinations of the cult, but it just ends up coming off like a waste of hard work. In a film full of mangled flesh, oozing body fluids, contorted, crackling corpses, and twisting tentacles — all of which the actors can actually reach out and touch — the film is shot and edited as if you aren’t allowed to look at the $82,000 worth of special effects.

The characters are thin, but I wouldn’t call them unlikeable. The low-lit shadows are evocative but often dim, and the scenes in the hospital lobby conjure a drab, pukey yellow reminiscent of coloring in a Netflix film. The exploration of abusing flesh to reach a higher state of being is also cut short. It’s a line of thinking that has underscored a good portion of the body horror subgenre already, such as with David Cronenberg’s work. But The Void’s far more shallow take on such subject material synthesizes into perfunctory ruminations and grand, largely empty monologues conveyed by an eventually fully-flayed Kenneth Welsh. Such imagery can’t help but harken directly back to Sam Neill’s shaven, sliced-up body in Event Horizon. Thus, the main takeaway of some reviews I’ve read from more devoted horror fans than I, seems to boil down to: “Why watch this film when you could just watch The Thing?”

And it’s true, that in the three years since I first saw The Void I have, well, seen a lot more movies. So, the initial effect that the film had on me in college doesn’t hit quite the same now, at 26. But I’m not gonna pretend like I hold any extensive knowledge on 80s horror films, despite the fact that I’ve seen more than my fair share. I don’t have any sort of concrete reference point to claim without a shadow of a doubt that “this movie is doing this” and “this movie is doing that” and feel like I unequivocally know what I’m talking about. I rarely know what I’m talking about when it comes to anything at all.

As with Wounds, I’m probably giving The Void a lot of leeway because it does things that I personally wish more horror movies would do, even if it doesn’t do them in the best-executed way. Because that’s the thing — I think that, on the whole, The Void, is a modern horror film that manages to be more ambitious and disturbing in a scant 90 minutes than many others do, those that wax poetic about “grief” and “trauma” under the crushing weight of their own self-seriousness. The Void, on the other hand, is simply a disgustingly good time at the moving pictures.*

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