A brief interlude
Low-budget horror film, 'Extinction,' offers rare depth, emotional punch in genre
File this post under: “things that I did not think I would be writing about when I woke up today,” but I would like to take a break from the serious topics to briefly talk about horror flicks.
I admit that I’m no connoisseur of the genre. When I was kid, I caught some of George Romero’s original “Night of the Living Dead” movie, and it scared the shit out of me, so I avoided horror for a long time after that. Of course, my tolerance level for the scares was pretty low back in the day; I am one of those people who were traumatized — in the more colloquial sense of the word — early in life by the Wicked Witch of the East being crushed under that house, and the image of her feet curling up at the end of the scene haunts me to this day. Speaking of hauntings, at some point in the early 2000s, I saw “Thirteen Ghosts” with Tony Shalhoub of “Monk” fame, and that sufficiently frightened me enough to keep me away from the genre for several more years.
While still mostly avoiding scary movies, I did hop on The Walking Dead bandwagon and watched pretty much every minute of that show, even later mind-numbingly boring seasons when it could have more aptly been called The Walking and Talking Dead, so eventually, I became fairly desensitized to zombies and less afeared of horror general.
I haven’t watched most of the classic horror films on Rolling Stones’ all-time list, but the last several years I’ve really sunk my teeth — pun not intended … OK, intended — into the genre, such that my movie tracker tells me that I now have about 75 films under my belt. They include five of the untold numbers of Halloween films (13 total), Get Out, The Exorcist, all the Saw movies (I think), all of Annabelle/Conjuring series, Nope, The Witch, Insidious 1-3, a few M. Night Shyamalan flicks and a bunch of low-budget indie creepers.
Most of them are worth watching simply for the spectacle of it all, but if you want depth, you’ll have to look elsewhere more times than not. I appreciated The Exorcist because of its interesting plot, so too with Get Out and Cabin in the Woods, but even if a film has a compelling gimmick, a recurring issue with many, if not most of them, is that audiences are not given enough reasons to care about the main characters, which brings me to a low-budget movie titled Extinction (2015) with Matthew Fox, Jeffrey Donovan and Quinn McColgan.
Now, to look at the artwork, one might think this is typical horror fodder, right? In many ways, it is. An unexplained zombie outbreak occurs, and nine years later, the three main characters, Jack (Donovan), Patrick (Fox) and Lu (McColgan) are sequestered in a pair of neighboring properties just outside of town. Patrick is an alcoholic and lives alone with his dog, and he’s been ostracized by Jack for reasons that are revealed in the film, while Jack and Lu live beside him. The gimmick here is that in the course of nine years, the zombies have evolved to apparently be stronger and faster, but they are blind with enhanced hearing.
In any case, what sets Extinction apart from most of the 75 horror films that I’ve watched is the attention it gives to the human drama playing out in the lives of its main characters and how the past affects the present.
The Rolling Stones article above bemoaned subsequent Halloween films for trying to peel away a backstory so that the action in the present doesn’t just exist in a context-less vacuum. “Halloween is always proof that what you don’t know is scarier than what you do.” In a sense, I get the sentiment. Many horror fans presumably just want to get in and get out; dispense with all the drama and talking and get to the bloodletting already. This provides a low-commitment, quick surge of adrenaline and then moviegoers can go about their day without having to feel a single soft emotion.
But to me, this is actually a weakness of the genre, and as such, probably the main complaint I have so far is that in almost every case, I don’t care one scintilla about the characters on the screen and whether they live or die.
The singular strength of Extinction is that, not only do Fox, Donovan and McColgan do a great job in bringing nuance and heart to their respective roles, but the film takes an extra 30 minutes of runtime to develop the backstory and characters to give some weight to what’s happening in the present.
Michael Gingold with Fangoria had this to say about the film:
… It’s refreshing when the occasional film puts the people at a premium. Such a movie is Extinction. … (Director Miguel Ángel) Vivas wrangles the drama into a quietly gripping survival saga, he and his leads fleshing out the trio of protagonists to empathetic effect.
Refreshing indeed.
When characters are properly developed and when the audience feels like they know the characters, then if one or all of them meet an untimely death — this is horror, after all — then that really means something and has an impact on the viewer, contrasted with a movie where poorly drawn characters meet their doom near the end of 90 minutes, and the audience feels nothing.
I’ll take films with depth, nuance and emotion every time.