
Scared To Death, and no, this isn’t William Malone’s 1980 creature feature, is one of the latest films in the ever-growing trend of horror flicks about making horror flicks, an ever-growing trend. It would be correct to categorize it with House of Seven Corpses, A Cat in the Brain, Darkness Reigns, and One Cut of The Dead, for instance. It is a sub-genre of horror cinema that seems to be gaining more traction with each passing day.
Jasper (Olivier Paris, The Wrong Teacher, The Wrong Mr Right) is a production assistant for the movie Dead House, or an intern, in simpler terms. He, like many other PAs, is however famished to get things done which is where he finds himself at the venue of a potential shoot, The Stern Orphanage which has been closed for about seventy years after five children were found there literally scared to death. According to Champ (Jade Chynoweth, The Last Ship, Max Winslow, And The House Of Secrets), it is indeed the ideal place to film a horror movie.
While Jasper is showing Lena around the house, he gets an idea after Felix starts talking about the scenes he performs and claims that Grog would do it at a reasonable price if he got to meet the star of Dead House, Michael. He sells The Real State Agent Max (played by Lin Shaye), the director of the movie, for Jason. While Lena, one of the stars of the picture, wants to take part in the séance, Max feels relieved in letting Jasper use that idea for his character.
Paul Boyd is credited both with writing and directing Scared to Death but the distinct storylines ‘We Are Gathered Here Today’ and ‘Challenger’ are woven together quite seamlessly for lack of creative mode. It’s a common belief that all horror films feign to be so-called ‘scary’ but all they require is the needed audacity to disregard certain cliches: the dead speaking in this case, i.e. a fake seance. Scared to Death certainly belongs in that category.
There are traces of a dramedy in Scared to Death, alongside regular elements of drab cast members and crew if anything. Shallow cast members pale in comparison to Rae Dawn Chong (‘Comlmando’, or ‘Tales From The Darkside: The Movie.’), for example, after Ruth’s death the plot shifts to the notions of survival inside an abandoned house. From that perspective, both the fight for life and turning the seance into a speculative prayer look exhaustively similar.
Zombies, children zombies, and zombie toys are featured along with animatics that were done by the Legacy FX team which apparently also worked on 2012, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and more recently on Alien Romulus. Once again, there is the annoying question of, how within budget they were able to get these gurus but in this case, it was worth it. Steven Poster’s camera work (Donnie Darko, Strange Brew) coupled with computer-generated images is able to achieve an effect that is well beyond its budget even though it has been said this film is graphics-heavy.
Scared to death is after all a great way to spend an hour and a half of your time without thinking too deeply, it is pretty amusing, plus there is no way you shouldn’t expect to see the posters of Grog’s many movies after the end credits, and it will surely be fun to grab a beer with friends and watch this on a Saturday night. It is definitely not groundbreaking and you probably won’t talk about it six months down the line but it certainly is a nice movie to watch and spend some time.
Scared to Death is set to make its international debut at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival, following which it will be available for viewing at other movies throughout the year. If you ever get the chance to watch it in the cinema, I recommend that you do, as one would argue any movie of this sort is best experienced in a packed theater.
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