Off-screen Worlds

This week, fantasy-horror and harrowing road trips (light spoilers  below) . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ The Head Hunter, dir. Jordan Downey, 2018.

1. A world in the spaces. The Head Hunter tells the story of a monster hunter and (with the exception of a night-shrouded deviation at the film’s end) we never see a monster fight. We see our Head Hunter brandish a sword and move off-screen, or ride a horse into the woods, and we see him afterwards, exhausted, a wound on his shoulder, or a werewolf claw mark on his face—but we never see the fight. This feels less unusual for horror (where delayed visual gratification is a conventional tactic) than it does for big-screen fantasy. The result is a more solidly horror experience than it might otherwise be, but also an experience that highlights the potential of withholding visual spectacle in fantasy. There’s the sense here of a world teeming with monsters—monsters more compelling as off-screen foes and heads-on-the-wall than they could have been as living, on-screen creatures given The Head Hunter’s tiny shooting budget. In not showing so much, The Head Hunter finds a form of no-budget world-building in its unfilled spaces.
2. Trophy danger. The Head Hunter is a trophy collector, spiking the head of each slaughtered monster onto a wall in his home. Trophies may be prized possessions, but they are not without their dangers. They are evidence, they tell a story—something not always to their keeper’s benefit. The big game hunter’s trophy room might ruin a relationship with a visitor disapproving of shooting innocent animals. Trophies also betray a foolish sense of mastery, announcing victory with a smug, foolhardy finality—when, in the case of the mounted head, the trophy’s affecting appearance itself attests to the power of the creature felled. It’s an overconfidence the Head Hunter learns in the film’s last half, when he’s forced to contend with a particularly unruly head.
3. "Did I just see that?”. Sometimes the perfect cut is the too-soon cut. There’s a moment in The Head Hunter where something moves that really shouldn’t, and we cut away almost as it happens. There’s nothing like the “Did I just see that?” feeling to grab our attention and conjure a distinct, especially unsettled kind of apprehension.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

◆ Hallow Road, dir. Babak Anvari, 2025.

4. Excruciating Distance. Like The Head Hunter, Hallow Road performs a rigorous experiment—one that also places the camera away from the action. Hallow Road follows a couple (played by Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys) on a long car ride to help their daughter, who’s hit someone with her car. Our connection to the accident and its aftermath is through their conversation in the car, their daughter’s voice on the phone, and in how it all reflects on Pike’s and Rhys’s faces. It's this contained, minimalist approach that conjures in Hallow Road a special brand of horror. The movie stands out for its surprising, sinister conclusion, but also for its constant engine of unease in the experience of needing desperately to be somewhere, feeling powerlessness in its distance, and moving toward the place in excruciating, unsatisfactory real-time.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

◆ You Are On The Fastest Available Route, dir. by Kris Straub, 2017.

5. "Head east for one quarter of a mile, then follow sings for 'Do Not Enter.'" On YouTube today, I stumbled upon a perfect companion to Hallow Road. You Are On The Fastest Available Route consists of dashcam footage of a GPS guided roadtrip, a trip that gets increasingly strange and increasingly more treacherous. An entry in the Local 58 analog horror web series, Fastest Available Route foregrounds the limits of technology, making horror mood of glitches and distortion—and a horror story of a journey guided by the empty confidence of a GPS.

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday.

Yesterday, during a raid in Monterrey Park, federal agents kidnapped eight of our community members across the street from Mark Keppel High, all while students were being dropped off for school. The time to resist fascism is now.