As a fan of movies, I am also a shameless fan of movie gimmicks. No, I don’t mean 3D, 4DX, or Smellovision – I mean gimmicks within the movie, like one-shot long takes, one location, and whatever those Dogma 95 dweebs did when the script wasn’t as good as Festen. The one-location movies evoke tension from their setting alone – there’s no escape from the rapidly-concentrating emotion, whatever it might be, whether it is a room full of jurors getting on each others nerves in 12 Angry Men, to the tension of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope where the audience are just waiting for the penny to drop. Now, think what you can do with horror. Obvious examples being John Carpenter’s masterful The Thing, or John Carpenter’s masterful Assault on Precinct 13 (yeah, he was good at these), or more recent examples of existential dread with You’ll Never Find Me or the game adaptations of Exit 8 and Iron Lung. Here are a few favourites that make the most of their single location!
Glorious
Starring Ryan Kwanten returning to the horror genre after some very mixed results, Glorious is the grandest name you could give cosmic horror movie that takes place in a very, very dirty public toilet in the middle of nowhere. Kwanten is Wes, who, after a rough break-up, is at a loose end and drinking the pain away. It is just when he is coming to the same conclusion I did – that that method sucks – when he hears the voice of JK Simmons behind the door of one of the stalls. The voice tells Wes he, the voice, not Wes, is a cosmic demi-god and that they both need to come to a deal otherwise Earth will be destroyed. Now, I’ve had hangovers, but at least mine never had some quasi-Twilight Zone test, and that’s where is the charm of this limited settin flourishes. Director Rebekah McKendry constantly contrasts the highest stakes imaginable but set it in the least grand place possible, guiding us expertly between horror and comedy.
The Guilty
Is a public bathroom to spacious a setting for you? Not to worry, I have a guy at his desk, on the phone, for the whole movie. This Danish thriller was remade by Netflix, but they forgot to make it, you know, thrilling, so let’s stick with the original. I understand that The Guilty is more of a thriller, but after watching Undertone, which for the most part had a character sitting at a desk and getting fed horrible revelations through the phone, I’ve decided that The Guilty qualifies as a horror. It is best to come into the film as cold as possible, but I can tell you why Asger Holm, played by Jakob Cedergren, is sitting there. He has been busted down to desk duty after using a bit of the old deadly force pending the verdict of his case. What waits for him on those phones is not supernatural – it is real people that he can’t hang up on, and that makes it all the more effective. Join him with your own listening devices and hear it the way he does.
Circle
There are certain cultural forces that can’t be denied. There are stories that you read, movies that you watch, and you are reminded of certain cultural touchstones. Like how the likes of Widows Bay and Weapons have a been strongly influenced by the work of Stephen King, or the likes of Strange Harvest or any cosmic horror is laid at the feet of HP Lovecraft. Well, Circle, similarly to Glorious, is pure Rod Serling. Circle is a feature-length Twilight Zone episode with fifty random people waking up in a darkened room, all standing in their own circles – except one is killed either if they try to leave or after every two minutes passes. What starts as a classic where the fuck and what’s going on movie, like Serling’s best work, it uses its premise to put humanity under the microscope, taking you from wondering why this is happening to those fifty people to worrying about what they are going to do next.
Any one location horror movies I’ve missed? Or ones you feel deserve more attention? Let us know in the comments!
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By Kevin Boyle
(header image via Netflix)
No But Listen 