I went on a bit of a binge lately, just hitting play after play on anything that caught my eye. I jumped from feel-good films to b-tier sci-fi before finally coming back to horror. Tubi is great. I powered through 8 movies, my longest streak of not writing since early January- which isn’t saying much. It still felt shitty. I stopped here, at Incident in a Ghostland because I finally- finally hit on something worth writing about. Let’s take a journey.
A Journey
I started with the Chris Evans and the almighty McKenna Grace film Gifted. Evans is a hunk, and him being such a sexy dad made me throb. My heart, I mean. Seeing him do his thing, with his smirk and his sighs, I got wet. With tears, I mean. It was a heartfelt movie with beats of amazing acting and a few stellar moments of cinematography. But it wasn’t enough to write about, because the movie was safe, and another drop in a river of forgettable feel-good movies.
Then came After.Life, a sci-fi military action flick with Vanessa Kirby. The CGI was refreshingly good, but the action was painfully low-budget, the story was unconvincing, and it’s surprisingly difficult to make soldier boys emote. Banter isn’t always the secret ingredient to humanizing your characters, and Kirby’s blocky portrayal- a necessity given her cybernetic role- was a major detraction. If there’s no emotion, especially from your protagonist, how can you expect your audience to resonate? Pass.
Turns out, After.Life is actually a pseudo-horror with Christina Ricci, Liam Neeson, and Justin Long. It had a solid core, but the story was so flat and unremarkable that I fucking forgot that that was called afterlife, and the Vanessa Kirby sci-fi movie was called Kill Command. After.Life has a lot of gratuitous Ricci nudity, but it wasn’t nearly enough to help me remember what the fucking name of the movie was. Both movies sucked.
After this was another sci-fi, but this one was a surprise. The film The Artifice Girl was an attempt at a high-concept sci-fi and the ramifications of rapidly evolving AI and when AI decides to… decide. The film is told like a play in three main scenes, each about 20-30 minutes each, each with a 20-30 year time skip. The conversations in each scene take place between the AI, its creator, and in the first two scenes, members of an organization who stop cyber child predators. Unlike The Whale, the film had a claustrophobic feeling, despite having three times as many locations. The acting was acceptable, and the writing was engaging, but all in all, I felt like the film retread ground already walked by other films with AI taking agency. It felt like Ex Machina lite. Not enough to write about.
The Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson film Regression was another surprise. A horror and psychological thriller film about satanic cults and backwater, broken families, the twist was spoiled by the film’s flat writing and poor police work. The twist was an incel’s wet dream, rising above the central theme of community paranoia and the fears of the early 90’s. Probably Watson’s worst performance yet, which breaks my heart to say. Another pass.
Without thinking much, I hit play on Separation and then Mara, hoping for a hit of horror to fuel my limbs. The former reminded me of The Conjuring 2, wherein the horror presents itself in all its glory right off the bat, and is then revealed to actually be a benevolent entity trying to protect the family from a malevolent one. Kinda. The movie wasn’t well thought-out, and I think too much of the plot was left on the editing room floor. Mara was a wholly uninspired movie without an ounce of talent or horror or effort. Olga Kurylenko was a flat character with flat acting and flat lines and the whole movie reeked of ‘why do we need a second draft?’ Pass and pass.
After that came a pause. I idled over two films, both of which drew my attention, but I picked a third, based on a reddit post about a twist- a twist so good that it left the viewer feeling dirty. This was it. This was the movie. Incident in a Ghostland.
A well-written, well-thought section that was edited and proofread
The movie Incident in a Ghostland (or sometimes known as Ghostland) starts and doesn’t stop. We get 10-ish minutes of character setup, and then we’re off to the tension-filled races. There isn’t just one twist, there are two, and three if you’re dumb. The film was dirty and violent and painful. It didn’t rely on blood splatters or severed limbs or jump scares. The nastiness came from the visceral blows to the head, the screaming when seeing a loved one in pain, the helplessness in the face of their assailants.
Content warning:
This film contains scenes of sexual assault of minors. The remainder of this review references these events.
I had a nightmare, once. I was being chased by Venom from Spider-man 3, the one with Tobey McGuire. It was chasing me down a hall. I shook it once, but I could hear it still following me. I was terrified. That’s what this film reminded me of. A nightmare I had almost ten years ago.
Ghostland made me think of the true roots of fear and horror in a movie. Is it a chair moving across a floor? Flickering lights? Chainsaws and fountains of blood? No. It’s helplessness. It’s the idea that you have no way of beating your opponent. You are outmatched in every way that matters. You are being beat bloody and senseless, violated in every way, and the worst is still to come- and it isn’t death. See, death isn’t scary. Someone dying in a movie? It’s not scary. The shock factor never really mattered- especially if there were no emotional connections to the character, no necessity for their existence. In a teen cabin slasher movie, we don’t give a shit about anyone. Saw their head off, I’ve seen it before. I don’t care.
That’s why a movie like I Spit on your Grave is so effective. The film’s central action is a graphic rape scene. Is it necessary to show it? Opinions are split. Does it cause an emotional reaction? Yes. So it works. Ghostland plays off of similar ideas of assault, and it’s even ickier because the victims are teenagers. That’s fucking depraved- and that resonates. I’m still on the fence about whether or not increasing the shock factor by dipping deeper and deeper into depravity is a good thing. Bollywood movies have gone too far in that direction, and use violence against women as a fucking trope now. What should be abhorrent is so commonly used, it’s a cliche. That’s insulting and dangerous. Unfortunately, my thoughts haven’t formed completely yet on this topic, so I’ll return once I watch a film that helps me sort things out.
If you pull back the curtain, we not only think of the writers, but also the cinematographers and the director. The film was tense and colorful and the mise-en-scene was not only dramatic and loud, but relevant to the plot. It played into the villains and the tension and the dirtiness of the film. The movie was a true film in the sense that they didn’t just fill the room with nonsense like a lamp or a table. They filled the rooms and halls with tools and atmosphere.
Hell, even the casting was ridiculous. In the dissociation scenes, it was odd to me why the grown-up writer was so hot and everything in her life was so perfect and why her sister was so ugly and battered. It was a play. They cast an impossibly beautiful woman to play the protagonist in her own fantasy, and a plain, much older, weathered woman to play her sister, who she was at odds with.
The one gripe I had with this film was its villains. Not that they weren’t good villains, not that they weren’t scary. They were terrifying. But they chose a mentally handicapped man and a trans person to be the antagonists. That’s problematic. I could tell you why, or I could point you to this excellent video essay by Lindsay Ellis:
All that said, Ghostland is a unique, gritty film that people have compared to Martyrs. If, like me, the content of the latter film requires some emotional preparation on your end, then Ghostland is a pretty decent alternative for similar themes and topics (as best as I can tell). Even if you’re a casual horror viewer, or someone who just wants something thought-provoking or well-made, I highly recommend Ghostland. All in all, I rate it
GOOD.
I watched Incident in a Ghostland on Tubi. I also watched Gifted, After.Life, Kill Command, Artifice Girl, Regression, and Separation on Tubi.
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