31(ish) Horror Films in 31 Days: Day 8 - Hatchet

You know how when one of your favorite songs from when you were a teenager comes on and all you can think about is listening to the whole album or, in some cases, every album from that time? For me it's the 90s grunge genre. Any time I hear an old song from Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, or Nirvana, nothing else sounds appealing to me until I burn through a megamix of all those albums. Well, ever since I watched and reviewed The Hole I've had a yearning for some old school horror. Watching that movie and being a bit let down left a void that I haven't yet had a chance to fill.

Today was a pretty busy day and tomorrow looks to be the same, so, I might have to settle for a couple of review/recommendations. In an attempt to quell my appetite for 80s horror I'm going to recommend a film that makes me feel the way those grunge bands do about music.

Entry # 8: Hatchet

If I had to guess, I would say at least 80% of you have already seen Hatchet. That means one of you has not. This is for you, then.

Hatchet is a modern slasher film by writer/director Adam Green. The main protagonist is played by Joel David Moore who you probably all know from a pile of horse shit that someone once stepped in and decided to call Grandma's Boy. Its villain, Victor Crowley, is played by Kane Hodder who has played Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees more times than anyone else and more successfully if you ask me. The man has a way of emoting murder (if murder was an emotion) with his body language that is second-to-none. There are also cameos by horror veterans Robert Englund and Tony Todd. Just having those names attached helps lift this film high above other modern horror films.

The basic slasher formula is there: A group of tourists takes a haunted boat tour through a New Orleans swamp that is supposedly haunted by the ghost of Victor Crowley, whose father accidentally kills him with an axe to the face after some bullying kids inadvertently start a fire at the swamp-side home of the Crowleys years earlier. After their boat sinks, the tourists find themselves trapped in Crowley's playground and he begins to pick them off one-by-one in inventive and overly gratuitous ways.

Increasing the nostalgic feel of the film is the work by special effects veteran John Carl Buechler. Each kill is completely over-the-top and usually involves more blood than a human body can possibly hold.

The only other element necessary - besides nudity, sex and poor choices, obviously - is the balance of comedy and horror. Few modern writers manage to get it right, but Green nails it. The original idea of using comedy in horror films was to relax the audience and set them up for the next scare. If you build tension and the viewer knows something horrible is about to happen, it can still be effective in its own way but it lacks that dynamic when going from laughing to jumping and screaming. Many times, a movie will come off corny because it's weighted too far to the side of comedy but Green, an avid horror fan, new exactly how far to push it and exactly when to pull back.

The result of all these things is, in my opinion, the closest thing to the old school slasher films in the last two decades. Is it perfect? No. But it wouldn't work if it was. 80s horror films often had very small budgets. It took combined strokes of genius and luck to create anything close to perfection in that environment. Hatchet is definitely more polished than those older movies but that's to be expected in this day and age of digital technology and, since horror is more widely accepted in the industry, having more resources to work with overall.

Hatchet isn't the type of film you'd expect hordes of people to fill theaters for. It's a horror film made by a horror fan, for other horror fans. Which is exactly how it should be.

Day 1: American Mary
Day 2: The Loved Ones
Day 3: Room 237
Day 4: The Changeling (1980)
Day 5: Trick 'r Treat
Day 6: The Hole
Day 7: Are You Scared?