Stuff: Does anybody ask mystery writers what crimes they've solved?

The Gray Dame has an nice with-your-coffee-on-Saturday fluff piece that revisits that perennial favorite topic of horror "journalism:" what scares the folk who make the things that scare us? The nice thing about this particular piece is that the NY Times can pull together a list that would be the envy of even the most powerful blogging sites. Their mix of A-list names and notable horror indie types is one of the best horror conclaves I seen in ages.

Movies: I'll give you my Axe Body Spray(TM) when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!

The obvious reference point for Jake West's 2009 lad-inflected zomcom actioner Doghouse is Edgar Wright's 2004 Shaun of the Dead. The loglines are similar enough: Underachieving male lead with relationship problems sorts his life out during a zombie outbreak. The chief distinction between the flicks lies in just what you mean when you declare your life sorted.

The titular hero of Wright's work has a familiar character arc: for all the yucks and guts, Shaun's recognizable from a million dramas and comedies as "the man who needs to grow up." He's got to make peace with a father figure while simultaneously making a definitive break from influence of his parents. He's got to assume the mantle of responsibility and he's got to secure his relationship with the woman in his life. For all Wright's visual and verbal inventiveness, Shaun's journey to adulthood is pretty standard stuff. That only sounds like criticism until you've seen Doghouse.

If you throw a frisbee so that the disk is released with an upward tilt, the frisbee will gain altitude as it flies. At some point, it'll stall out in its ascent and begin a steep drop. Eventually, whatever combo of drag and lift, wind and spin is working on it will give it enough power to right itself and fly back toward the original point of take off. Sooner or later, the disk runs out of power, but if you've tossed it right, you'll be able to catch it without moving. I'm not sure what you'd call the figure traced by the flight of the frisbee. It isn't an arc, because of the looping return. A loop would suggest a more rounded figure. For purposes of the post, we're going to call this shape - an oddly curvy triangle that looks like a child's rendering of a wind-filled sail - the Frisbee Aerial Return Triangle, or FART.

The male characters in Doghouse don't follow arcs so much as they FART their way through the flick. They start out as a set of variably boisterous losers all on the lam from a collection of stereotype women (I think it is fair to say that even the gay member of our stag party has a partner who is, gender aside, essentially a needy, nagging shrew). Their metaphoric/social conflict becomes a violent, deadly one when the boys find themselves stranded in a town where all the ladies have been transformed into zombie-like homicidal monsters - while, luckily, retaining their stereotypical identities: the hair-dresser, the witch, the barmaid, the fat cow wife, etc. The boys reach the peak of their development when they decide to embrace their arrested development and start fighting back against the legion of female archetypes arrayed against them. We learn the valuable lesson that the point of men is that we're irresponsible, not terribly bright, emotionally limited creatures - and we should be proud of it. Finally, we basically end up with everybody back where they started, except for the few lads who were killed along the way.

The "war of the sexes" is a theme that's rarely employed with any sincerity. More often than not, the "war" is an ambush and a slaughter. Few people have picked up pen, paint, or camera intending to document the tensions between men and women with anything like objectivity or impartiality. It is the theme of choice for those with an axe to grind. So it is here. As far as we can tell, the gents that populate this flick are kind of douchebags. With the exception of the sad sack leader of the pack, they are stalled out examples of modern man-boys. It's far too easy to imagine that, yeah, were I a chick, I'd have had it with this JLA of modern male lameness too. West, however, plays the film out like this band of bros is a ragtag Dirty Dozen on a mad near-suicide mission in the battle for gender freedom.

I should point out too, this isn't me stretching for some political subtext here. West made the liberation of Maxim readers everywhere his central motif. When a character tells his fellow bros to grab golf clubs and bash everything "in a dress," its clear that subtext is the whole text here.

Not that I'm personally upset by the absurdly whatever-the-male-equivalent-of-hysterical-is representation of women. It's unclear to me how offensive the movie would be to a female viewer. On one hand, it is clearly giant middle-finger to anything that doesn't have a penis dangling between its legs. On the other hand, I could easily imagine a woman assuming this was some oddly rigorous exercise in satire by an artist so committed to his joke that he never revealed the slightest crack in his character. The latter position, though, she would most take only because the idea that the director was serious would be too pathetic to believe.

If Doghouse were extremely funny, scary, or exciting, then perhaps it could be forgiven for the dumbness of its central conceit. If there's anything the history of genre entertainments teaches us, it's that audiences will forgive a work almost anything provided it keeps manically mashing our pleasure buttons with both fists. Any time you see somebody stop to think critically, you know something's broken down. But Doghouse never achieves that escape velocity. Enamored with its own minimalist take on gender politics, it yammers when it should run, complains when it should scream, and rants when it should joke.

Take away lesson: Be offensive if you like; but for God's sake, don't be tedious.

Movies: Trusting young normal human girl wanted to watch completely normal human child of unremarkable human parents.

There's probably no better example for how absolutely familiar the well-trod ground over which Babysitter Wanted walks is than the shot of Angie (played by the preternaturally young-looking Sarah Thompson) plucking a phone number off a babysitter wanted flier hanging on a bulletin board on the college commons. It's one of those movie-real moments that only doesn't strike us as fake because we've seen it repeated so often in fiction that we've grown to accept it as reasonable. Like elaborate terrorism-for-hire plots or the idea that mental asylums all look like a cross between Disney's Haunted Mansion and the Bastille, we've seen so many people put up random posters for a babysitter - instead of using their social network of personal connections, as most folks do - that this bizarrely non-discriminating way of hiring somebody to watch your offspring doesn't strike us as odd. Or, to put a finer point on it, we know it's odd because Babysitter Wanted is a horror movie, so we know it's a horrible idea to go to the home of somebody who is fine with any babysitter just showing up. We know the poster might as well read, "Trusting young normal human girl wanted to watch completely normal human child of unremarkable human parents. References unnecessary. Non-virgins need not apply. NO CELL PHONES!" What strikes us as not odd is that nobody in the film thinks that it is odd. It's a genre plot point that's become so comfortable that it doesn't even evoke a twitch on disbelief-suspensometer.

The babysitter flier is one of those genre cliches that has become so overused that it no longer seems like a short cut or lazy storytelling, but rather a small shared ritual, like saying "bless you" when somebody sneezes. And in that small space of the knowing exchange of shared meanings, Babysitter Wanted delivers a surprising amount of simple pleasure. This isn't to say that such a willingness to embrace genre expectations doesn't come with some serious drawbacks. BW engages the viewer so effortlessly and places so little in the way of demands on the viewer's attention that the experience is inevitably a shallow one. But some pleasures are narrow. When I was a young boy, I was obsessed with card tricks. My stubby, sausage-like fingers ensured that I would always lack the dexterity to master such tricks myself. I had to content myself with simply learning all the secrets and watching others perform them. When I watch a magician perform a card trick, I (usually, but not always) can see exactly how the trick is done and follow every slight of hand and misdirection. Because of this, I think I enjoy the tricks far more than the uninitiated. For those being "tricked," there's always a hint of potential aggression there. For me, there's the uncomplicated, refreshingly simple pleasure of watching somebody being competent enough to successfully complete a tricky task.

Speaking of cards, let's lay them out on the table. Babysitter Wanted is really nothing more than a poor man's House of the Devil. Or, to give BW its chronological due, House of the Devil is nothing more than an artsy remake of Babysitter Wanted. The plots are similar: young college girl takes a babysitting gig for a family living in a remote house, there's a satanic angle, chasing and sacrificing ensue. But there, the differences end. Reviewers of West's retro fright pic often praised it with negatives: no jump scares, no torture porn, no ADD-friendly pacing and editing, and so on. From the list of negatives, you could imagine a theoretical alternate version of the film that deployed far more typical genre tropes; but you don't have to, Babysitter Wanted is that hypothetical flick.

Aside from storytelling choices, the key difference between the films centers around the treatment of their source material and, by extension, each film's relationship to its genre. BW lacks the period trappings, apparently a major draw for legions of folks who felt that the lack Walkmans in contemporary American cinema was a dire failing much in need of correction. But otherwise, the two films are genetic relations; BW and HotD both draw deep from the well of "Satanic panic" films of the 1980s, only the former does it without the self-conscious display of influences and technique. House treats the whole Satanic stories subgenre as an archival tourist spot, a curious destination to visit and document. By contrast, Babysitter treats it as just another subgeneric tributary, perhaps somewhat attenuated but still flowing, that pours in the mainstream of horror. This is distance is typical of West. The result is that West's work, even at its most energetic (Cabin Fever II), possesses an emotional detachment. This isn't a criticism of West; his most sublime moments often come from his careful indifference to the demands of genre and his movies would lack their delicious sadism if he trafficked in fan-service. In contrast, Barnes and Manasseri are eager to please and driven to fit directly into the expectations of their viewership.

What struck me while watching BW is that we no longer recognize how weird the standard horror flick is. In a way, West's flick is a far simpler beast. Its obsessive awareness of influence acts to restrain it. It wants to be a very specific thing - an '80s cult flick - and only that. By contrast, Babysitter pulls from satanic panic flicks, uses some torture porn elements, throws in some slasher like hunting scenes, goes in for some black comedy, and so on. These things are presented in a oft repeated and utterly familiar context, so the use of these elements doesn't seem particularly surprising or innovative. But, watching them come together, it dawned on me how many influences, how much film history appears in even the most run of the mill horror film. Most horror films, regardless of their merits and intentions, are the result of a century of artistic history and they carry the marks of this heritage, for better or worse, on their face.

One of the most common visual metaphors for evolution is the ascent of man illustration. You know the one: there's a chimp on the far left side, the start of a series of increasingly bipedal and hairless humanoids, that ends with a fully human individual. The problem with that picture is that it suggests variable levels of evolution. Chimps aren't proto-humans that couldn't cut it and therefore never got the bennies of a fully upright posture. Chimps are the result of the same millions of years of evolution as humans. They are equally, but differently, evolved. The same, in a strictly metaphorical sense, can be said of that most reviled of horror products: the "standard horror flick." Babysitter Wanted never voluntarily picked up this burden and it is almost unfair for me to place this weight on such a slender and innocuous flick, but for a brief 93 minutes, the film reminded me that even the commonplace is highly evolved.

Movies: Eighties night.

Visionary filmmakers don't just come up with a clever pitch or a few kooky shots. Any boob can figure out a way to "show you something you haven't seen before." After all, cinema is just over a century old. If considerably older media can still retain some shock of the new - we still have novel novels, for example - then we shouldn't be surprised that cinema's creative storehouse is far from exhausted. No, to be a visionary requires more. Visionaries find some new way to explore a genuine human experience and then thoroughly immerse themselves and their viewers in the lived reality of that experience. The bring us the real and familiar at an angle that forces us to revaluate what we believed we knew. At some point in the writing stage of Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, Ti West said to himself, "Ti."

Well, actually, because he's him, he'd be speaking in first person. But I think it's important to keep the awareness of the artifice of the idea that I somehow know what Ti West was thinking in the forefront of your mind because the illusion of seamlessness is a tool for social control. It's part of my commitment to politically switched on criticism and the reason why ANTSS is the blog that believes there's no school like the old Frankfurt school.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah. "Ti," Ti said. "People sometimes piss blood. It's true. They have to pee and blood comes out instead of piss. Sure, sometimes it's blood mixed with piss. Or, you know, it's some STD maybe and it's all squishy. But people get sick or they get punched in the kidneys or something and, whammo, blood out your dick. But you never see that. In Lethal Weapon, when Riggs gets worked over, he doesn't have some scene where he's pissing blood. But it's a real thing. There's a whole unexplored country of human reality begging for examination. And it's something Hollywood, with its airbrushed Disney attitudes, has ignored. I'm going to put pissing blood in my next movie."

And right there, if Ti West had stopped, he'd be simply a clever filmmaker. Bloggers would clap. When some blogger made the inevitable "Top Ten Pissing Blood in a Horror Movie Scenes" list to fulfill their weekly list obligations (though, honestly, every time a horror posts a list, an angel loses its wings - don't do it!) West would rank in the top quartile.

But West didn't stop there.

He thought, "And I'm not just going to throw in some half-assed scene of pissing blood as some random day's martini shot. No siree Bob, I'm going to commit to the program of pissing blood in cinema. I'm going to show multiple consistencies of urethra-centric desanguination. And the most important varieties of weenierated bloodletting are going to be hightlighted with a stable, long take, medium close up. You know, so people really feel like they're that penis and smegma is really passing through them."

Ti West set out to be for blood coming out your third leg what Robert Burton was to melancholy. And that fateful decision is why Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever is about 7 billion times better than Ti West's other experiment in 1980's archeo-filmmaking, the abortive House of the Devil.

Ti West has always been a filmmaker who pulls inspiration from the history of horror cinema. The Roost was a veritable taster's menu of 20th Century horror, from the radio show and the 1960's TV horror host to Blair Witch style indie minimalism and the zombie renaissance. The Trigger Man fused naturalistic indie aesthetics with survival dramas (like Deliverance) and slasher tropes to create a surprisingly effective hybrid. So it's no surprise that his last two flicks borrow heavily from previous eras of film. But West has always been a master of sampling; he's never let sampling be the master. And there's the rub. Despite, or perhaps because, Spring Fever lost its central guiding vision and became a hurried collaboration, it is never in thrall to its diverse sources. It's bitter sarcasm - as little more than a "fuck you" to the studio system that spawned it - gave West the distance he needed from the project to not get lost in it. The producers who then reworked the flick after he wrapped admit that they approached less as a work of art and more as a dare. The result is something bracingly anarchic. House of the Devil, on the other hand, wears its source material like a straightjacket. The project of recreating, rather than exploring, a justly neglected Reagan era mutation of the Satanic cult trope robs West of his own creative impulses and traps him in a joylessly reverent mode that the source material hardly merits.

Energetic, bitter, fast, and sloppy, Spring Fever plays like punk band who has decided to give a double bird to the label signing the checks. It isn't just the most punk flick made in the last decade, it's a specific punk song: the Pistol's EMI. Consequently, it's a hot mess. But it's a driven hot mess. The flick picks up from a scene of the original Cabin in which the original's lead falls into what appears to be dammed area, tangling with a diseased corpse, and catching the flesh eating super-disease that is the franchise's chief baddie. From there we find out that the tainted water is collected and shilled by bottled water company. The shipment heads to a local high school. The water is used for to mix up a prom punch (and, to seal the deal, the filmmakers have an infected dude piss into the punch bowl - which goes ultra-pear-shaped and becomes our first pissing blood scene) and makes what had, until then, been a cheese ten prom comedy become something like Masque of the Red Death on crystal meth.

Spring Fever knows it's '80s horror. West et al hit the obvious allusions. Leaving Carrie out of a blood-soaked prom-center teen scream pick would have made the allusion naggingly conspicuous by its absence. But West and Co. look past the straight horror canon to dig up resonant images from flicks as diverse as One Wild and Crazy Crazy Summer, Donnie Darko, and (an ANTSS fave) Class of 1984. The filmmakers crib some visual style from the period as well, bathing selected scenes in candy-colored lighting. Even the synth heavy soundtrack of original songs made to sound like intrusive pop needle drops evokes the commerically-minded sonic clumsiness of early John Hughes.

Despite the flurry of allusions, CF2SF is saved from becoming a paint-by-numbers experiment in recreating '80s teensploitation by a bitingly satiric Mad Magazine sensibility that helped the filmmakers keep the source material dancing to their tune. In contrast, House of the Devil is in hock to the sources it borrowed from, a debt that's all the more deadening for being utterly unnecessary.

Intended as a homage to "satanic panic" flicks of the 1980s, House of the Devil is gets the worst of both worlds: It is neither a particularly accurate recreation of the flicks its meant to emulate nor a creative and innovative film in its own right. House tells the story of a cash-strapped college student hired to provide in home care for an elderly woman on the night of an eclipse. It all turns out to be a trap and, before the flick is over, our heroine is tapped as breeder for one of His Satanic Majesty's demonic servants.

West paints himself into a corner with House. Because of his sure filmmaking instincts, House is far superior to the vast majority of flicks in the subgenre it pays homage to. West, for example, is not bush league enough to think that a scene filmed in front of a religious symbol is inherently more meaningful than one that isn't. Nor does he fill his soundtrack with bad "gothic" compositions and hokey boy choir pieces. In fact, despite the 80s trappings, the film is recognizably a piece of his larger oeuvre: It has a slow burn structure, uses minimal dialogue, and avoids backstory and explanation. (So much so that at least one normally astute reviewer wondered in his review where the baddies left to in the flick; in fact, the flick implies that they never left the area around the house.) Much has been made of how exacting a forgery House is, but I find it hard to believe people who have made that claim have any knowledge of flicks from the subgenre. None of the post-Exorcist/Rosemary flicks were ever this competent.

Unfortunately, West's ill-considered commitment to following in the steps of crap hamstrings the film. West's normal slow burn strategy works because his films are building towards a novel experience the viewer isn't ready for. Furthermore, West is a master of details (I suspect he cranked out the period detail in this piece without even breaking a sweat), though those details are never simply window dressing. In Trigger Man, for example, the long intro contrasts with the sudden and inexplicable appearance of the sniper and the use of a sniper, instead of a more traditional slasher figure, radically transforms the movie. In House, the fine details are irrelevant because the viewer is aware that West is recreating a familiar plot. The '80s details are there because, you know, its the '80s.

If horror has an Achilles heel, it is the genre's tendency to mistake nostalgic pandering for depth of context. With House, the genre's best hope made that error.

Movies: Finger on the trigger.

Here's the thing: Experiments don't always work out the way you plan. That's almost the point of experiments. Ti West's follow up to his critically lauded, but popularly panned The Roost was the rigorously experimental Trigger Man, a Dogme-influenced survival horror tale that bent West's brilliant grasp of sound design and the avant-garde time-cinema of Larry Gottheim to the task of creating a genre thriller about a trio of hunters who suddenly find themselves the target of a sniper. Trigger Man did West no favors with the horror fancy. Once again critics praised his flicks to high heavens, but fans gave the flick the bum's rush. Despite a notable 89% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the collective horror fancy gave the flick a weak four-star rating on imdb. Trigger Man practically begs for this sort of love/hate response. The film is not an unmitigated success. As an experimental filmmaker, West is at odds with his genre-loving fanboy. West wants to throw out all the rules of horror flicks, but he also wants to make taut, well-constructed fright engines. The result is a patchwork of commitments and compromises, some of which pay off and others of which overtax viewer patience. Still, I think the film is worth the serious attention of anybody who is curious about the future of horror cinema.

The plot of Trigger Man is almost absurdly simple. Three Manhattanites (from the Lower East Side, actually – the Pitt Street address of two of the hipsters is shot on location and readily recognizable) go on a hunting trip in a forested region of Delaware. They catch nothing, shoot at some litter beer bottles, and have a couple of cans of Yuengling. Then, without warning, one of the trio is shot in the head. After some running around, the invisible sniper bags a second hunter. Ultimately, it is up to the remaining hunter to wade into the sniper's nest – a massive, rusting industrial center slowly being reclaimed by the forest – and confront this invisible killer.

That's it. That's all there is to the story. There's an innocent jogger who gets pulled into to this inexplicable conflict and the corpse of a photographer that suggests the mysterious sniper has been at this manhunt for a day or two. But, essentially, these are just slight distractions included mainly to show how utterly ruthless a mousetrap this flick is. If a character appears in this film, they are either getting killed or shooting their way out.

If the plot is trimmed down, the characterization is less than minimal. West gives the viewers almost nothing to latch on to. Even by genre standards, the lack of exposition notable. We know that one of them is having troubles with his girl, though what the problem is never clear and a tense, but opaque half-a-phone-conversation we get near the beginning of the flick does nothing to illuminate the issue or connect it to the main plotline. We know even less about the other two hunters. One of them seems a bit more buttoned-down than the other two, and he has more experience in the woods. The killers are motiveless strangers, the victims just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, everything that happens to either group plays out with the pitiless logic of an accident. Few films have captured the unpalatable mundane horror of modern violence, the numbing pointlessness of a Columbine or a VA Tech shooting, with such a matter of fact impartiality. Despite the surface similarities – the forest setting, the ten-little-indians plotting, the "last" character convention - Trigger Man's relentless naturalism and its refusal to give the viewer even the slightest bit of forced exposition reveals the Romanticism that drives even the most "gritty" torture porn or slasher flick.

This is not to say that Trigger Man is taboo-breaking in its depiction of gore. By modern horror standards, it's body count is downright demure and the gore that makes it on screen is, though unflinching, hardly over the top. Any gorehound worth her salt should be able to rattle off the titles of a bakers dozen of more hardcore flicks than this one. What is novel is the sudden and strangely disinterested brutality of the film. Like the death dealing sniper who seems to be able to smite our protagonists from an untouchable perch, the film has a chillingly heartless lack of concern for either its victims or killers. The kills in this flick are neither endurance tests nor splatter drenched punchlines. Rather, they have a grim, understated feel that makes them oddly affectless.

Visually, the film is striking. Filmed with a high-def hand camera, the movie starts off with distracting Blair Witch-esque shakes and stuttering, jerky zooms. Happily, the most excessive unsteadiness fades when we get to the woods. There, West opts for long tracking shots, emphasizing the motion of his actors through each composition. This style is not only indebted to avante-garde films like Fog Line, but also the structuralist work of Michael Snow. This rigorous, clinical camera work is often supplemented with a soundtrack that relies heavily on the "found" sound of the film's location. Running brooks, the crunch of boots on gravel paths, and the incidental sounds of the forest are used brilliantly to enhance the naturalistic feel of the film while, at the same time, slyly playing with the dramatic and filmmaking conventions that viewers have become so habituated that they're mistaken for "realism" (a scene in which two characters' dialogue is submerged in the roar of river that runs between them is a standout). I'm torn about the music West adds to his film. After an indifferent needledrop that plays over the credits, West revisits the modern classical sound of his first film. Here, however, the dirge-like Reich-inspired serialist sound is more epic and grand, suggesting the influence of Philip Glass's music for the restored 1931 classic Dracula. The music is, itself, amazing. The problem is that it simply isn't as involving as the rich "natural" sound design West uses so well. I'm open to the possibility that the score is deliberately intrusive. Perhaps it was meant as a sort of Brechtean device, reminding us to keep our distance and reinforcing the clinical affectlessness of the visuals. Still, I feel the flick verged on taking the bold step of not using any music at all, a move that I think West could have pulled off.

Bringing so many experimental techniques into play, while exciting on a meta, does have its drawbacks. The films affectless approach to characterization might be an intentional defamiliarization technique, but it also serves as a real block to emotional involvement. I've seen critics complain that the victims in a certain film are unlikable; the victims in Trigger Man are unanythingable. The filmic approaches of Gottheim and Snow developed in response to a very specific vision. Their use here makes for a very, very, very slow film. The effect can sometimes be soporific rather than exciting. Finally, despite the bold choices West makes, there are other choices that feel like strange relapses into genre convention. Using genre conventions ain't no crime, but like the avant-garde techniques West uses, the conventions have evolved as part of a system. To use them after stripping away their context and their capacity to link emotionally with the viewer is to rob the conventions of their punch.

Ultimately, Trigger Man is one of the most interesting, but not most successful, horror flicks in recent years. West has the convictions to follow through with ideas, though it means that these ideas occasionally trump the need to deliver on the genre's traditional thrills. Still, the vast majority of those working in horror have the clear goal of delivering solid, dependable, effective, and traditional entertainments. Given the entertainment focus of the majority of the field, I think it is good for the health of the genre that there's room for committed experimenters like West.

Word on the street is that West's next two flicks, House of the Devil and Cabin Fever II, both got stuck in post-production hell and were cut up by producers. I hope Trigger Man isn't the last time we get to watch West experiment: triumphs, failures, and all.

Movies: Bat-shit crazy.

The reception of Ti West's debut full-length, the low-fi creature feature The Roost, is exemplary of the Internet Age of horror flick criticism.

On its release in Aught Five, the flick was remarkably polarizing. Horror-centric review sources were fulsome with their praise. Bloody Disgusting declared it one of the best movies of the year, "if not THE best!" (Hyperventilating caps and exclamation theirs.) Severed Cinema called it a "wonderful Super 16-mm throwback to the 1970s horror so many of us love and miss" and gave the film their highest rating. Twitch claimed the film justified calling writer/director Ti West the "new Sam Raimi" and said the film compared to Evil Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And Fangoria called the film an "unheralded horror gem, an unexpected little treasure in the sea of independently made chillers" and compared West to George Romero and, again, Raimi (who, back then, was still being lauded as "the horror kid who made good" and not derided as "the dude who made Spider-Man III who needs to remember his horror roots").

But the fans, they were having none of it. Though BD gave the film 4.5 out o' 5 little skulls, the fans gave it a mediocre 3. (That doesn't sound like a big difference until you think of it in terms of the scale's minimum unit: the half skull. Measured in "half-skulls", BD declared the film just shy of perfection, while their readers sat it near-square in the middle of the scale.) Severed Cinema readers disagreed with the site's masters and gave the film the lowest possible score. Fangoria was spared the reader revolt by dint of its dead-tree format, but imdb – the Hyde Park Speakers' Corner of online fandom – gives the film a weak 4-ish stars out of 10 and the critical comments include terms such as "torturous," "failed," "nothing short of absolute garbage," "truly bottom of the barrel," and – my personal favorite – from Kathy, who, after writing "Eeeeeeek" and announcing that she is also a filmmaker, accuses the cameraman of "scratching his butt" the whole time through the movie and encourages the filmmaker not to film dialog with the actors' backs to the camera (though, honestly, why exactly that pisses her off so much isn't clear). Wonderfully for the purposes establishing parallelism in these two opening paragraphs, there's even a review that begins, "I don't quite agree with Fangoria, that this film is an astonishing achievement of modern horror and that it is a horror gem."

Ironically, many of the genre's biggest promoters found themselves in the same position they regularly ascribe to mainstream critics. The "average" fans were telling them that they'd missed the boat and either championed some obscure piece of preciously self-conscious art-junk or didn't know enough about the genre to spot rubbish. It's an object lesson to would-be Visigoth's determined to destroy the criteria of the ivory tower: There's always another band of Vandals coming hot on your heels.

This polarization – that a film is either brilliant or utter shit – seems to me to be paradigmatic of Web Era criticism. If the tone of Interwebs is any indication, horror fans are constantly having their world rocked. Either they are getting their faces just melted off by the insane super awesomeness of whatever they just saw or, more likely, they a reeling with incomprehending horror at the news that Michael Meyers will – GASP! – appear without his mask in latest remake. Apparently neither the fact that remakes are pretty much universally poo-pooed on sight or the stunningly craptacular popular and critical reception of the F13 reimagimak-a-launch, which had the horror-blog pro-am pooping hockey-mask wearing kittens for weeks leading up to its debut, has in any way inured the fright fancy to the notion that these things won't make them 18 again.

The second thing that is so exemplary is that these passions seem to be spent the moment they're shared. The release of West's flick and the division between the "horror elite" and the horror polloi could have been something amazing. The horror blog-twit pro-am could have used it as an opportunity to look at the values of the community, the changing tastes of the old timers vs. the new blood, or at least questioned what was at the root of the wild divergence of taste. Instead, of course, what happened is that everybody shot their critical wad, put their pants back on, and split before we could even ask if we were going to call one another later. In the defense of the horror fan community, this is somewhat commensurate with the importance of what we're talking about. We're just shooting the breeze about some fright flicks – it ain't like the definitive review of The Roost is going to cure cancer, end the oppression of the toiling classes, break our dependence on non-renewable energy sources, or make Mr. Pelagius any smarter. Still, there something dismaying about the instant amnesia. It smacks of rancor for rancor's sake.

Happily, this means that the unpaid Interwebbian bloviator, like yours truly, now approaching the flick gets to avoid the kerfuffle and toss in their two cents without taking a side in the GFOAT versus Kathy war.

But before that, my friend Cori and her quest for the best mac and cheese in Manhattan. Cori was this woman I used to know. I met her through her boyfriend, a dude named Matt, who I met at a bar called No Idea in the Flatiron District. Once a month Cori would drag Matt out to some new food joint – could be a greasy spoon, could some posh jackets-required joint (this was back when that still existed – now even 21 doesn't bother) – for the sole purpose of trying their mac and cheese. Now what's interesting about this is the Cori never really became a mac and cheese snob. She wasn't looking for innovation or somebody who revolutionized mac and cheese. Rather, it was as if she was trying to find somebody who could magnify its comfort food aspects. She wanted the Platonic mac and cheese. This was, of course, impossible. She ate a lot of mac and cheese, but she never found that elusive plate of perfect mac and cheese.

Matt left her for a talented, but not particularly nice professional cello player. Cori chased a new boy to San Francisco, but left him after only a week. She settled in Chicago; she became a very successful salesperson of packing goods. She excelled in the hot beverage container segment of the market, if I recall. None of this has anything to do with mac and cheese, but I thought you might be curious to know what happened to them.

The point is, though, that Cori ate a ton of mac and cheese. Over time, she developed a pretty exacting taste for who was doing it right and who was screwing it up. She'd say that the premise of good mac and cheese is fairly simple. You have mac. You have cheese. There are a handful of other ingredients you can add to tweak this formula – but, really, the art of good mac and cheese is about taking some staple ingredients and handling them well.

Ti West's The Roost is pretty darn good mac and cheese.

The plot is familiar, though cleverly handled. The film opens with a pomo framing device: A Crypt-Keeperish horror television host (played with hammy reserve by Tom Noonan) announces that, once again, his master is not at home and that the responsibility for introducing the evening's program has devolved to him. After some suitably cheesy banter, he hands us over to The Roost proper.

Curiously, several reviewers, both pro and con, mention the host's involvement in the flick solely at the beginning, a short appearance in the middle, and at the end of the film. This is, I think, incorrect. I believe that his voice appears repeatedly throughout the film, often embedded in various sound-effects or accompanying the music. His strange invention at a later point in the film suggests that he's one of those odd characters – like the home invaders in Funny Games - that seems to understand that he's in a film and that he can, if he wishes, alter the narrative to suit his needs. Viewed this way, several of bits of his typically goofy horror host banter take on a more sinister aspect, such as when he suggests that he's altered the protagonists' travel schedule to suit "our" – his and the viewers' – needs.

The "film" of The Roost then begins. We open on a stretch of rural road. It's nighttime. There's a carload of young folks, three men and one woman. The driver, bespectacled and slightly smarmy Trevor, and the woman, the withdrawn and sullen Allison, are up front, talking and half-listening to an old-timey horror radio show that's being rebroadcast because it's Halloween night. We learn from Allison and Trevor's banter that the foursome are headed to a friend's wedding. Suddenly, a big ol' bat comes barreling straight into their windshield. Before you can say "That's a crap idea" our band of protags have wandered off to the nearest farm house to get help.

The rest of the plot involves them awakening a very irate barn full of vampire bats who, as vampire bats are want to do, turn people into vampires. (Curiously, people refer to the post-vamp bite undead as zombies, though I'm not sure that's what they're supposed to be. I guess one could theorize that the bats have some sort of super-rabies that turns folks into 28 Days Later-ish viral-based "zombies," but I assumed that this was just a particular strain of vampire located far over on the mad-beast vrykolakas side of the vamp-spectrum instead of the suave opera-cape wearing type.) Needless to say, not everybody is making it to the party and, once the bat/undead monkey-shines begin, our protagonists end up in a tense battle for survival.

Let's start with what doesn't quite click. Visually, West has a feel for these minimalist, lonely shots: the sort of image where one human with a flashlight stands framed in a tiny little rectangle of light, engulfed by inky darkness on all sides. Many of these compositions are stylish and striking. However, the limitations of his DV combined with the demands of a night shot and his unfortunate decision to muddy up the result in an effort give his film a vintage '70s feel – even down to artificial scratches and cigarette burns (applied here with a considerably lighter hand and far greater consistency than seen in the Tarantino/Rodriguez vanity project that followed two years later) – forces viewer to try to glean the craftsmanship of these set-ups through a thick smear of murky imagery. [UPDATE: An anonymous reader sets me right in the comments. The grainy look comes from shooting on 16mm film. The scratches and other artifacts in the film were not post-production adds.] The acting is also patchy. The director smartly mitigates the damage done by shooting expended sequences without any dialogue between the characters. This both creates a mood of literal unspeakable tension and, oddly, liberates his actors to emote without the added challenge of trying to bring awkward B-film dialogue to life. Still, the actors are basically trapped in a barn for an hour or so. They carry as much as they can, but it is impossible to ignore the fact that we're not watching seasoned thespians doing their thing.

That said, so much else works.

Though the plot is strictly KISS workshop stuff, West's slow burn approach invests it with real suspense. I remember a time when indie and underground horror was characterized most by its over-the-top splatter that made the "video nasties" and the like so infamous. Now that the anti-hero slashers of the 1980s can be repurposed to shill sneakers and 3D slasher fare is considered a good bet with mainstream audiences, it would seem that the creation of suspenseful, minimalist, almost reserved flicks is now the purview of the indie auteur.

Where ambition outstripped capability in the visual department, the sound department has both in spades. Running through The Roost is this dense sonic stream of retro-horror broadcasts, thunderous silences, surreal fourth-wall busting sound artifacts, well crafted sound-effects, and a soundtrack that evokes a stripped down and punkier version of, say, the intro to Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. West is so confident in his use of sound that his first big "kill" occurs completely in the dark, with only the sound of the violence and horror providing the scares. The old-timey radio broadcast that provides a reoccurring sonic backdrop isn't just a pomo gag, I suspect that West is sincerely inspired by the work of yester-year's radio horror masters.

Finally, The Roost might be the single finest example of how horror filmmakers can use pastiche and allusion without lapsing in a sterile Möbius strip of fan service or wallowing in a cheap and easy nostalgia. In its fighting trim 80-minute running time, The Roost fuses threads of grindhouse era schlock, radio horror classicism, Silver Age showmanship from horror's television boom, and a distinctly contemporary postmodernism. But here's what separates the flick from the rehash slasher-revival and reheated grindhouse hack work that's dominated the big screen for way too long now – West genuinely lets each of these threads influence the entire flick and in significant and meaningful ways. The radio horror show introduced at the beginning of the film becomes the paradigm by which the entire film handles sound. The dark-yet-cheesy humor of the television horror host who introduces the film shades into self-aware genre bending. The only misstep is the visuals, which we discussed earlier – though, even there, at least West has the conviction to follow through, rather than dumping the style once you feel you've met the minimum requirement (I'm looking at you, QT). There's a way in which The Roost is one of the most inclusive love letters to the genre ever committed to binary code.

The Roost is remarkably accomplished or a debut flick, but it often what pleases the viewer is the promise of more. Greatest film of '05? I don't know about that. It was a big year: The Descent, Devil's Rejects, Hostel, the silent ultra-indie Call of Cthulhu, Romero's return to the "of the Dead" series, and, of course, Komodo versus Cobra. Still, it deserves, and rewards, your attention.

Now who's hungry for mac and cheese?

1 3/4 cups of macaroni
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups of extra sharp cheddar
3 tablespoons of flour
1 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
2/3 cup sour cream
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 1/2 cup half-and-half
1 1/2 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 2/3 cups grate extra-sharp cheddar (this is on top of the cheddar you've already got – you're using all of it – get your heart ready for the overtime)

Cook the mac until just tender. It's getting cooked more, so don't over-do it. Drain well and transfer to a buttered 9-by-13-by2 inch baking dish. Take the 1 1/4 cups of ungrated cheddar and cube it. Add that to the mac in the dish.

Preheat the oven to 350.

Put the flour, the salt, the dry mustard, the black and cayenne papper, and the nutmeg in a mixing bowl. Stir it all up 'till it's mixed.

Now you got to do this next bit in order. It matters. Add the sour cream, then the eggs. Now whisk that mess until it's a single consistency. Whisk in the half-and-half, then the heavy cream, then the Worcestershire sauce. Blend that all up. Then pour it evenly over the mac and cubed cheese. Stir all it all up to blend it.

Top that with the grated cheese, but don't stir that in. Just let it sit on top.

Bake it until the edges set, but the middle's still a little loosey goosey. It should take about a half hour.

When you take it out of the oven, let it cool for about 10 or 15 minutes. That lets the custard set and makes it extra nice.