Julian Richards’s The Last Horror Movie is a poignant, postmodern psychological parable, wryly disguised as a black comedy. And, not to beat around the proverbial bush, is perhaps one of the greatest works of horror ever made.
Max (Kevin Howarth, mixing the best of Mary Harron’s American Pscyho by looking like William Defoe and exhibiting the acting prowess of Christian Bale) is a wedding photographer who has chosen to make a documentary about his weekly bloodlust.
Shortly after The Last Horror Movie begins, the footage breaks to a man staring directly into the camera. He is apologetic for the disruption and proceeds to outline a change in itinerary. Instead of getting to watch the film we believed to have in own video players, the audience is instead going to be treated to a real-life killer, his daily routine, and philosophies. What follows is a psychological thriller unlike any other for, it not only involves the viewer directly, but on a very serious, moral level.
After laying the groundwork for his killer by having Max rehash his first murder and the giddy anxiety during the early stages of his career–Max estimates he killed 20 a month before tapering off to 8-10 every four weeks resulting, to date, in what he believes to be upwards to about 50 deaths–the director grants us exclusive insight into Max’s life over a six-month period. However, what at first appears to be a character study quickly transforms into a study of ethics, not just upon life and death, but upon the moral culpability involved in the act of cinematic voyeurism, i.e. being an audience member. Of course, when our narrator proposes if there is in fact a difference between killing a man and not saving his life, we should brace ourselves for something different, something unique, something nothing short of breathtaking. And that is what Richard gives us.
By breaking the fourth wall between the safety of the screen and the audience, Richards hurls his viewer into a postmodern quagmire. However, though previous efforts have had spine-tingling results–namely Lamberto Bava’s Demons, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Scream–The Last Horror Movie is so succinct in its vision, so precise in its thinking, that the viewer will be irreparably changed on a multitude of levels by the final frame. Richards’s feature is simultaneously a meditation upon ethics and aesthetics but, and this being his masterstroke, it is never didactic.
Part of the filmmaker’s precision is his ability to control his limited budget whereas many of his peers and predecessors let such restraints control them. Not since Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project has meager sources been so aptly applied via the faux documentary format. For example, the medium allows the director to humor less-than-professional acting for his cast is comprised of fictional amateurs. Moreover, a pricey special effects bill is superseded in the director having most of the bloodletting occur off screen, which results in the Hitchcockian culmination of the worst, for it sets the audience’s imagination spinning, thereby fashioning for each viewer his or her most terrifying personal vision of pain and suffering.
Approximately midway through the film, Max queries the viewer as to why–since what he or she is watching has been revealed to be factual–the individual is still watching. Our narrator also poses the question of personal morals when he wedges us between our vicarious bloodlust as viewers of horror films and our apathy to thwart existing suffering. He wonders, if we know we could sell our televisions and send the money to needy children in Africa, why we haven’t do so considering such lethargy commissions knowing harm. This is exquisitely represented in Max having his unnamed assistant, played by Mark Stevenson, attempt a murder. When the young man cannot force his hand, his mentor conjectures that, in the novice’s filming of Max’s atrocities, there is no qualitative difference between doing and watching solely upon the basis that distance exists. Such thereby makes our actions equitable to Max’s as well as those of his cinematic forefathers. With this, Richards no longer allows us to hide behind the veil of “a knowing fiction”–that all fabricated stories are just that, make-believe tales to be enjoyed with apathetic detachment–for the audience is obligated to respond to why a vicious act is permissible by proxy. Such becomes, not only philosophical fodder, but the framework for the stunning finale where we are unable to move, not because of our fear, but due to our contract to be part of the aesthetic whole (I refuse to serve a spoiler however much I would love to explore what the director has placed before us). This says nothing of the assistant turning a knife on Max, thereby revisiting the ethical, utilitarian dilemma of killing a killer to stop killing as seen in Howard Hawks’s Sergeant York and David Fincher’s Se7en.
Moreover, Richards makes sure that, for all of the girth that the film offers, it remains entertaining. Though Max periodically lectures the viewer by way of rhetoricals, he does so with overriding verve and confidence–which serves as a segue for Richards and his co-writer, James Handel, to insert very poignant but nonetheless pithy monologues–making it all the more difficult to distance oneself from the malevolent perpetuator. As Max works his theoretical magic on the viewer, bringing him or her closer to the killer’s own POV, Richards exacerbates our attempts at keeping ourselves at bay by coyly having Max approach a small child on the street and enter the house of a frail old woman. The filmmaker thwarts our typecast expectations for he makes his central figure all the more humane for the child and elder share a close relationship with Max: they are his relatives and, alas, Max is not the stereotypical antisocial introverted psychopath of rote Hollywood, but a family man.
In relation to the history of the genre, Julian Richards’s The Last Horror Movie, is by far the greatest faux documentary ever produced. Moreover, it is one of the greatest, most riveting, psychologically-revealing tales of terror ever set to celluloid. In short, The Last Horror Movie is, not a movie, but a film par excellence.
-Egregious Gurnow
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- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
