This past weekend I seized the opportunity to do a trial run of the streaming subscription “Screambox” via Amazon Prime. The service, which prides itself on being “pure horror”, gained recognition last year when it boasted the exclusive streaming rights to Damien Leone’s Terrifier 2. A substantial portion of Screambox’s catalog seems to be derived of vintage foreign horror and direct-to-video b-movies, with a small smattering of some newer titles. Upon a brief browse through the service, I immediately likened the service to the early days of Shudder, the current heavyweight in the horror streaming market.
One title that has been sitting in my backlog for some months that caught my eye on the service is Cristian Ponce’s History of the Occult (Historia de lo Oculto). This Argentinian film follows a group of political activists in the 1980s attempting to expose their government’s association with a cultist organization live on a nationwide news broadcast. The news program within the film, titled 60 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT, kind of serves as the core of the film with the events of the film unfolding both on screen and in the residence of the activists watching the program.
This unconventional way to structure the movie serves as one of its greatest strengths. A more-or-less real time counter ticks down along with the show, leading up to several events converging at midnight, acting as a built-in suspense generator. Germán Baudino, who stars as the enigmatic leader of the cult Adrián Marcato, is the biggest highlight of the film. Marcato is a man who has been brought on live television in the form of a trap, but plays every minute like he’s the one who’s really in control. He exudes absolute confidence and an air of dark mystery. When the program breaks for advertisement breaks, the focus switches to the activists and their reactions as the events are unfolding.
History of the Occult feels less like a horror movie and more like a political thriller with a whiff of horror around the fringes. From the very beginning, I felt very disoriented being thrown into an actively unfurling plot that may or may not have basis in real world events as far as I knew. For a movie that is very clearly signalling the exact moment when the hammer is to fall, the end result can’t help but feel rather weak when compared to the buildup. For me, the lead up was novel enough to excuse the lack of substantial payoff.
The other film I watched, and my main attraction to the service, was its exclusive access to Robbie Banfitch’s The Outwaters, a found-footage movie gathering steam on social media, much akin to Skinamarink earlier this year. I admired Skinamarink for the mood it was so committed to setting, but felt like it didn’t amount to an entertaining or worthwhile experience. Even so, I was still interested in seeing what all the hullabaloo was about in The Outwaters.
The movie follows four friends as they travel into the Mojave desert to shoot a music video but end up being terrorized by someone or something. Because it’s a found footage film, the events of the film are presented as recovered snippets of footage recovered from the main character Robbie’s (also, the director of the film) digital camera memory cards. The first half of the film is almost entirely dedicated to setting up and developing the characters, which consists of a good deal of acoustic folk singing and bad camera-work. It isn’t until almost exactly halfway into the film’s 100 minute runtime that we start to dip our toes into the weirder aspects of the film. However, once that switch flips, pretty much all hell is let loose as the hills run red with blood.
Unfortunately, copious amounts of blood and guts and gross-out gore is all this movie has going for it. There is very little explanation as to why anything is happening as the last 45 minutes of the movie is basically a bloody man walking through the desert with a camcorder. In the final moments of the film I could practically feel the filmmakers straining themselves trying to think of the sickest way to gross out audiences. In the end I couldn’t help but feel exhausted and extremely unfulfilled. Which, strangely enough, is exactly how I felt upon finishing Skinamarink.