Dir. Ti West, 2005, US, 80 mins
Cast: Tom Noonan, Wil Horneff, Vanessa Horneff
Ti West’s new ultra low-budget horror starts with a delightful homage to the Elvira-style presenters of late-night TV. Filmed with an almost Ed Wood-like sense of camera movement and mise-en-scene, this segment finds Tom Noonan playing a bored-looking ghoul introducing the latest in a series of tacky creature features. The twist is, it’s the film we’re about to see. And true enough, the plot is straight out of the bargain basement bin – four teenagers lost in the middle of nowhere after dark with monsters on the loose!
And yet…something’s different. Our plucky heroes are not blue-eyed boys or tight T-shirted bimbos straight off a daytime soap but normal people – the young actors are given naturalistic, believable dialogue and underplay accordingly. The film may be cheap but the director uses this to its advantage. Shooting with what seems like only available light on digital video, he creates an environment of murky darkness where the few shafts of light are hemmed in by threatening shadow. And West, clearly a devotee of the genre, revels in upending his audience’s expectations. He plays on their knowledge of horror convention by introducing all those elements usually denied to characters out in the wilderness – a friendly cop, a mobile phone ringing during a chase, some other teens passing in a fast car who, rather wonderfully, play no further part in the action. And the shocks often derive from keeping essential pieces of information from both the protagonists and the audience.
If The Roost has a problem, it’s that of geography – ironic for a film whose atmosphere is so dependent on its setting. Time and again, we’re not quite sure where we are. The barn where the action takes place is a complex space and it’s only after some time that we realise it is made up of different levels and contains several rooms. West does this deliberately to further disorientate his audience but it undermines key sequences of suspense. When the main section is suddenly filled with bales of hay, it should be a great “What the…?” moment but the audience is just left confused.
And it just isn’t scary – unless you have a phobia of bats (personally, I think they’re rather lovely creatures). The reason lies in the fact that West wants to have his cake and eat it. He presents us with an intelligent, cliché-free story but at the same time wraps it up in the safe embrace of some post-Scream irony. Which conveniently means that if the film doesn’t deliver, the director can make the excuse that it was only meant to be a bit of postmodern fun anyway. Herein lies the problem of the modern horror film – it’s too in love with its own history. For all its original touches, The Roost can’t help acknowledging its debt to Blair Witch and Jeepers Creepers, films that are vampire-like in their ability to generate versions of themselves. What the genre needs now is a young Van Helsing to put them to rest and offer us something new – sadly, Ti West is not that man.
Mike Bartlett
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