By Keri O’Shea
You know, it’s funny. I’ve spent around fifteen years writing about horror cinema – for a variety of audience sizes from one upwards – but in all that time I’ve never been for a wild weekend in a remote cabin, and nor do I know anyone who has. Perhaps it’s just not a British thing, but were anyone to use the opening gambit of oh-so-many of these films as any sort of indicator of reality, then you’d think a cabin break was some sort of rite of passage; everyone just seems to do it, everyone’s distant relative apparently has a little place in the woods, and there are far more cabins than castles in modern horror. Anyway, considering that The Evil In Us proudly proclaims its pedigree as “Cabin Fever meets Evil Dead”, then we’re already at cabin x cabin, even before the opening credits roll.
When they do, what we see is a fairly robust and stylish set of visuals – based on first impressions, presumably there’s at least some cash and some clue behind this project, as shown by the prettily-shot woman bathing in (and, for want of a better expression, gargling with) blood. Furthermore, there’s an early surprise when we seem to start with urban horror, as police discover a gruesome scene within the confines of an otherwise normal apartment block in Seattle. Still, this turns out to be a parallel plot line: as a detective tries to get to the bottom of what happened in the apartment, an expected group of twentysomethings are indeed getting ready to head into the boonies for a 4th July party. A few unnecessary lines of dialogue tell us that there is limited cellphone signal at the cabin they’re staying in, and as ever I’m unclear on whether this group of old schoolfriends are meant to be hateable or relatable, but feeling called upon to ponder this now seems as ubiquitous a part of cabin-based horror, for me, as the bikinis and the weak bottled beers.
It seems, though, that the events back in Seattle and the party animals in the woods are somehow linked. Key to this is a mystery narcotic, a bag of which has made its way out of the city with the gang of friends; the supplier of this narcotic evidently has plans for those who fall under its influence, and there’s an as-yet unknown reason for wanting to make the people who take it increasingly paranoid, angry and aggressive.
The Evil In Us isn’t a badly-made film, and the shooting style suits the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere as, one by one, friends fall under the influence of the drug. There’s a fair amount of ambition here in terms of combining several tried-and-tested elements from horror films we may know well, and attempting to link scenes in the cabin to something wider that is going on outside of this situation is a decent idea in terms of adding interest. This does mean that first-time feature director Jason William Lee has to navigate some choppy waters, though; filmmakers have long struggled with filming drug trips, and they’ve often struggled with the ratcheting tension you’d expect from…well, from a bunch of young people losing their minds in a confined space, and there’s no exception to that here, even if it was brave to try and incorporate so much. Ultimately, it’s not the reversion-to-yelling or the drug use scenes which do the film the most harm, however: rather, it’s towards the film’s close. By this point, The Evil In Us is a zombie film by any other name rather than anything really akin to The Crazies or Blue Sunshine, with the same aesthetics and behaviour on display as we’ve seen in any number of other films in the zombie genre.
And as for the ‘big reveal’ of what has been going on, that emerges only in the closing parts of the film, and as such feels very much tacked on for some heavy-handed social commentary. Had there been more of a consistent approach to this political element, then this could have added a much more interesting dimension overall. Seeing the film hailed as ‘a message for our time’ is, I think, overstating it somewhat, unless you want to go fully ‘meta-‘ and comment on how the film’s flailing aggression and conspiracy theory elements give you a sense of deja-vu which is currently being echoed by our global political picture…
The Evil In Us will be released by Studiocanal on 10th October 2016.