Starting with a lone, bloodied man tormented enough to start pulling his own fingernails out, Itch! (2024) could go in a number of ways, albeit none of them very pleasant. It seems as though the film – with its stark opening titles and heavy cinematic grain – is calling on the nastiest, grisliest of its predecessors. Actually, that turns out to only be true up to a point: this is no simple gore fest, there are no hordes of extras, no gallons upon gallons of blood. Instead, this is a surprisingly intimate horror story which relies as much on inference and clue as it does on overt violence. It’s an interesting, and successful approach.
Back to the man with the fingernail issue – this is Jay (played by director and writer Bari Kang) and even prior to his lowest ebb, life has not been kind to him lately. Bereaved of his wife, lately he divides his time between worrying about his mute, traumatised daughter Olivia and worrying about their evidently rough financial situation. The little girl is having a bad time in school too, it seems, because children’s worst impulses can rival anything the horror genre can come up with. Jay works for his father at the family business in a down-at-heel part of New York, and as much as he values his father’s help and support, he is clearly deeply damaged by life’s recent turns, too. Kang plays Jay very much as a man for whom news of a strange ‘scabies outbreak’ in the city is just another damn weight on his shoulders, and it works well that way. But the issue finds him much more forcefully when a crazed, skin-shredding woman walks into his store; the authorities are called, and they confirm to Jay that this is happening all over town. Something serious is clearly happening, albeit obscured by rumours and hearsay; people have moved straight to wondering who’s responsible instead of pausing to panic over what is actually happening. By the time Jay has been out to collect Olivia from school, things have taken a further turn. Not only is there some strange infection spreading, but the store is being threatened with robbery too; a mismatched group of people soon end up forced to hunker down and wait out whatever hell is breaking loose outside.
No film is faultless and there are a few odd, or less plausible pauses during the more high-action sequences, including around the time it takes to get infected/to reanimate, but that’s often been a bit of a puzzler for films of this kind (and hopefully, given the film’s poster, it’s no great spoiler to discuss these particular plot points). But it’s a minor quibble about a film that is, in most respects, very good indeed. Assuming that some of its elements are intended as homage, it manages a decent balance of homage and creativity, particularly in how it opts for a more psychological approach overall. With a small cast and a small location, the film feels nicely oppressive with the convenience store in a city street operating as a kind of echo of the infamous mall out in suburbia – technically it’s a good place to get trapped in terms of material needs, but you’re trapped nonetheless, and this puts all sorts of pressure on already fraught, frightened people. Likewise, people begin to rely more and more on the modern equivalent of the radio, only now refracted through a mobile phone and topped up with other, newer tech, like CCTV – used sparingly but effectively here, and of course a store in a rough neighborhood would have a camera trained on its front shutters.
Itch! has a less-is-more approach, which works sensibly with its small budget, but also allows the more gruesome moments to really land – because they’re never so frequent that they turn things into a simple us vs. them affair, another ordeal to survive. As such, every encounter with people suffering from ‘the itch’ has extra weight in the narrative, and the fallout from this is well acted by all of the cast. Something else of note here: the sound design is absolutely key in generating the sort of unease which runs throughout the film, giving an impression of all sorts of horrors and other stories unfolding largely unseen outside. It all adds to the paranoia, as does the sense of rising heat and humidity which might make your skin a little itchy at the best of times. You start to watch the characters rather hawkishly…
Itch! offers a sickly, slow burn approach to its subject matter, along the way offering a glimpse of an America which is clearly troubled, but never treated simplistically. Sure, there’s some gorier payoff in here, but really where the film excels is in how its humanity eventually leads to an unbearable and poignant conclusion. It’s a discomfiting, artfully depressing watch with much to recommend it.
Itch! (2024) received its world premiere on Saturday, 7th December 2024.