By Keri O’Shea
Although he’s clearly been working hard in his other capacity as a prosthetics specialist, I had been wondering what had happened to Paul Hyett: director since he brought us that mesmerisingly grim movie The Seasoning House back in 2012, which screened at that year’s Frightfest. Well, he’s back in a directorial capacity with Howl (2015), and you wouldn’t need to be a genius to work out that – given the title, the poster blurb and the full moon shot – it contains a specific, rather different kind of brutality to the wartime vision of his first feature film (though while we’re on the subject, whoever opted for that bloody cliched handprint-on-window poster art for this wants bloody shooting). So it’s clearly a creature feature of a specific kind; the question is, how does it compare to other films within this reasonably sparse, but often problematic genre?
Train guard Joe (Ed Speleers) is an ambitious guy within the remit of his profession, but when we meet him, he’s in a frustrating place. Having just been turned down for a promotion, the first treat in store for him in the role he had hoped to ditch is an extra shift on a last train out of Waterloo to some back-of-beyond location in that dangerous, unchartered area known as Not London. On board is the usual ragtag bunch you get at that charmless hour of the evening: workaholics, gobshite teenagers, slightly uncomfortable pensioners and the obligatory Train Lech. Still, these things are to be expected, and the journey seems to be going as well as these things ever do, right up until it isn’t; without warning, the train grinds to a halt, ditching power in the process. The driver (Sean Pertwee) gets out to investigate – and that’s the end of him.
Now, just two members of staff – Joe, and assistant Ellen (Holly Weston) – remain alongside an increasingly irate group of passengers, a few of whom demand to be let off to walk the last few miles to the next station. Joe starts off fretting about the future of his job as the reason people shouldn’t do so, but they’re happy to ignore the disappeared driver, the full moon and the pitch black woods in order to get home (which, if you think sounds unreasonable, you haven’t spent very many hours using the borked British rail system). Thing is, Joe and Ellen soon find the driver when they try to leave alongside their passengers, and seeing what’s left of him gives them one of the more compelling reasons to hole up in the train instead. Something is out there – something dangerous – and if those on board want to survive, then their only hope is to work together against whatever preternatural predator now hunts them.
Hyett has chosen to work with a couple of the same cast he used to good effect in The Seasoning House here, namely Rosie Day and Sean Pertwee, though he clearly doesn’t want to over-rely on them and as such they have bit parts only. This seems a bit of a waste, really, as Pertwee in particular has the chops for genre cinema; perhaps Hyett felt he really wanted a very young actor to play the thwarted shift manager Joe, and Speleers is decent enough, if a little monotone in places. Still, familiar cast or unfamiliar cast, creatures or no creatures, one of Howl’s key strengths is in something Hyett also does in The Seasoning House – which is to create a sense of claustrophobia and helplessness, a potent combination. Howl gives us a competent glimpse of a horror staple, namely just how vulnerable people are when even a few miles ‘off the grid’, and it’s at its best in a few key scenes: when the camera pans down from some of the passengers wondering what the hell is causing the delay, through the train’s chassis and to the carnage going on underneath the train, this shows flair and even a little of the glib humour which crops up elsewhere in the film.
This brings me back to the creatures themselves, though, and I have to say that, despite some phenomenally creative SFX where the critters are concerned (hallelujah for werewolves which look original and even fearsome), the werewolf motif overall falls rather flat for me. As much as I want to see more creature features grace our screens, I want to be able to differentiate between the creatures which make it there, and frankly when we have a group of disparate people being forced to overcome their differences and barricade themselves into a confined space to defend against a relentless foe (ahem) then it could be a zombie, a vampire, an omnipotent redneck, any horror staple you like. There’s really not that much in Howl to distinguish these baddies as werewolves save for the phase of the moon outside, and certainly nothing substantial about mythology, cause, anything of the sort which may have raised the plot up beyond the most obvious level. Add in the contagion element present in this plot, with a bitten passenger slowly ‘turning’, and it feels more and more like a zombie movie by any other name…
The could-be-anything enemy is there then, and in addition to that, Howl pitches in rather too many tropes for the average horror fan’s liking. For instance, humanising an awful human being is code for the fact that they’re about to get offed, when it would have been more interesting to have us ask ourselves whether we wouldn’t still be able to empathise with a twat, rather than someone who momentarily turned out to be lovely after all. On the converse of this, layering awfulness on awfulness until a character can barely stand the weight of it is further proof positive that bad things will befall them: more nuance, more ambiguity would have helped the characterisation, again, raising the plot up.
I always want to champion werewolf horror as I’d generally like to see more of it around, but sadly Howl doesn’t quite fit in with this wish overall. Competently made on a technical level, it nonetheless treads a safe path through genre conventions without really making much of the source of the horror it spends ninety minutes on. Finally, elements of threat disparity collude to see the film out with a bit of a whimper. As far as directorial calling cards go, The Seasoning House is still by far and away the best bet.
Howl gets a theatrical release on 16th October and its home entertainment release on 26th October 2015.