When I was a teenager, I was really into cosmic horror (well, I still I am, but I was then too), and I remember browsing in a bookstore near my house one afternoon and coming across a copy of the Necronomicon. For those unfamiliar, the Necronomicon is a fictional book that features in some of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. It’s a cursed book filled with ancient, forbidden knowledge, and it drives anyone who looks upon it insane.
And since I was looking at a copy of it in mass-market paperback, sitting on the shelf at a B. Dalton’s, I was pretty sure it wasn’t the real thing. Antrum is kind of like that paperback copy of the Necronomicon.
I love stories about cursed media - films, books, records, plays, etc. that bring madness nr ruin on anyone who experiences them. Works of art that serve as literal gateways to hell, that offer up visions that destroy the sanity of anyone who sees them. Usually, very few copies exist, or they’ve passed into the realm of myth, and the protagonist is someone tasked with going down whatever rabbit hole will lead to the art in question. Sometimes these stories are done well and sometimes they’re done badly, but I will give them a shot pretty much every time.
But there’s another thing these stories tend to have in common - the audience rarely if ever gets any firsthand experience with the art in question. We almost always see its effects secondhand, with the horrifying experience itself left up to our imagination. And I think Antrum (subtitled The Deadliest Film Ever Made), if nothing else, gives me a good idea why that’s the case. It’s an ambitious failure of a film that gives itself a very difficult task to accomplish and doesn’t pull it off, mostly because it doesn’t have confidence in its audience or its ability to tell the story
We begin with a sort-of documentary introduction to the titular film, which was supposedly made in the 1970s and exhibited in public exactly twice before vanishing from the face of the earth. The problems start early, with about 10 minutes of background on the film’s effects - some of them seem to be supernatural (a theater in Budapest showing the film burned down in a mysterious fire), but others are people befalling accidents which could easily be unfortunate coincidence, and yet others appear to be the direct result of things that have nothing to do with the film. Right off the bat, this muddies the brief because it seems to be as much happenstance as evil. If you’re going to tell a story about a cursed film, make that shit evil. Make it the kind of thing that drives people to gouge their eyes, to change their name and move far away. Make everyone involved in its production either dead or very difficult to locate. Especially if you’re going to subtitle your film “The Deadliest Film Ever Made,” you can’t sell it with things like people slipping in the bathtub, because nobody’s going to believe that a film that has caused death and madness is going to be available on streaming services. You aren’t going to find the Necronomicon in paperback. Instead of trying to sell the idea that this is a real film, let it be fictional and then sell the idea that it’s something truly unholy.
So we’re already off to a shaky start. It’s handled convincingly enough from a mockumentary standpoint, it sounds and plays like an actual talking-head documentary, but it doesn’t make a strong enough case for the actual power of the film before introducing the film itself. We get just enough to know that there is a film called Antrum, it only showed at a couple of film festivals, and pretty much everyone who saw it met with one kind of bad end or another, and it’s not enough to establish the film’s myth. It could really use some more setup in terms of who made it, where did it come from, what happened to everyone who starred in it, and so on. Or, hell, even just establish that it was made by someone nobody had ever heard of, and that nobody could track down the cast and crew. That would help establish the mystique that the story really needs. Instead, we get some perfunctory setup before we’re introduced to the film itself with a 30-second countdown under a disclaimer, which feels too hokey, like an old William Castle gimmick.
So the first problem is really one of plausibility - we’re being sold a bill of goods that doesn’t for a second feel likely, and there’s not enough mystique to get the audience invested. The second problem is that we’re being shown the film in question, and there’s no way it’s going to live up to whatever mystique it does have. Usually the way these stories work is that the protagonist is someone tasked with tracking down a copy of the work in question for someone wealthy and powerful and usually depraved. The story then is usually more about the journey than the destination, the dark, horrible things the protagonist discovers along the way, rather than the work itself. And I think there’s a reason for that - it’s really, really hard to directly depict a piece of art that opens doors to hell and destroys minds and do justice to the idea. It’s much easier to convince an audience that the artifact in question really is as bad as it seems through showing the effect it has on others than it is through showing us the artifact itself. Put simply, it’s a lot easier to show people watching a movie and losing their minds than it is to show us the movie itself and make it seem convincingly like something that would make people lose their minds. Imagination tends to beat out direct depiction - the worst thing you can come up with in your own is generally going to be freakier than what someone else comes up with, and so whatever follows is bound to be underwhelming.
And sure enough, it’s pretty underwhelming. It’s the story of siblings Oralee and Nathan, who have apparently just had to euthanize their dog, Maxine. Afterwards, Nathan is plagued by nightmares and the feeling that Maxine is somewhere in hell because she was a bad dog. So older sister Oralee takes Nathan into the woods, supposedly where Satan fell from heaven, to perform a ritual and dig a hole to hell so they can rescue Maxine’s soul and redeem her. And so they begin to dig, and as they do, strange things begin to happen around them. By itself, it’s not a bad idea - the film as presented does feel like a cheaply produced piece of outsider art, like a somewhat cleaner, slightly more professional Manos: Hands Of Fate. It’s just amateurish enough to make everything about it seem slightly weird and uneasy. And it’s plausible enough, technically speaking - it looks like something that was made on the cheap in the 1970s, albeit in surprisingly good condition, though I’d rather have its vintage underplayed than overplayed. But there are a couple of problems with the film itself, apart from the gap between imagination and reality I already outlined.
First, if it’s going to be as plodding and unfocused as it is from a narrative standpoint, then the strangeness really needs to pop - either the whole thing needs to feel off-kilter or it needs to feel really mundane right up to the moments that it doesn’t. As it is, it takes a little too long to get really weird, and there are too many stretches where nothing really happens even after it does get weird. Second, there are sort of two layers of narrative strangeness here, and they sort of detract from each other. The things actually happening in the film, when they do occur, are more often than not sufficiently creepy by themselves. But then on top of that, you have obviously spliced and inserted material - occult symbols, words on the screen, what seem to be scenes from a different, equally low-budget movie - and it’s all at odds with the source film, both by being way too obvious, and by being obviously added digitally - it’s too clean and sharp compared to the source material. Puzzlingly, the documentary layer of the film explains - well, first it explains that it’s there to begin with, ruining any element of surprise that it could have had on its side, and then it explains that it seemed to have been added later, which if anything dilutes the mystique of the original film. And then once the film itself is over, we get even more explanation over the end credits, basically “see, there were hidden symbols in this film, and here’s what they mean,” which is kind of insulting to the audience’s intelligence, at the end of the day. It’s not enough to let us sort of experience the film as text, the filmmakers had to signpost and footnote everything in case we missed the point, just yelling “GET IT?” over and over again.
This was always going to be an uphill battle, but there was potential here. The film within the film starts off with a dreamy strangeness to it and has a few moments that are genuinely creepy, and I think if the filmmakers had trusted in that footage without the distracting spliced-in stuff, and had tweaked the actual story some, it could have been something pretty unsettling. Not the sort of thing to drive anyone mad, not by a long shot, but at least disconcerting. Let inference do more of the work up-front, make the film’s history and provenance more elliptical, let the audience read into it more, then show us what appears to be a circa-70s low-budget story that just feels…off, and then take it stranger and stranger places. Don’t obviously splice in ham-handed subliminal stuff, and definitely don’t explain the subliminal stuff after the fact. That could have been something, but this tries too hard on every front to convince us that the paperback book really is the Necronomicon, when nobody was ever going to believe that.
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