The Burned Over District: An Attempt Was Made

 (I will probably get a little spoilery in this one, but the story doesn’t really have twists and turns, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. The story also doesn’t have much of a story.)

Making films is difficult. Maybe I don’t fully appreciate just how difficult, but I know that even low-budget indie films still require a great deal of money and equipment and logistics, and generally don’t have the luxury of multiple locations, high-end cameras or lighting, a schedule that allows for experimentation or even multiple takes. And this is a point raised usually in defense of films that fall short - the idea that making a film is hard work and so criticism is unjustified. That is patently horseshit. You could run a marathon while wearing wrist and ankle weights and be working really hard the whole time as a result, and it isn’t going to make you the winner. You can appreciate the difficulty of doing something and still recognize when it isn’t a success.

Like this week’s movie, for example, in case you were wondering why I was ranting about criticism. The Burned Over District is a clumsy, amateurish attempt at cosmic horror that doesn’t so much miss what’s good about cosmic horror (although it misses that too) as it does miss the basics of storytelling.

It begins as a hazy, sun-drenched reverie. An attractive woman, gazing at someone lovingly. There’s no dialogue, just soft music, softer lighting, and what seems to be a quiet moment with a loved one. And then it is over, cut short by broken glass and blood and crumpled metal. A man and the woman we’ve just seen are sitting in the front of a car, and she appears to be badly injured. As it turns out, her injuries are fatal, and that is how Will Pleasance loses his wife, Natalie. Cut to some weeks later, and his mother (his shrill, awful mother) and his sister are visiting him to see how he’s doing. He isn’t doing well, which really is to be expected when you’ve watched the person you love die right in front of you. His sister’s sympathetic, his (terrible) mother less so, and then they leave.

Sometime later, Will’s out hunting in the woods and in the process of trying to take down a deer, encounters a hole in the ground. A really, really large hole that goes pretty deep. It looks like it might have been an old well, since the sides seem to be lined with brick. But now it’s just a gaping maw, above which dangle a number of crude wooded shapes bent out of twigs and saplings.

Almost like talismans.

There’s no really elegant way to get into this. The film is basically “man loses wife, is very sad about it, then cult shit out of nowhere.” The two things aren’t really connected at all. Like, to the point that in the scene where Will discovers the hole, a friendly older man just pops up suddenly to express his concern and deliver a big exposition dump about the history of the hole. Which is on Will’s property, which makes it odd that he’s never seen it before, especially if he spends any amount of time in the woods hunting. That he’s out there hunting without any safety orange on and with his finger perpetually on his rifle’s trigger is a whole other matter, but he and Natalie have apparently lived out here for a long time, and he’s never seen this hole before today, even though it’s been out here for centuries. And then there’s someone right there to explain it to him. The whole film is nakedly mechanical in that sense, a collection of things that need to happen that never feels like an actual period of time in someone’s life. It’s not chaotic, but things do happen without any real rhyme or reason. Why is Will’s mother back at the house? Who knows? Why is Will’s sister driving back into town in the middle of the night? No idea!

This is made even more obvious by how the story (such as it is) is actually being told moment to moment. The performances come from the ACTING! school of acting, all hammy and melodramatic and two-dimensional. And the writing comes from the WRITING! school of writing, all speeches and cliches and things that nobody ever actually says. It’s a film full of people saying lines, instead of characters inhabiting a believable space. And what they have to say isn’t even especially interesting. So yes, there’s an evil cult in this town that’s been worshiping what’s in the hole for ages (big surprise), and they are boring. The moments when the cult’s leader makes grand pronouncements like cult leaders do, they ramble, they go on and on, and they’re almost less oratory and more just him kind of explaining the same things over and over again while the other members stand around in sort of quasi-Mennonite outfits for no apparent reason.

And I cannot stress enough how ineptly the story is handled. It’s not especially complicated or unfamiliar – man, grieving the recent death of his wife, discovers that the town he lives in holds a dark secret. That is not in and of itself a problem, you can do some good stuff with that. The problem is that the story has an almost-complete absence of connective tissue. Natalie’s death has almost no role in the overall story, even as a facet of Will’s character. Basically, he’s drunk, sloppy and reckless, there’s a nightmare sequence early on, a sort of vision much later and that’s kind of it. At one point, someone intimates that the cult had something to do with her death, but it’s never followed up. I think we’re supposed to get the idea that Will isn’t thinking straight because of grief, but there’s no attempt to establish that or contextualize his actions. It seems almost irrelevant: Wife dies, I’m sad, whoops, there’s a portal to some interdimensional evil on my property that I’ve somehow never noticed and it’s being worshipped by a cult made up of most the townsfolk. There’s no discovery, one thing just sort of happens after another in isolation. He and Natalie have lived in this small, ostensibly tight-knit town for some time and somehow Will has to be told that there’s one really powerful, influential family that owns everything, and nobody else in town seems to know who Will is. That’s what makes small towns such fertile ground for horror - everyone knows everyone else, and everyone’s keeping secrets. For that matter, we're introduced to most of the townspeople as weird cultists first, and then as respectable citizens, which is just...ass-backwards. Again, the effectiveness of this kind of story lies in not knowing who to trust, at the revelation of which friendly neighbors are in thrall to some eldritch menace. When you know it's everyone right off the bat, there's not much you can do with that.

This is so egregious that there’s one scene where Will’s sister is sitting in the kitchen having a drink, then the wind blows a door open, some mysterious force shatters the cup in her hand, and she is subsequently compelled to…walk out into the middle of the woods where she discovers a ritual sacrifice going on. That’s the only way they could get her out there to witness that? It boggles the mind. Add to that the bog-standard pompous speechifying by the cult leader, and the odd way that the story seems to wrap up at the halfway mark to make room for a second half that is one long revenge sequence, and it’s a baffling experience.

There are a few redeeming qualities – it’s obviously got a smaller budget, but it looks pretty good. There’s lots of beautiful footage of snowy woods and mountains, clouds scudding across the sky, and the lighting is generally stark and nicely lurid in places. In general, the film has an aesthetic that would sit nicely next to homages like The Void, and the filmmakers are surprisingly good at not telegraphing startling moments given how not-good they are at so many other things. The violent moments are goopy and visceral in a way that fits with the overall aesthetic and manage to avoid being either gratuitous or silly, but the whole thing is so incoherent, the climax is so hilariously cliched (complete with a Final Girl cocking a shotgun), dragging out entirely too long before ending in what was probably supposed to be a moment of awe and horror but comes across like a bunch of people standing around, unsure of what to do next.

That it’s not especially original isn’t an issue – there are only so many stories in the world – but top to bottom, the execution is so fumbling and inept that it even screws up the basics. They tried, yes. But they failed.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon