Spooktoberfest #12 A Horrible Way To Die

I am slowly becoming aware of a group of upstart horror filmmakers who are all friends and appear in each others' movies. I was first hipped to their existence through Ti West (House of the Devil, The Innkeepers) who led me to VHS. That led me to Joe Swanberg and Adam Wingard. Swanberg directs a lot of indie comedy but appears in indie horror flicks as an actor. Wingard (and Simon Barrett, who seems to be his writing partner) are all tied up with this group, too. I have been trying to sample their wares and see what this little group is all about.

That led me to tonight's movie A Horrible Way To Die. In it, we follow Amy Seimetz (from Upstream Color) as she goes to AA, works at a dentist office and tries to forget that she once dated the most celebrated serial killer in the US. As she begins a relationship with a new guy (Swanberg), we also follow her ex as he crosses the country, killing pretty much anyone he runs across. The ex is played pretty wonderfully by AJ Bowen. His serial killer is one of the better takes that I have seen. More than charming, he keeps insisting his victims will be just fine even up to the moment he kills them. He is soft-spoken and gentle. He never reverts to the easy cliche of the killer who is seething with rage just under the surface. Great character work by Bowen.

Unfortunately, he is not really the main character. When he is onscreen, his dark antics are dreadfully entertaining. When we are following the awkward, blooming romance between Seimetz and Swanberg, the movie loses a lot of the narrative drive. This is mostly due to the fact that there is a "big twist" in the plot that I hope to God you see coming like a bullet train. It is so clumsily telegraphed in both the script and some of the performances that you can't help but get there waaaaay before the movie. Situations like that make movies hard for me to watch when you are waiting forever for the characters to catch up with what we know.

Really, the whole thing plays better as relationship drama than as a horror movie. One bit I found super annoying was the overuse of handheld cameras and using extreme close-ups on light sources to signal scene changes. I wish the movie had been called A Horrible Way To Edit. I hear You're Next (by the same guy) is pretty darn good but it is kind of hard to see the potential here. Skip it.