Horror | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

As far as coming up with a new idea for a horror-blood-and-gore movie, the new film “The Monkey” has many scenes never seen before. For starters, the evil creature creating all of the death, is a toy monkey that when wound up, plays a drum. The monkey has very evil eyes, and an evil smile, that when turned on shows a row of dangerous looking teeth. All definately new ideas.

What is not new are the horrific deaths of many people in this story invoving blown up, dismembered bodies, heads blown off, a woman falling into an electified pool and blown into hundreds of pieces. Many of these extreme deaths reminded me of the “Final Destination” movie franchise where several people at first cheat death and are later slaughtered in horrendous ways as death seeks its revenge. All of this of course is ridiculous, with some measure of humor and over the years this kind of death movie has found an audience. A documentary about why movies like this are popular might be better than the movies themselves.

The Monkey stars Theo James as Hal, who has a twin brother. At the beginning of this movie, Hal’s relationship with his abusive brother is difficult to watch, due to the non stop verbal attacks that at times seemed too much and unnecessary. There is a cameo appearance later in the movie from
Elijah Wood – there are no other well known actors in this production. I found some of this story, especially towards the end disjoined and sketchy, almost as if the screenwriter could not come up with an effective ending. This movie was directed by Oz Perkins, who also directed the recent “Long Legs” horror movie. Perkins also co-wrote the screenplay of this insane movie with writer Stephen King.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film is a too high 76% with my rating 65% without a recommendation to see this movie.

The new movie “Presence” plays like a combination of Poltergeist (1982) and any one of the seven Paranormal Activity movies released from (2009-2021). The most interesting fact about this movie is the very unusual way the director Steven Soderbergh shows scene transition, with the end of the scene, a few seconds of black screen, and then immediately into the next scene. This is a technique I have never seen before, and gives a very unusual look and feel to this movie.

This story follows the same basic idea as Poltergeist. When there is a person who passes away under corrupt circumstances, the person’s spirit is not able to ascend to where it would normally go and instead haunts houses, to either prevent another wrong or right the wrong that happened to them when they died.

Presence stars Lucy Liu as Rebekah in one of her few starring roles in recent years and Chris Sullivan as Chris, who was one of the main stars of the great television series, “This is Us”, which ran from (2016-2022). Liu and Sullivan seem very unlikely as a married couple, something even mentioned during this film. They have two children, both of them in their late teens within a very dysfunctional family with a large number of arguments and foul language, especially from the teenage son Tyler played by Eddy Maday. The daughter Chloe played by Callina Liang is in constant conflict with her brother with arguments that constantly escalate and the underlying cause is that Rebekah favors Tyler over Chloe.

Throughout this film, there are several scenes that include the presence of a ghost, that eventually forces the family to hire a professional medium – much like the plot of Poltergeist.

The dramatic ending is both mostly unexpected and well done, with a final ending scene that was impressively acted by Lucy Liu.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings are a high 87% and I mostly agree with this rating, due to the different director techniques introduced by Solerberg and the acting.