Fear Itself (2016)
Staci Layne Wilson
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Starring Amy E. Watson
Directed by Charlie Lyne
Fear Itself is billed as a documentary, but it’s being called a “film essay” on the festival circuit. (I caught it at the wonderful AFI Fest in Hollywood.) It’s hard to say what Fear Itself is exactly – or to whom it will appeal. It’s not informative enough for noobs, and it’s not deep enough for hardcore horror hounds.
As nearly 100 movie clips unfold over the 90-minute runtime, there’s a valium-induced monotone narration by a presumably fictional woman. She tells us that she stays in her room and watches horror films night after night. Her backstory is disclosed little by little as she talks about how the tension, dread, and fear evoked by the films she watches is nothing compared to… “the accident.” It’s a novel approach, but it doesn’t quite work.
First and foremost, the speaker sounds really, really sleepy. I think they were going for the hushed tones of a Gothic heroine (not unlike the narrator in Oz Perkins’ I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives in the House), but she sounds so drowsy that the drone of her words is too easily tuned out. Plus, they’re a bit pretentious. During a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds, she whispers, “As long as fear’s still out there, sanctuary is a just sticking plaster, slowly peeling away.” About halfway through the doc… excuse me, film essay, I had lost the subplot entirely.
Director (and Guardian columnist) Charlie Lyne chose some worthy movie clips, but I don’t think they flowed together very well. They aren’t in chronological order, nor do they seem to follow a logical succession in terms of subject matter. Lyne uses mostly dialogue-free scenes so as not to complete with the narration (and, I imagine, to avoid having to pay a severed arm and leg for the rights).
We see moments and glimpses from many different genres including slasher, supernatural, Giallo, and Gothic. Lyne chooses to focus on moments of suspense and apprehension of the unknown, cutting away just before the reveal. That’s a smart choice since the doc is called Fear Itself, and if there is a story, it’s about the feeling of dread leading up to the pain of death. There’s an understated, melancholic original score (by Jeremy Warmsley) which adds to the languid, liquid flow of the film.
While I cannot say Fear Itself is bad – I mean, it couldn’t be with all the memorable moments from a huge cross-section of horror cinema assembled for our viewing pleasure – it’s not good either. It isn’t the kind of doc that will entertain or enlighten. It’s basically a clip movie of the sort you’d put on in the background at a low-key Halloween party.
Released already in the UK, Fear Itself is heading our way via VOD soon.
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Film
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