These Things That Hide
We are now about 9 years from what was surely the peak in the zombie bubble. Kicked off with the fiendish running zombies of 28 Days Later in 2002, followed by two more great entries in 2004 – Shaun of the Dead and Dawn of Dead (the latter being our personal favorite) – the genre achieved a pinnacle of mainstream awareness with 2009’s Zombieland and the 2010 premier of AMC’s The Walking Dead – a show that, despite enduring constant abuse from its own fans, continues to dominate its time slot on Sunday nights.
All these years later, can the dead still scare us?
According to Ravenous (originally Les Affamés), a French-Canadian movie just recently added to Netflix, the answer is yes. It’s the best horror movie we’ve seen since last year’s It.
Unlike It, however, Ravenous is an economical work. This is a movie that gives you virtually nothing in terms of character development, exposition, or even establishing shots, yet still hooks you from the first scene – a testament to the careful work of director Robin Aubert and editor Francis Cloutier.
We begin with the zombie apocalypse already well underway. Short vignettes introduce us to our protagonists – two men trade jokes next to a pick-up truck which then pulls away to reveal charred human remains. A lone boy travels through the woods with his rifle, saving an old man’s life. A woman in a pant suit hacks away at a zombie with such gusto we figure it must be a family member. Two older woman hunker down at a farm, rifles ready, waiting for someone to return.
As you might imagine, these various story lines converge quickly into the classic apocalypse movie trope: a band of strangers struggling to survive together – usually accompanied by the sort of predictable group dynamic that has us groaning and rolling our eyes. And we do get most of the typical accompanying group dynamics – squabbles about whether so-and-so is infected and whether strangers can be trusted, etc. But the movie deftly handles these necessary evils. Yes, someone gets bitten. And he or she will have to die. But the movie just moves right along, as do the characters, who bear their sorrow and struggle mostly in silence. When outbursts become necessary, they keep them short and to the point. They are prey, after all. It would not do to be loud. French Canadian zombies, much like other breeds, respond to noise.
These mort-vivants also run, bite, infect, and roam around in packs. But don’t let their modern abilities fool you, they have more going on than meets the eye – a kind of collective animal intelligence or purpose that seems to be guiding their actions. Or maybe it's just the pagan fetish of late capitallsm. They like to stack chairs and other household items into Babel-like towers before which they stand rigidly like cult followers about to strike a sun salutation. What it all means, we don’t know; but these creatures, “ces choses qui se cachent” as one character calls them (“these things that hide”), also prove to be devilishly good predators – luring us into forests using dead relatives, or into a dense fog by emulating the sound of a crying child. It is said of Napoleon that his genius lay in the ability to quickly move troops where they would be least expected. Ces choses appear to have taken a page out of his tactics manual, drawing us into a game of now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t. It’s a game at which Aubert and Cloutier happen to be experts. Watching them play it, we were fascinated.