Scared To Death had its international première 8 March at the Glasgow Film Festival for FrightFest
Writer/director Paul Boyd’s Scared To Death unfolds amid layers of deep, echoing need. It is not just because its principal setting is an old three-storey house on Potter’s Lane in Altadena, Los Angeles County, which was built on a beggars’ cemetery before it became the Stern Orphanage (a “Home for Helpless Children”), and then was closed and abandoned in 1954, after five young orphans were found dead in the attic, apparently ‘scared to death’ – but also because it is set in, or just outside, America’s city of (broken) dreams, and tracks the aching appetites and ambitions of a cast and crew working on a low-budget horror film not unlike Boyd’s own.
Certainly protagonist Jasper (Olivier Paris) is full of both ambitions and disappointments. Having graduated with top marks from film school, he now finds, to his chagrin, that his rôle as assistant to director Max (Lin Shaye) involves little more than making coffee for his bullying boss and enduring her humiliating tirades. Yet Jasper has a plan. Given that Max’s latest film Dead House revolves around a séance, Jasper intends to arrange a séance in the spooky, supposedly haunted old orphanage so that the actors can experience the real thing before their shoot – and he is also hoping to be in charge of shooting the proceedings, as a first step in directing a film.
“Are there any stars in the movie you’re making?”, asks Felix Crust, who manages the empty house and also happens, by a wild coincidence, to be a medium. “No big names, but we do have one horror legend,” replies Jasper, in words that are ironised not only by the casting of Shaye as the director, but also because Rae Dawn Chong cameos as the movie’s producer Ruth, while Felix Crust himself is played by none other than old Chop Top himself, Bill Moseley. For much as the Stern Orphanage features several looking glasses that keep giving people frights, Scared To Death is itself a metacinematic hall of mirrors, using its location just beyond the limits of Hollywood to reflect upon its own form as marginal horror.
Take, for example, the ‘horror legend’ who has been cast in Dead House. Gregory ‘The Grog’ Grogstone (Kurt Deimer), who appears to be modelled in part on Kane Hodder, has, despite his obvious good nature, had countless film rôles as slashers, monsters, or monstrous slashers – and a recurring joke in Scared To Death is that no matter how particularised the situation that confronts them in the Orphanage, ‘The Grog’ is always able to compare it to a scenario from one of his many previous films, whose wholly invented, increasingly ludicrous titles become a running gag in themselves (stay during the credits for hilarious mock-up posters for some of his movies). Meanwhile Max’s reassurance to her cast that “we have no shitty little kids or stupid animals in this movie” will be proven very wrong, as she finds herself getting into bed with a quintet of terrified children.
With its fakeout scares, its séance gone wrong, its ghosts and possessions, its Satanic rituals, its creepy kids, its monster under the bed, its buried secrets and its resident evil, Scared To Death may be built on genre cliché, but it is also self-aware enough to get away with its own derivativeness. Meanwhile the orphanage’s former head Amos Stern, an abusive drunk who vanished without trace back in the Fifties around the time of the children’s mysterious death, and whose very name is practically an anagram of his function in the story (“there’s a monster under the bed,” as the phantom children keep saying), brings originality by assuming a memorably bizarre partial form. In a way, it makes perfect sense that the house’s old master and the director’s assistant should come together. For both are equally driven by a desperate neediness, and their union will allow Amos to get his breakout, and Jasper to get ahead. Accordingly Boyd figures Jasper’s cynical rise through the film industry as a Faustian pact with an old devil who is also in the business of exploitation.
strap: Paul Boyd’s slyly comic séance-set horror has a genre film’s cast and crew facing frights fake and real in a haunted house
© Anton Bitel
