The HOSTEL and SAW films have taken horror to new extremes over the years with their desire to see new pain inflicted on seemingly innocent victims, but as we all know by now, horror films are not as straightforward as they used to be when John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN ushered in a new dawn for the genre just over four decades before.
At first glance, the new indie horror offering THE DARE, directed by Giles Alderson from a script he co-wrote with Jonny Grant, seems to start out like a SAW film – a group of individuals shackled in a dark room, but in this film the villain is not a Jigsaw out to get them to play sinister games in exchange for their lives, but a masked silent type who seems to have something else in mind.
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For family man Jay Jackson (Bart Edwards) his life is pretty good, although another business conference beckons for him, amidst some reluctance from his loving wife and children. However, when somebody breaks into his house and knocks him unconscious, leading him to the circumstances he finds himself in with three other people who have found themselves in the same place, it is clear that he is not quite sure what the deal is.
One of the individuals, a naked man by the name of Paul, who has his lips sewn shut, plus another male and female, are part of the mysterious puzzle that beckons. Before long, though, Jay, recognises the man – and even more recognition of his past comes to the fore…..
There have been a lot of torture-based horror films in recent years, which does make a film like THE DARE a lost opportunity, as the narrative does belie a more complex character study that would work well enough without the blood and gore on show. It fuses elements of the likes of the aforementioned examples, with a touch of the recent version of IT and STAND BY ME, with its’ flashback story later on which reveals the truth of why these people are in the room that they are.
Herein lies part of a major structure problem, as the early torture sequences are rooted in raw horror and actually do get in the way at times of the audience trying to understand why things are the way they are. It does make things a little confusing, but once it gets to the second half of the film, there is a little more clarity that does allow the audience to breathe a little easier.
However, there is only a slight breather, as the gore and gratuitousness of this piece come to the fore again as the conflicted characters get more intensely paranoid. Horror fans will lap this film up, but one suspects that it may be time for a new approach to the genre, given that films like A QUIET PLACE and GET OUT are showing a new dawn for the genre that celebrates the potential of the genre as a far more scary rather than gore-focused genre.
THE DARE was released recently in the USA and is currently scheduled for a later release in 2020 in the UK.
