Have you ever seen the music video for “Fantasy” by DyE? If you haven’t, there’s a link. He’s a French electropop artist and the song is pretty good! But the main reason I want you to see it is because it has a twist. A very… Lovecraftian twist. What starts out seemingly normal night suddenly becomes a nightmare involving realities beyond mortal comprehension. And I bring this up because that’s basically the plot of The Void, too.
We open with a woman being set on fire, and follow that up with a man who escaped the same fate. He’s found by a deputy sheriff and taken to a hospital where things quickly fall to shit. The staff is just a skeleton crew, the guy is freaking out, cultists in white robes with a black triangle on their hoods surround the place, and one of the nurses cuts the skin off her face. She attacks the deputy, who kills her because ACAB but she gets the last laugh when she turns into an mass of tentacles and tries to kill everyone. Turns out there’s something weird going on and some of the people in the hospital are in on it. Who’s in the cult and what their goal is gets explored as the movie gets bloodier and weirder. That’s right, I’m not spoiling the ending because I like this and recommend you check it out.
This movie reminds me a lot of the Arkham Horror Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games. If you haven’t played it, it’s a campaign-based horror card game where a group of “investigators” stumble into a Lovecraftian world where they are in way over their heads. As the players complete chapters/missions, the story usually leads them to hidden places and other dimensions where humans should, as a general rule, never go. If the investigators survive it’s usually with them being forever physically and mentally scarred. But failure is a real risk, and sometimes everyone just dies or goes insane. Anyway, This movie is a lot like that! In a way. Really, I just wanted to talk about a horror game I love.
No horror movie exists in a vacuum; the horror genre works in part because it builds off ideas and tropes from previous movies. So it’s not a bad thing when I say that the writers/directors Mr. Jeremy Gillespie and Mr. Steven Kostanski have clearly seen Hellraiser. One character near the end has peeled most of their skin off, looking kind of like Frank from the first movie. You remember Frank, right? He was one of the main villains who wasn’t Claudia or Pinhead? You know, the skinless ghoul living in the attic. And mild spoilers, but the last shot of the movie seems to evoke Leviathan from Hellbound: Hellraiser II. Man, I should review that franchise at some point… Too bad tomorrow I start diving into Children of the Corn instead. It’s October of the Corn, baby!
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