The movie the void has been all over the Facebook groups that I’m a part of. One of them is a Lovecraft interest group that focuses on everything from the Cthulhu Mythos. So I decided to devote an hour and a half of my life to this movie.
If you want to know what it’s all about, go watch it on Netflix.
Interest-Grabbing Factor
It starts out with a couple of guys burning a woman after they shoot her in the back. Another guy flees the attackers. There’s also a guy or possibly a girl standing off at the edge of the woods wearing a white outfit reminiscent of the KKK. On the front of the person’s mask is a black triangle. Triangles going to be a motif throughout the movie. This is a rather interesting way to open the movie, because you really don’t know who the good guys or the bad guys are at this point.
Character Interest Factor
There are a lot of characters in this movie. As is common in horror movies, I don’t really get attached to the characters. I watch horror movies for the same reason other people watch NASCAR or hockey: to see the violence. Or why I watch The Walking Dead, which is to see who dies, when, and how.
Our characters are a cop, a doctor, a nurse, some young pregnant chick, an intern, and the guys who were burning people. Oh and there’s the guy who was running from the guys who were burning the chick.
The main character was a cop, whose name I can’t remember because it’s not really important. He is the husband of the nurse. Apparently they lost a child. The doctor, who’s an old man, also lost a child. But that’s really about the only ties.
There are some nice deaths in there, and there’s a lot of blood squirting around, but as is common in modern horror movies, I could really care less if they live or die.
Character Development
I really don’t see a whole lot of it going on. But this is a horror movie, so that’s expected.
Makeup Quality
The makeup is actually really well done.
Special-Effects Quality
The special effects are also well done. The monsters and zombies are quite lifelike, and the tentacles are pretty believable. The gore is at a level that would be believable as well. There’s not a whole lot of CG special effects. The lighting does a lot for the horror ambience. My one complaint though is that some of the bodies that were hanging around and the basement look pretty plastic. One had intestines that were packaged inside the abdomen despite it being sliced open. It looks like one of those models in anatomy and physiology class. In reality those things would be all over the floor like a giant purple worm.
Medical accuracy
Yes, I know I’m really expecting too much to have some medical accuracy in a horror movie. But I can dream, right? It’s okay, but it’s certainly nothing that makes me sit up and say, well they certainly did their research! But I’ve seen way worse.
Twists
I’m pretty good at spotting the twists in horror movies. I pretty much called it that the pregnant chick would play a major role. And once there was a bit revealed about the doctor, it wasn’t hard to tell that was going to a bad place.
But the end was a little bit different from what I expected. It didn’t actually end, which is sort of Lovecraftian, but not quite to the level that I would like.
Logic
This means, was I able to tell what on Earth was going on. With most horror movies, I don’t really care that much if the plot is understandable. That’s because most horror movies exist two make us wince and cringe. Or to make us laugh, which happens sometimes unintentionally.
I’m rather vague on what this was all about. I get that the main antagonist was summoning creatures from some other realm with secret signs and rituals. He was experimenting on people and/or offering them as sacrifices. The rest of it gets a little hazy, except that he was doing all this in order to bring his dead daughter back. How he brought her back was a little bit confusing. But I guess that his brain was warped by extraplanar forces.
Monster Danger Factor
They had tentacles and could poke your eyes out, drag you away into the corner, and squish your head. They could also impregnate you I guess. It was a vague there. They also could stand up to a lot of damage from firearms.
But overall, they were vulnerable to fire and damage with an axe or shotgun. They also were not very fast. As for size, there were a few that were large, but you can still fit them in a room easily.
Zombies
As stated above, they weren’t all that dangerous. But there was a fair number of them in one area of the building. They looked pretty darn impressive.
Unintentional humor
There really wasn’t a lot of humor in this movie. I don’t know how I feel about that. Unintentional humor, such as gallons and gallons of blood from one human, or monsters that just are not convincing, is great in horror movies. Dark humor is also appreciated.
If you’re not going to have these kinds of humor in a movie, then the film has to be very convincing and thought-provoking to come across as compelling. This didn’t make the grade.
WTF Factor
First up, the cop had to bring the survivor of the shooting and burning to a hospital. The nearest hospital is one that has all of four people working in it. This is ostensibly because there was a fire at the hospital. Now, I’ve worked at hospitals. I’ve also heard in great detail about hospitals that have sustained damage from a natural disaster. Normally, if the fire damage is so severe that only a few people can work, they shut the whole place down. So at the time of the movie, we’ve got a hospital that is less efficient and less helpful than an urgent care clinic. There is all of one other patient there as well.
Sometimes they have electricity, and sometimes they’re able to connect with the outside world, but a lot of the time they are not. There’s no real explanation for this.
There’s also no real explanation for why there’s a cult of white-robed people that have triangles on their faces. Oh I forgot to mention that there was a whole pack of those people outside the hospital, keeping everyone inside.
It doesn’t really explain how the main antagonist got the powers that he did, nor what the powers are, where they came from, or what they want. In a Lovecraft story, you know what’s going on even if it is mysterious. You know that the Old Ones or Cthulhu or Nyarlathotep are trying to take over the world. Again. You know that probably the main character, the one who’s narrating the story, is going to go mad at some point. They may die as well. But it’s all very straightforward. I feel that when you know the motivations and intent of the evil forces, the dread you feel is heightened. If I don’t know the stakes that are involved, I really can’t work up much concern for stopping them. Watching this, one would think that the worst that could happen is that we would have a few conglomerations of shambling corpses wandering around. They would last until somebody used a flamethrower, grenade, or .50 cal machine gun on them. There was no mention that they were going to take over the world. Then again, there may have been, but the movie didn’t really grab me, so I was checking Facebook a lot. Part of how I judge how good a show is, is by the…
Facebook Check Index
That’s how often I check Facebook and how long I am on during the movie. Some movies, such as Iron Man, keep me off my phone the whole time. Some series are like that as well, such as Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad or Stranger Things. I stayed off my phone for a good 20 minutes. There was some good gore and some neat little twists that kept me interested. Then things started to get a slow because I didn’t care about the characters. This far into the movie, I should at least care if the main character lives or dies.
I was able to check all my messages, reply, read an article that was linked in another Facebook post, and take a quiz on my preferences about the zombie apocalypse in fiction. I also had time to wander aimlessly around the apartment. I might also mention that I checked Pinterest extensively. I was going to do some research on book marketing on Amazon, but the movie distracted me.
Was this Lovecraftian or not?
Yes, it was quite Lovecraftian in the fact that there were tentacled monsters that the antagonist summoned from a nether region of the Abyss. There were even some nice summoning diagrams in a book.
Was it worth watching?
It was alright as a general distraction movie. There is nothing that really stimulated the imagination. There was nothing to make you think deeper. And there was really that made you scared afterward. This wasn’t like Jaws, which made you afraid to get in the water. Nor was it like Psycho, which made you afraid to take a shower. There wasn’t even much that made you jump. And yes, I did watch this with the lights off. I like to save electricity.
There was a short clip with zombies in it. Like I mentioned above, they were really nice zombies, as far as that style of walking dead goes. They weren’t all that dangerous, even there were a lot of them.
The writing was nothing to write home about. The acting was par for any B or C horror movie. The filming was fairly okay.
If you’re bored and just want to kill some time, and have a little bit of a hankering for some Lovecraft, give us movie a shot, but don’t waste too much ammo on it.
Thoughts? Did you watch this? Do you know any other Lovecraftian movies? Comment!