31 Days of Horror: The Signal
Directors: David Bruckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry, 2007, 99′
IMDB Keywords: Anarchy, Flashback, Extreme Violence, Bloody Violence, Brutal Violent Movie
I originally wrote about The Signal back in June, but it’s a film that’s stuck with me and so I thought it might be worth revisiting again now as part of this series of blog posts.
A mysterious TV signal affects everyone who watches it, making them completely batshit insane. It’s not exactly the most innovative setup, I know. Stephen King did something similar in his novel, Cell. Although sometimes the setup isn’t important for the story you want to tell. What is important is that everyone in the world is suddenly a bloodthirsty, homicidal maniac.
What do you do with your story once you’ve gotten there? Stephen King decided that his story was going to be about psychically-linked zombies (And why not? He has already written about everything else). Most directors only want to show how small groups of ‘normals’ handle the weight of a world full of crazies. And don’t get me wrong - many fine movies have been made using just this premise.
In The Signal, however, the directors went a completely different route. Their film is about a love triangle set against a world gone la-la. This movie is as much a love story and pitch-black comedy as it is a horror film. And yes, the IMDB keywords aren’t lying - this is a very violent movie and the violence, or rather, the brutal, bloody violence isn’t just played for laughs. Someone of a weak disposition might have trouble sitting through the entire movie.
The story is told in three parts, with each of the directors handling a different part. Because of this, each of the three stories has a completely different ‘tone’. One is played almost completely as a straight horror, another as a black comedy and the final one is more contemplative and touching. I guess you could suggest this is one of the movie’s faults - and I did in my original review - but on the second time round, it seemed like this was intentional and this made it very interesting. As you’re watching a world gradually descend into lunacy, occasionally from the eyes of a lunatic, the discrepancies in tone almost make the film seem like an example of cinematic onomatopoeia.
Shot on a budget of $50,000, it works well within its means. The clever use of gore to pull people into an interesting story they might have otherwise missed means that it will stay with you a lot longer than most other low-budget shockers.
The Signal
Dir: David Buckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry, 2007, 99′
IMDB Plot Keywords: Extreme Violence, Flashback, Poison, Beaten To Death, Loss Of Family
All the best horror movies deal with weird, unexplained shit happening on a large scale. We know this. The directors of the Signal (all three of them) know this, and they want us to know they know, so the film is littered with clever, knowing winks to other films. In the case of the Signal, the weird, unexplained shit is a signal on TV and phones that causes people to go crazy and start murdering other people. Not the most original of set-ups, but to make it interesting the filmmakers ditch the only sane character in the film after 25 minutes and spend the rest of the film concentrating on people who are dealing with actually having gone crazy. A good effort to put a new spin on an old formula, but unfortunately the movie is so wildly uneven, the whole thing ends up looking like an experiment in moviemaking onomatopoeia.
