| Title | The golden age of horror: Shutter (2004) |
| Author | Chris Hornbostel and Bill Cunningham |
| Posted in | Features |
| When | October 11, 2014 |
Bill: The amount of exhausting labor that goes into haunting people in horror films is ridiculous. Hurling furniture across a room, tossing people around like sacks of laundry, waking up at 3am to pull the bed sheets off...seriously, that's just too much damn work..
Read the full articleI remember the only reason I checked this movie out was because there was an American remake I didn't want to see, but was curious enough about it to get the original from Netflix (back when I used DVDs!). Anyways, I agree that the ending is the best part of the movie and that it is otherwise pretty unmemorable.
Oddly enough, this movie always reminds me of an Asian horror-comedy that's partially set in Thailand called The Eye 10. I found that movie to be really interesting because it's the same director-brother pair (Pang brothers, I think) that made the straight-horror movie The Eye, proceeding to parody the various tropes of these movies.
I liked this one quite a bit. I felt the tone was way darker than either The Ring or Ju-on, and while I think it's pretty easy to figure out what happened Natre, the big reveal for me was how Tun figured into the whole ordeal.
I did feel like a lot of the movie was going from setpiece to setpiece without actually trying to string everything together. Why are they in the car again? Oh, so the ghost can show up in the window. Why does Tun need to stop at a shady gas station to use the bathroom? Oh, so we can play a trick on the audience with the toilet paper gag.
But, aside from the weird plotting, I loved all the creepy scenes, and the reveal at the end I think can be read a couple ways. Natre is clearly persistent in her haunting of Tun, but she's also not yet ready to give him up. I read it as more complicated than a strict revenge haunting.
