What if, when Carrie, from the Stephen King film, had her period in the locker room, the girls had helped her out in the name of women’s solidarity? What if Satan appeared before an unsuspecting couple, planning on scaring the bejesus out of them, but they just thought he was a homeless man and gave him a dollar? That’s just what we see in director Sassy Mohen’s short film, Fear, Actually. And it’s not only Satan and Carrie who are having troubles. There’s a whole therapy group of frightening creatures and monsters facing a terrible problem: no one finds them scary any more.
The film focuses on Pennywise, the clown from It. He’s on the outs with his girlfriend because, well, he just doesn’t scare her like he used to. In fact, she’s found something much scarier to satisfy her needs: the evening news. That’s the premise of this film. I laughed out loud at this film many times. You’ll want to pay attention to the little bits of newscasts we hear throughout. The script, written by Kyle Sullivan, is absolutely hilarious from start to finish, on all sorts of levels.
Not only is the premise great; a bunch of monsters from horror films are out-scared by the horrors of the newsfeed. That premise also sits on top of another conceit: the film, as you may have suspected from the title, is riffing on the 2003 Richard Curtis film, Love, Actually. Where the latter plays out in the run up to Christmas, Fear, Actually revolves around the Halloween season. The similarities go further, but in the name of avoiding spoilers, I won’t mention them. But Sullivan finds all sorts of ways to play with the fear=love equation.
And on top of a great premise riffing on a ridiculous romcom, Fear, Actually also provides us with some actual food for thought. Are we in fact living in a world where the news is more frightening than any horror film? And what precisely about the news is frightening? Terrifying stories about the plight of others? Or is it the tales of all the horrible health problems and political turmoil that we face personally that are most frightening? To go further, Fear, Actually pushes us to wonder, what is the role of horror in society? What need does horror scratch and do we still need to scratch it? I think the actual point of view of the film is that the news has gotten so horrendous that traditional forms of horror just can’t compete. Whether it’s true if the news today is worse than, say, during the Second World War or the Cuban missile crisis, is hard to say. But it really does seem like the news is ever more insistent in its efforts to scare the daylights out of us. And it does so not just once a day while we’re watching Walter Cronkite read the news. It’s trying to terrify us all day long – on our phones, on TVs and on giant screens set up in every city’s downtown.
Is Fear, Actually a call to action? Probably not. The real lesson is that no matter how scary what we see on our screens is, the only real path to happiness is through finding that special someone who knows just the right way to scare you, accepting all their little quirks and peccadilloes, and riding off into the sunset with them. Or perhaps it reminds those of us who are real horror fans of the paradoxical fact that we often flee from the horrors of the real world by cuddling up with one of our favourite horror films. Why that’s the case, I don’t know.
On the technical side, Robert Walters, who plays Pennywise, does a phenomenal job of playing the bummed out demon clown. It’s absolutely clear that he really believes in this character. The acting on the whole, in fact, is very well done, as are the costumes. The direction also goes a long way towards making this so great. Visually, there is never a dull moment. But the one who really steals the show here, I must say, is the writer. The fast pace with nonstop jokes is what really makes this film shine. And you’ll definitely want to stick around for the end credits. Sullivan also wrote the words to the song that plays over them.
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