31 Nights of Halloween Horror - Night 8 - Pyewacket
Pyewacket
90 minutes
Dir. Adam MacDonald
Canada/2017
Seems that there are two types of horror films that are made these days. Those that are filled with cheap jump scares and those that are a slow burn with a revealing pay off at the end. Pyewacket falls into the category of the latter. I found myself thinking about this film after it ended, which for me is always a good sign.
Pyewacket takes it time building character development, which is really necessary for the success of this story. It can tell you the gist of why these people are this way and why they are doing the things they are doing, but unless you experience it with them, it is far less meaningful. So bare with me as we spend a good 75 minutes of this film following the mundane lives of these characters as the tension builds and all hell breaks loose at the end.
Leah is a angst ridden teenager. Her father recently passed, but she enjoys hanging out with her friends. They all walk more on the darker side of life, I guess more of what today's goth type kids are like. Dark clothes, band patches on jackets and back packs, dark make-up and an interest relating to the occult. Something I think a lot of us can relate to as we were growing up. A strength of this movie is it does not portray these kids in a stereotypical way, it all seems much more natural. Anyway Leah's mother, played by Laurie Holden who was Andrea on The Walking Dead, is having a much harder time dealing with the loss of her husband. She has mood swings, takes it out on Leah and eventually comes to terms with the fact they need to move out of the house. Obviously Leah is pissed about this, she has no desire to leave her friends behind, go to a new school, all the frustrations a teenager would feel in this kind of event.
This is where the movie may seem slow as we need to build the relationship between mother and daughter to really feel for the characters. You can understand it, but when you spend time with them, you feel it. One night during one of their spats the shit hits the fan and Leah can't take it anymore, in a fit of blind rage she refers to one of her occult books, goes out into the woods and performs a ritual to summon a demon to destroy her mother. Perhaps a tad bit overkill, but again when you are a teenager everything seems monumental and end of the world.
The question is, did the ritual work? There are suggestions that something was summoned. We hear noises, we see shadows, and if you ask Leah's friend Janice who sleeps over one night, Pyewacket is real, so real she refuses to talk about it or leave her room. Are you brave enough to sit through this slow burn of a movie to find out if the ritual worked? I don't want to give away the ending, not that it is a shocking twist ending, this whole movie is pretty straightforward in it's terms of story telling but it is interesting to see how the outcome was brought about.
Pyewacket which presumably is the name of the demon, as Leah mutters it a few times as she performs her ritual, is one of those movies that had me thinking about after I watched it, and it is movies that have that kind of effect that I find tend to be some of the best. In that sense it reminded of Blackcoat's Daughter, with similar pacing, a girl and her demon and the fact that the more I thought about it afterwards, the more I liked it. If you have what it takes to sit through slow burn horror films and don't need those jumps scares to be afraid, Pyewacket just may be worth checking out. I know we are only 8 movies in, but Pyewacket so far is my favorite that I haven't seen before.
Pyewacket
90 minutes
Dir. Adam MacDonald
Canada/2017
Seems that there are two types of horror films that are made these days. Those that are filled with cheap jump scares and those that are a slow burn with a revealing pay off at the end. Pyewacket falls into the category of the latter. I found myself thinking about this film after it ended, which for me is always a good sign.
Pyewacket takes it time building character development, which is really necessary for the success of this story. It can tell you the gist of why these people are this way and why they are doing the things they are doing, but unless you experience it with them, it is far less meaningful. So bare with me as we spend a good 75 minutes of this film following the mundane lives of these characters as the tension builds and all hell breaks loose at the end.
Leah is a angst ridden teenager. Her father recently passed, but she enjoys hanging out with her friends. They all walk more on the darker side of life, I guess more of what today's goth type kids are like. Dark clothes, band patches on jackets and back packs, dark make-up and an interest relating to the occult. Something I think a lot of us can relate to as we were growing up. A strength of this movie is it does not portray these kids in a stereotypical way, it all seems much more natural. Anyway Leah's mother, played by Laurie Holden who was Andrea on The Walking Dead, is having a much harder time dealing with the loss of her husband. She has mood swings, takes it out on Leah and eventually comes to terms with the fact they need to move out of the house. Obviously Leah is pissed about this, she has no desire to leave her friends behind, go to a new school, all the frustrations a teenager would feel in this kind of event.
This is where the movie may seem slow as we need to build the relationship between mother and daughter to really feel for the characters. You can understand it, but when you spend time with them, you feel it. One night during one of their spats the shit hits the fan and Leah can't take it anymore, in a fit of blind rage she refers to one of her occult books, goes out into the woods and performs a ritual to summon a demon to destroy her mother. Perhaps a tad bit overkill, but again when you are a teenager everything seems monumental and end of the world.
The question is, did the ritual work? There are suggestions that something was summoned. We hear noises, we see shadows, and if you ask Leah's friend Janice who sleeps over one night, Pyewacket is real, so real she refuses to talk about it or leave her room. Are you brave enough to sit through this slow burn of a movie to find out if the ritual worked? I don't want to give away the ending, not that it is a shocking twist ending, this whole movie is pretty straightforward in it's terms of story telling but it is interesting to see how the outcome was brought about.
Pyewacket which presumably is the name of the demon, as Leah mutters it a few times as she performs her ritual, is one of those movies that had me thinking about after I watched it, and it is movies that have that kind of effect that I find tend to be some of the best. In that sense it reminded of Blackcoat's Daughter, with similar pacing, a girl and her demon and the fact that the more I thought about it afterwards, the more I liked it. If you have what it takes to sit through slow burn horror films and don't need those jumps scares to be afraid, Pyewacket just may be worth checking out. I know we are only 8 movies in, but Pyewacket so far is my favorite that I haven't seen before.
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