The Scare Salon

2016’s The Void is a very well-regarded and largely Lovecraftian Canadian film written and directed by Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie, and largely funded through a successful Indiegogo campaign. Like a great many indie horror flicks from the past decade or so, it has a heavy 1980s influence, both in its use of delightfully splattery practical effects, and the sheer amount of 80s-era horror touchstones it references. It seems as though it might also be set in the 80s, judging by the lack of cell phones and the models of the cars, but the year is not obviously mentioned (unless I spaced out and missed it), or even particularly important to the story.

The Void begins with a woman running out of a house with two armed men in pursuit. The men shoot the woman in the back, but another man who has also come running out of the house manages to avoid being killed, and takes off into the surrounding woods. The two shooters then rather casually set the dying woman at their feet on fire.

Cut to the main character, small-town police officer Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole), who later sees the wounded man crawling out of the woods and hurries to help him. He takes the man, whose name is James (Evan Stern) to a nearby hospital, which only has a skeleton staff due to a fire that broke out there recently. The few remaining staff are going to be moved to another hospital soon, but are stuck at this nearly empty backwater for the time being.

The only other people at the hospital are nurse Allison (Kathleen Munroe), who also happens to be Daniel’s ex-wife, another nurse named Beverly (Stephanie Belding), a trainee named Kim (Ellen Wong), the elderly Dr. Richard Powell (Kenneth Welsh), a patient named Cliff (Matt Kennedy), and in the waiting room, a pregnant girl named Maggie (Grace Munro) and her grandfather Ben (James Millington).

Not long after Daniel brings James in have him looked at, things start to get decidedly strange. Beverly appears to go into some kind of trance in which she kills Cliff with a scalpel, and then cuts the skin off her own face. A state trooper named Mitchell (Art Hindle) arrives, looking for James, as he’s investigating a “bloodbath” out at the house we saw at the beginning. Suddenly none of the phones seem to be able to reach the outside world, and when Daniel goes outside to try the radio in his patrol car, that doesn’t work either. Even worse, he’s set upon by a creepy-looking person in a white, full-body, burka type outfit, with a black triangle over the face. Seemingly before he can blink, the hospital is surrounded by these eerie figures, who seem to have been summoned by a weird horn-like noise coming from the sky.

Back in the hospital, the group have discovered that erstwhile nurse Beverly has turned into some kind of tentacled monster. The two shooters from the first scene, Vincent (Daniel Fathers) and his son Simon (Mik Byskov) arrive in order to finish off the job they started, i.e. to kill James. They seem to know about the people transforming into monsters, but not much else, though it seems they aren’t taking any chances.

After this, the movie takes on the feel of a siege flick akin to The Mist, with the protagonists trapped inside the hospital by the white-robed cultists, and also uneasy about the people they’re locked in the building with, who could turn into Lovecraftian murder-critters at any moment.

Throughout the movie, Daniel has been having visions of a vast, featureless void in which a massive black pyramid looms on the horizon. As the story goes on, we learn that this is indeed another dimension, and that, much like in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, someone has figured out how to access it in order to further his own goals. The culprit is—spoiler alert—the nefarious Dr. Powell, who it turns out had been experimenting with opening the door to the void for some time, because he believed it would not only help him to become immortal, but also bring his beloved daughter Sarah back from the dead. Later in the film, the remaining characters stumble across a weird sub-basement that isn’t supposed to be there which contains all kinds of malformed human horrors, which are presumably Dr. Powell’s failed experiments that he keeps around for shits and giggles. The fire that ravaged the hospital was also Dr. Powell’s doing, as he lurked around down there, tampering in God’s domain and what not.

It also comes to pass that the pregnant Maggie was actually knocked up by Dr. Powell himself, and that her baby is going to serve as the conduit for the return of Sarah. Daniel’s ex-wife Allison is also transformed into a baby-maker for the hell-dimension, a fact made doubly poignant by the fact that she and Daniel broke up after she had a miscarriage.

At the end, after pretty much everyone dies, a skinless Dr. Powell tells Daniel that he can have Allison and his dead child back if he accepts death, and he says okay, but then he tackles Dr. No-Flesh and they both fall into the void. At the end, Daniel and Allison are shown standing alone in the void from his earlier visions, with no one else in sight.

As indie horror films go, this one was pretty damn ambitious, and I admit I was extremely impressed with it, especially after my second viewing. It played like something of a mashup between Hellraiser, The Mist, The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, with a huge heaping helping of H.P. Lovecraft tossed in for good measure. I found the plot slightly hard to follow the first time I watched it, but it was somewhat clearer the second time. While the exact nature of the cult surrounding the void, and the exact endgame of what Dr. Powell was up to, were left fairly ambiguous, the movie more than made up for its unwillingness to completely explain itself by being an exceptionally entertaining, fast-paced flick with some absolutely stellar gore and creature effects and fantastic acting. Though it’s obviously an amalgam of a bunch of different 80s horror classics, it never really feels like a retread, and has its own original vibe going on. Highly recommended for fans of 80s cosmic horror in the vein of John Carpenter or Stuart Gordon, and easily one of the best Lovecraftian flicks out there.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.