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ILS

ILS opens with what has become the standard method of opening a horror film: the isolated murder incident. It is a supremely intense piece of film in which a young woman and her mother are offed by an unseen assailant. Watching it fresh after not seeing it in so long, I was surprised to find that it had lost none of it's effectiveness. The first time I saw ILS, this opening sequence definitely made my asshole pucker. If the first 10 minutes of this film were THIS intense, how would my nerves survive the next 60 minutes?

And ILS is most definitely intense. This is one taut, nerve-wracking, terrifying little film. Clocking in at just under 80 minutes, ILS does not fuck around. This is an arrow flying straight and fast at the audience, wrapping up it's character development stage in little under 15 minutes before becoming one long, extended set-piece that picks up speed quickly and never lets up. The story can basically be summed up in a single sentence - a young couple living in the countryside find themselves under attack by a mysterious group of psychopaths on one dark, lonely night - but that isn't to the film's detriment. ILS is all about executing the highest amount of scares in the least amount of time. It is a film designed - like, for example, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE - to make you anxious, make you feel completely unsafe, before it wraps it's hands around your throat and throttles you to death.

With so little in the way of character and narrative going for it, one would expect the film to be much less frightening than it actually is. One of my repeated complaints about the slasher film - even though ILS isn't technically a slasher film - is that cardboard cut-out characters with one-sentence personalities are a hindrance to the effectiveness of the film being watched. It's simply impossible to feel fear when you're watching characters you have no emotional investment in being chased, caught and cut to ribbons. The scenarios generated for most slasher films also hurt the effectiveness of the piece. We've become accustomed to the triggers for slasher violence. We know, for example, that anytime a character draws a bath or turns on a shower, it's not too long before they're toast.

But sometimes the familiarity of a setting - Haddonfield is a great example, with it's small-town America feel - or a shared fear can be enough to carry us through, even if we're saddled with characters we don't really know or don't really care about. Having someone break into your home while you're sleeping is, I think, a shared fear. There's a reason we lock our doors before we go to bed at night or don't leave windows open. We prime our security systems, turn on the motion triggered lights in the yard and generally lock ourselves inside for the night so we can feel safe. The scenario presented in ILS feeds upon our fear of invasion and the threat of violence spilling over into our little secure homes. It doesn't matter that we're not familiar with the main characters. We can empathize with them. We can imagine ourselves in their position. The idea of invasion - whether it'd be by alien forces, plague or simply a psychopath with a blade - is a terrifying thought. We try so hard to wrap ourselves in a blanket of security. It's amazing how helpless you feel when that blanket is torn off.

For the entire 80 minute running time, ILS maintains this fear. Even when we've left the home and are sprinting through the forest or crawling through tunnels, the idea of immediate, inescapable death follows. The film ends rather tragically and a bit unbelievably - the final reveal of who the attackers were pushes ILS into an entirely different sub-genre of horror and would be laughably absurd were it not for the fact that ILS is based on true events - but as a whole, you are not likely to find a film that serves a single purpose as well as this film does. Horror films are about a lot more than just scaring the pants off an audience but sometimes they don't need to be. ILS may have a message behind it - but to tell you what it is would ruin the final reveal - but ultimately it is just a film that wants to scare the hell out of you.

And it succeeds brilliantly.

If ILS has a single flaw, it's that it a film that has to be watched in a very specific way under exactly the right conditions in order to be truly effective. Watching the film for the first time on a tiny 15 inch television, the film still contained enough of it's power to floor me. Watching it again on a 42 inch screen with surround sound going, I found the film almost unbearable. This is one of those films where the darkness plays such a key role and the sound design is so essential to the atmosphere that to experience it in less than optimal conditions - say on a bright and sunny Saturday afternoon with the kids playing in the yard - is likely to neuter the entire effect. So wait until dark, take the phone off the hook, put the dog outside - for kicks, unlock all the doors and windows when you're done - and crank the surround sound. Then sit back and prepare to piss your pants.

Essential viewing.