I’m always on the hunt for an exceptional horror movie that actually makes me scared.
Sadly, such films have been few and far between in the past year and it’s disappointing.
However, I had high hopes for ‘Antlers’ since Guillermo del Toro produced it and trailers surfaced in 2019 for the flick.
The movie’s release was pushed back due to the COVID-19 Pandemic and I’m just glad to finally get to see it on screen last week.
Antlers is a buffet of grisly terror from natural and supernatural elements – namely a “wendigo.”
Wendigos originate from folklore First Nations based in and around the East Coast forests of Canada, the Great Plains region of the United States, and the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada – also known as speakers of Algonquian-family languages.
It is often said to be a malevolent spirit, sometimes depicted as a creature that possesses human beings.
The wendigo is known to invoke feelings of insatiable greed/hunger, the desire to cannibalize other humans, as well as the propensity to commit murder in those that fall under its influence.
In some First Nations communities, other symptoms such as insatiable greed and destruction of the environment are also thought to be symptoms leading to someone becoming a wendigo.
Antlers is a supernatural horror film directed by Scott Cooper.
The film stars Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons, Jeremy T. Thomas, Graham Greene, Scott Haze, Rory Cochrane, Sawyer Jones, Cody Davis, and Amy Madigan.
The screenplay, written by C. Henry Chaisson, Nick Antosca, and Cooper, was adapted from Antosca’s short story “The Quiet Boy,” originally published in Guernica magazine in January 2019.
Antlers lasts 99 minutes and is rated R for violence including gruesome images, and for language.
In a small town in Oregon, Frank Weaver (Haze) runs a meth lab out of an abandoned mine.
While his young son Aiden (Jones) waits outside the mine in his truck, Frank and an accomplice are attacked by an unseen creature.
Investigating strange noises and disobeying his father’s request to stay in the truck, Aiden is also attacked by the creature.
Frank and Aiden survive their encounter with the creature and return home, where their condition quickly worsens.
Frank sets up a locked room and demands that no matter what, Aiden’s older brother Lucas (Thomas) keeps them locked inside.
Three weeks later, Lucas spends his time roaming the town after school, collecting roadkill and trapping and killing small animals before taking them home.
Lucas’s teacher, Julia Meadows (Russell), is alarmed by Lucas’s strange behavior and alarming drawings and attempts to bond with the troubled boy.
She begins to suspect that Lucas is being abused and becomes determined to help him, spurred on by her own experience of childhood abuse at the hands of her father.
Since her father’s recent suicide, she returned to the town to be with her brother Paul (Plemons), who is the local sheriff, and whom she feels guilty about abandoning when she was younger.
Despite concern from Paul and dismissive comments from school Principal Ellen Booth (Madigan), Julia persists in her investigation into Lucas, eventually visiting his rundown home and hearing strange sounds.
And nothing is creepier than hearing something without seeing it – there’s plenty of that in this film as much as there are stomach-churning murders.
While Antlers has a slow start, the latter half of the movie is loaded with body horror, gruesome deaths and chilling jump scares.
I definitely advocate getting the full experience by catching this on the big screen.
