Quarantine

This was one of the fall releases that was barely hanging on in the theaters by the time I got to Massachusetts and had the opportunity to start catching up on my moviegoing. As such, to see it I had to drive all the way to Danvers to the Liberty Tree Mall, which seems to hold onto movies longer than others (map).

I'm offering this fact as proof of my earnestness in seeing as many movies as possible in the theater this year. You'd think I could have caught a break with my first horror movie in New England: Danvers is the actual real site of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. *Sigh*

Stylistically, Quarantine comes straight out of the genre of "hand-held reality" movies like The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverfield. The story itself could be best compared to the Alien (1979) series: a group of people are trapped in a building while collectively and individually fighting for survival against a monster (or monsters). Conceptually this movie had some cleverness and almost made it, but, well, it just flat out didn't.

To wit, as a horror tale, the Alien series is quite classical, in that the arc of the story largely revolves around these questions:

Who lives and who dies? How do the choices of the characters lead to their respective fates? For the ones that die, what is the manner of their deaths as reflected by their actions as characters?.

Those are the questions that drive good horror tales. Quarantine offered none of that and degenerated into the sloppiest of postmodern storytelling, asserting that it doesn't matter what you do. The monster will get you, and each one of you will all die an equally horribly and pointless death. It thinks it's being clever and scary when it is just being gratuitously nihilistic. Another term for this is brain-dead screenwriting. Now that's scary!