My life is a labyrinth
Main Cast: Jackson Rathbone, Shaun Evans
Director: Anthony DiBlasi
Each year there are movies produced that are never seen by the public. Their content is considered too graphic, too disturbing, too shocking for general audiences. This is one of those films.
More often than not, Clive Barker has fallen prey to the same pitfalls as Stephen King when it comes to filmed adaptations of his work. Great stories turn into cheap movies. Come on, watch the original HELLRAISER again, it’s cheesy as anything. It’s got its moments, no doubt, but it’s still badly made. LORD OF ILLUSIONS was decent, but I have a feeling anyone who hasn’t read the original short story is going to miss a lot of the subtext and backstory. So I guess it’s probably a good thing that the man who decided to adapt Barker’s short story Dread from his BOOKS OF BLOOD collection is someone who spent his early cinematic career working almost exclusively from the works of “the future of horror”.
Writer/director Anthony DiBlasi worked as executive producer on four Barker-related projects (THE PLAGUE, MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN, BOOK OF BLOOD, and DREAD, which he also wrote and directed). Quality aside, he does love and deeply respect the works of Clive Barker. And sometimes he’s even got the talent to pull off the adaptation.
DREAD is one of those times.
Stephen Grace (Jackson Rathbone) is trying to come up with an idea for his thesis in film class. The philosophy student he’s just recently met, Quaid (Shaun Evans), has a proposition: let’s do a fear study. The idea is to document what it is that makes us afraid, to get at the heart of our fears in hopes of better understanding them.
But Quaid just may have ulterior motives; at the age of six, he saw his parents murdered by an ax-wielding maniac who was never caught. Since then he’s been haunted by the images of their deaths throughout his life, as well as hallucinating their killer nearly everywhere he goes. Quaid’s dealing with his own demons in the only way he knows how: by making others face their demons and, hopefully, learning through them how to better handle his. But his methods are a touch extreme.
Barker says of this story that it’s about the obligation we have toward one another as people. I don’t know how much of that translated to the movie. Stephen is the focal character, but up until the last 15 minutes or so, he seems pretty useless in terms of dealing successfully with the monster that is Quaid.
In the end, DREAD is FIGHT CLUB without the split personality and the army of disciples. Quaid certainly is channeling his inner Tyler Durden. And I think that is where DREAD falls down: the comparisons between this and other, better movies is too easy to spot. Granted Dread the short story was published first, but I haven’t read it in nearly 20 years, so I can’t say whether this aspect of the Quaid character was even present then or if it’s just an aspect of the movie character. Either way, FIGHT CLUB the movie came before DREAD the movie, and that’s the most immediate comparison.
DiBlasi’s direction is fine. There’s nothing overly showy about the style, but it shows moments of inspiration in all the right places. I think he missed a few opportunities to instill real dread in the audience, but in other places he makes sure not to turn away and gives us exactly what we came for.
The actors hold their own okay. I don’t think it was Rathbone’s performance of Stephen I didn’t like so much as Rathbone himself. I think it was the hair. Shampoo, dude. Please? Evans’s Quaid is obviously nuts from the get-go, so if DiBlasi was hoping to keep that fact under wraps and shock us with it later, it didn’t work.
DREAD contains an incredible amount of gore, but it never felt gratuitous to me. Shock value was definitely at play a time or five, but gratuitous? Never.
Of all the After Dark Horrorfest movies, this is one I’d been most looking forward to. I’m always up for a Clive Barker movie, always hopeful I’ll come across one that gives me the same feeling as reading his prose. And I’m glad the quality of the movies is finally getting better. DREAD has problems, there’s no denying that. But despite those flaws, DiBlasi and company have made a hell of a movie nonetheless. DREAD is effective. Scary? Not so much. But definitely effective.
I liked DREAD. I may even watch it again. I do think it could have been better if a little more originality had been worked into making what DiBlasi himself admits is a “third act” short story into a full-length movie.
Read more 8 Films to Die For reviews
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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