Scare Me (2020)

Movie: Scare Me (2020), directed by Josh Ruben

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.29 miles, 8’51”/mile, 01:04:31 (recovery run)

 

I was kindasorta in the mood for an anthology for tonight’s run, and I remember Scare Me showing up on Shudder recently, which sounded like it would probably fit the bill. In the end, though, what I thought I was getting and what I actually got were two very different things—and not at all in a bad way, because it’s only kindasorta an anthology. The elevator pitch is that Scare Me is about two horror writers, Fred and Fanny, in a remote mountain cabin who pass the night during a power outage telling each other scary stories by the fire. (If you’re a lit nerd like me, you’re all “sounds like a modern take on the Shelleys and Byron and Polidori telling ghost stories at the Villa Diodati” and I’m like “YES, WHO ARE YOU, WE NEED TO GET COFFEE SOMETIME.”) If this were a typical horror anthology, that premise would be the frame story and the tales the writers tell would be separate short films edited together between the introductions. It’s a tried and true format, but one that’s getting awfully creaky in the hip joints by now.

 

Well, good news! As I said, Scare Me is not a typical horror anthology—not by a long shot. If anything, it feels more like a stage play: there’s basically a single setting, two main characters, a couple of supporting characters who only appear for short periods, and a LOT of dialogue. The scary stories they tell each other are literally told to each other; we don’t have Fred saying “once upon a time there was a blah-dee-blah” followed by harp music and a cheesy fade into seeing the blah-dee-blah then do whatever it is blah-dee-blahs get up to in campfire stories. True, Fred and Fanny actually get up and act out their stories in the cabin, and there are awesome little sounds and visual effects (Fred’s hand being shown briefly as a werewolf paw, e.g.) added to convey the experience of what happens in your imagination when you hear a scary story, but beyond that, Scare Me is literally “tell, don’t show.” That will drive some people crazy, and honestly, I’m all in on this.

 

Why? Because Scare Me, on one level, is a movie about writing, and a good one at that. So many things can go wrong when writers write things about writing—there are plenty of pitfalls to the “write what you know” edict, pretentious solipsism ranking among the rookiest of mistakes—but this movie is smart about it. Fred is a “writer” who doesn’t write; he starts with lazy ideas and then takes the shortest and most obvious path from point A to point B. Or would, if he ever even left point A, but mostly he just dreams of being AT point B and he never takes even the first real step to get there. Fanny, on the other hand, is a massively successful author who is enjoying precisely the sort of life and accolades that Fred only dreams about because she actually writes. All this comes out as they tell each other stories: Fred tosses out hackneyed ideas, and Fanny pushes him to go further. It starts out as a jam session, but what we’re really watching is a writer’s workshop by firelight.

 

That alone would probably have endeared me to Scare Me, but it’s also a night out at an improv club. There’s a palpable sense of joy that just comes off this film in waves when the writers (and, eventually, the pizza guy) are acting out their off-the-cuff stories. You really get the feeling that the actors are enjoying the hell out of themselves, and it’s infectious. Granted, that’s not necessarily the sort of thing you always want from a horror movie, but if you’re in the mood for a laugh and you like your comedy a little horror-flavored, Scare Me has you covered.

 

Which is not to say that this movie is just a horror-comedy, because it eventually does get around to becoming just plain scary, and this is where a lot of people will, unfortunately, just nope on out: Scare Me ultimately makes the case that werewolves and vampire-zombies and murderous trolls who live in the walls of Edible Arrangements stores are not nearly as scary as male fragility and gender-based entitlement. Jealous of her success and unable to scare her with his stories, Fred eventually settles for intimidating her with the threat of good ol’ man-on-woman violence. I don’t want to get more specific than that, but I do want to point out that this does not come out of left field, as a lot of people seem to think; literally everything about the entire movie has led inescapably to this sort of ending, and the REALLY scary thing is the number of people who can’t see that.

 

A movie that is essentially a stage play on film can’t slide by with mediocre acting, and Scare Me delivers the goods. Both Aya Cash (currently kicking hinder as Stormfront on The Boys) and writer/director Josh Ruben are stellar as Fanny and Fred, respectively, Rebecca Drysdale nails her small bookend role as Bettina, and Chris Redd is so damn cuddly as Carlo the Pizza Guy that if they announced a plush version of him as movie merch I’d be all SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. The writing is smart, especially in moment-to-moment beats and dialogue, though the overall pacing is a little uneven; the movie is slow to get going, and the acceleration to the climax feels a bit rushed. And while the HARD left turn it takes at the end is justified logically by everything we’ve seen up to that point, the tonal shift is so drastic that it derails much of what has made the previous 90 minutes so enjoyable. I understand that’s likely the point, but I’m not certain that it was the right choice, nor that the implementation was quite where it needed to be.

 

Bottom line, though, I loved Scare Me. If you’re allergic to what you perceive to be “social justice virtue signaling” in your horror, give it a miss and just queue up yet another generic splatterfest and count the naked breasts, but you’re missing out on a really smart and funny film that has important things to say and a fresh way in which to say them. I mean, Fred has literally watched Fanny do the work of being a writer all night long and he still sees her as a “little girl” who has had everything handed to her on a platter, yet when she tells him that her best-selling novel is “really about gender politics,” he replies, “Huh. I don’t see it.” Don’t be like Fred, dude. There’s a reason that what finally scares Fanny is yet another fragile white guy’s ego: it's because she knows she’ll never escape them.