31 Days of Halloween: In the Tall Grass

2019, Vincenzo Natali (The Cube) -- Netflix

Stephen King and his son Joe Hill (King) get together and write a creepy novella together. It takes a simple idea -- turn a field of tall grasses (bamboo?) into something menacing. As long as you don't over explain, as long as you don't dig too deep in the loamy soil. Once you explain too much, the fearful will fade; the fear lies in the unknown.

So then, why did Natali do just that? I recall his The Cube as being so enigmatic, so utterly bizarre and unreal there could be no real explanation. And I believe that mystery is what made it successful. Our head canon ends up doing all the work for us.

I have commented before on how there is a familiar visual trope of following a lone car down a wooded road, from far above above. You see the wide expanse, unbroken by human influence. The utter vastness of a woodland vista instills a sense of fear in us; something primal. Here there be monsters. The Kings switched that to grasslands, but the trope lives on as we see Cal and Becky driving through the Heartland, grass on all sides of them. Becky is pregnant, and her brother Cal is driving her away from her old life, to begin again, sans the coming baby's father. They pull over, so Becky can get sick, near an age-old church with a bunch of cars in its lot. And then they hear the child's voice from the field, beckoning them to come help him find his way out.

The first act is the core of the Kings' story -- once in the field, you are forever in the field. Voices shift location, the grass is just tall enough to obscure a good vantage point, and your sense of direction is obliterated. What ill intentioned force is doing this to our characters? Who is Tobin the child, and why do we immediately distrust his dirty face. What is the big rock, not quite a rock, at the "centre" of it all? How many people has the field "eaten" ?

If the movie had only kept with the mystery, kept the explanations and expansions at a minimum. Suddenly you can see the tale spinning off its axis, adding in phantasmagorphic visions and imagery of other things in the fields. It is trying to build a mythology around the goings on, but really it just muddies the ponding water.

Natali does not succeed with this movie, if but for the visuals. The swirling, swaying unnatural grass vista is enthralling. Its waves are not wind born. Its motions and sounds are not from insects and nature. If only he had kept to this minimal horror, this focus on the unknown, this reliance on fear, I would have loved this movie.