"The Unborn" -- Shoulda Stayed That Way

"The Unborn" is a horror movie and I like horror movies for a lot of reasons. I once read someone describe horror movies as the jazz of pictures: there are a few basic structures to follow and anyone can alter and fill in that structure as they like to make something ordinary or completely exciting and new.

"The Unborn" fills the template with many variations of a stock horror device: things appearing suddenly in the frame, accompanied by screeching strings. "The Unborn" is especially creative in its imagery; the picture features some of the most disturbing visuals I've seen in a while. It owes a few things to the (relatively) recent recut of "The Exorcist," for instance--that picture's "spider person" coming down the stairs is revisited here. Also, the filmmakers use a neat little technique of pulling out frames to give certain tense scenes a jerky, otherworldly quality. (At one point, looks to me like they combine this with having the actor reverse his motions, then playing back the film in the other direction, but I could be wrong.)

Anyway, the focus of this post on the picture's scary details instead of its story reflects what's wrong with "The Unborn": The filmmakers focused on producing a series of frightening images instead of on telling a tale. They could have used their industrial-strength horror images to provide and support a plot, they could have used them to spice up the story, or they could have gone all David Lynch and flooded us with the experience of strange imagery.

But no. "The Unborn" is about twenty minutes of story puffed up to an hour and a half with scary images which, lacking a substantial plot to explain them, are just hyper-fast (and therefore hyper-short) set pieces with fluff to pass the time between.

People go to the movies to see stories, not filler. What's more, those stories must consistently obey some internal logic. I write this not because I judge movies on some academic basis--I don't. I judge them on the basis of whether or not I had a good time and might like to see them again. But it turns out that some of the things we like and dislike about movies really can be quantified, and what I do at times in this blog is describe those things.

"The Unborn" fails, and its reliance on shouting "boo" instead of telling a story is why.