Genre ouroboros

“The Void” is 80s pastiche

There’s a cliché that there is nothing original under the sun. If you’ve thought of it, it’s been done. Pop culture, as Patton Oswalt predicted, is beginning to eat itself.

I’m not talking about sequels, remakes, and the franchise fetishism—or even Marvel transforming the movie landscape into an extravagant HBO series that takes 20 synergized years to play out.

I’m talking about films like J.J. Abrams “Super 8,” Ti West’s “The House of the Devil,” that “It Follows” thing everyone loved so much. These stylistic remixes, both cinematic and televised, serve up ‘80s pop culture curiosities with a side of nostalgia and regurgitate them into something that hopefully feels fresh—all while battling the fanboy wink factor that goes along with cannibalizing obvious geek iconography.

And it’s people like me (middle-aged assholes steeped in ’80s nostalgia) who wind up really enjoying the shit out of pastiche filmmaking like “The Void,” that are part of the problem.

Writers and directors Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie, of the Canadian production house collective Astron-6, have a shared output of comedic, homebrewed, practical FX-driven, retro horror films. With “The Void” the duo seem to have dropped the satirical elements of their retro-conceit, going for straight horror and largely succeeding with a tension-filled narrative that never quite reveals itself until the end.

Opening with the brutal murder and immolation of a nameless girl and the pursuit of her escaped maybe-boyfriend, “The Void” grabs you by the genre balls (or whatever you’ve got) and doesn’t let go.

The possible boyfriend, James (Evan Stern), tumbles out of the woods to be discovered by Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole), a local cop who takes him to a rural hospital that is in the midst of closing permanently due to a mysterious fire in the basement. The skeleton crew, including Dr. Powell (Kenneth Welsh), nurses Beverly (Stephanie Belding), and Carter’s ex-wife, Allison (Kathleen Munroe), along with their intern, Kim (Ellen Wong), set about sedating James. Dr. Powell attends to the pregnant Maggie (Grace Munro), who’s experiencing some alarming birth pangs. They are joined by Sheriff Mitchell (veteran character guy, Art Hindle), who tracked James from his bloody escape and aims to take him in for the murder of the girl.

Things get more unnerving when Nurse Beverly, apparently possessed, cuts off her face and kills a patient. Officer Daniel shoots her, and on his way to the car radio finds himself surrounded by hooded cultists, who critically wound him before he finds sanctuary back in the hospital.

Carpenter’s “The Thing,” “Prince of Darkness,” “Assault on Precinct 13,” and “In the Mouth of Madness” are the pervading influences. Add a liberal dose of “Hellraiser,” a dash of “Phantasm,” a pinch of Cronenberg via “Silent Hill,” and the splattery horror bona fides of “The Void” become clear—even when the story (somewhat purposefully) is not.

The rest is all creepy locales and being hemmed in by lethal enemies as the lambs are forced down the path to a gory, sanity-bending, Lovecraftian hell. Which should sound familiar to John Carpenter fans.

But I fell for its sincerity. Game performances, gleeful gore, crowd-funded verve, and some true moments of creepy shock abound. But unlike the trope-turning, vital horror films of, say, the Spierig Brothers (“Daybreakers,” “Undead”), “The Void” feels like a genre ouroboros that should probably be decapitated for the good of our collective imagination.

For more from Joe, read his review of ‘Ghost in the Shell.’