Maybe not since Hereditary has the buzz around a horror film (and how scary it is) been this intense. At my preview screening of Osgood Perkins’ hyped-up chiller there were whispers, nervous giggles, and tense clutching of armrests and companions even before the film began. You could feel the collective intake of breath as the garish red and black titles blazed onto the screen to the sleazy-sexy strains of 70s glam rockers T Rex.
The scares begin immediately. A young girl stands in the snow outside her family farmhouse, looking quizzically at an old car that’s appeared in the driveway. A strange, deathly-pale, bloated-faced man speaks to her in a deranged sing-song voice, asking her name.
The camera is unsettlingly off-centre, cutting the man’s full face out of the frame, as though a child were looking up at him and couldn’t quite make him out. There is a stomach-churning sense of dread. And that’s just the opening sequence.
Enter Special Agent Lee Harker (a solemn-faced Maika Monroe), that young girl on the driveway, now all grown up. It’s the 90s and she’s on one of her first cases at the FBI, investigating a bizarre series of murders. Partnered with a more experienced agent, Carter (Blair Underwood), Harker is solitary and odd, barely able to mumble a passable greeting to Carter’s wife and child when he invites her over.
But that awkwardness notwithstanding, she has a knack – a spooky one – for intuiting details of the case that would otherwise be unkno.