THE BARN: A B-movie Horror Delight

Somehow it turns out that I know many people who love Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, or Michael Myers, but probably no one who is actually afraid of them in adult life. Perhaps then the point is not that the boogeyman frightens us, but that we simply like to watch him do his job, more or less skillfully. In this sense The Barn is something of a treatise on a job well done…

The year is 1989. A group of young people of mixed gender drives a van through unfamiliar areas, looking for a Halloween party in a town where a massacre once took place. They have marijuana with them, and there are cornfields all around. It is possible that they took a wrong turn. Some of them are certainly sexually aroused. They spend the night in a field. They drink, laugh at macabre stories by the campfire, and peek into an abandoned barn.

I will start with spoilers that may surprise only a very casual reader of the section. There will be slaughter, young and old blood will flow, and non-virgins have no chance. The heroes will face three rather original monsters: a pumpkin-head, a scarecrow, and a miner with a headlamp. This crew does not look ordinary, but on Halloween night it can shine not only in wastelands but also in the city.

At the same time they are not some psychopathic masqueraders (like Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – messed up, but still belonging to the earthly world) or a group of deformed rednecks like those from Wrong Turn. These cruel cannibals are literally straight from hell. That is why what seems to be merely an eccentric style, such as a pumpkin head filled with flames, is actually an inseparable, physical aspect of their existence.

I do not feel as if I have revealed too much, because this film quickly lets us sense that not what but how matters here, and joyful maximalism is the currency. We will therefore see a gigantic moon above the wandering unholy trinity and a true orgy of split skulls and gouged-out eyes. The film by Justin M. Seaman from 2016 very much wants to belong to the world of earlier decades. The Barn is a very cheerful tribute to slashers with colorful boogeymen, machetes, and knives extracting analog blood from campers.

All the possible clichés characteristic of this type of cinema appear here, celebrated like ordering a martini in every Bond film. The patterns, condensed, ostentatious, and biting the eye like the acid of Alien, do not cause yawning but excitement. If during the era of walkmans you fell in love with those strange silent guys who know how to approach young people in order to open them up – this screening is for you.

The film was made with little money but with great sensitivity and commitment. The director used grainy footage that imitates a dirty and scratched film stock. The whole thing was given a soundtrack so that the film clicks. These deliberate devices bring to mind grindhouse cinema, but the eightiesness of the image is emphasized even more strongly. The young people look as if they were cut with a machete from one of the Friday the 13th films and pasted into The Barn.

The soundtrack deepens our sense of encountering a retro creation. On the one hand we have electronics that – of course – drills into Carpenter’s musical work like a pickaxe into a kid’s head in the prologue. On the other hand the director stuffed the film with a lot of crude, rocket-fast rock music that probably has no other use than serving as a background for productions like this.

The young actors perform stiffly, but – surprisingly – we root for them. Perhaps it is because the boys do not pretend to be Robert De Niro and the ladies do not pretend to be Meryl Streep, but everyone simply seems to fit the roles of teenagers pushed to the edge of hell. In an episode appears Ari Lehman, who once played Jason Voorhees in the first Friday the 13th, and horror veteran Linnea Quigley (Silent Night, Deadly Night, The Return of the Living Dead).

Besides that, the film features sickles, pickaxes, knives, and lawn mowers. As a result, gore will shine. Really a lot of dynamically presented gore. Arm, leg, brain on the wall, but in a light version, very conventional. Because whatever you see on the screen, the director probably made it from jelly, baking soda, and a few other products from the market near his house. Even tearing the skin from someone’s face in The Barn is somehow cheerful and appetizing. Breasts will flash – in a very ostentatious shot. There will also be the obligatory heroic awakening in the protagonists, who – furious at evil and with freshly blossomed toughness on their faces – will arm themselves effectively and set out to butcher the cannibals.

The whole thing is edited with taste and dynamism. It has a lively pace and distributes all the attractions in such a way that the atmosphere of good fun never drops for a moment. The Barn, however, does not contain a single gram of tension. The absence of the latter may be explained by the atmosphere of joking that permeates everything – at the level of sounds, titles, individual frames, and even the trailer. We received truly low-budget cinema with truly high entertainment potential.

The title offers clouds of grotesque, stylization, and splashes us with gore with great pleasure. The whole thing therefore lies relatively far from Stranger Things or Summer of 84, but it is soaked with the enthusiasm of Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson from their youthful years. The trailer suggests that the film will soon be on cassette. That is not true, but what a beautiful untruth.