Bore me
I do not begrudge Scare Me’s existence. In fact, I believe more movies like it should exist. The reported budget for the recent Snow White film is around $300 million. What if that was more like, I dunno, $200 million, and then Hollywood producers gave 20 ambitious, untested creatives $5 million each to write and direct a movie? Surely the result would be more profitable (or, as the case may be, less bankrupting) than a live-action remake boondoggle. All it would take is one or two modest hits in that batch to break even. I know; I know: that’s not how late capitalism IP production works. But let a movie lover daydream.
Anyway, I do not begrudge Scare Me’s existence, but I also don’t think it’s very good. I would, in fact, call it “bad” outright but for the saving grace of Aya Cash’s dynamic performance as Fanny Addie. And given the film’s premise, having a strong lead performance does indeed go a long way. The film is the directorial debut of Josh Ruben, a sketch comedian of College Humor and Dropout fame. Besides his directing and writing duties, Ruben is the film’s other co-star, and he is considerably worse than Cash. (In fact, I will say he is “bad” outright for most of the film.)
By the way, what is it with sketch comedians making horror films? Is it simply because Jordan Peele made a quarter billion with Get Out that the likes of Ruben and Zach Cregger (of Barbarian) are getting greenlit? Or does the well-documented neurosis required to be a professional comedian (see: Funny People) incline them toward demented material?
In Scare Me, Fred (Ruben) is an aspiring novelist who rents a house to hunker down and draft his opus, a werewolf novel that he hasn’t even outlined. He bumps into Fanny (Cash) who is coincidentally doing the same thing one house over, except Fanny has already released a well-regarded horror bestseller entitled Venus. (At one point, a character unironically calls it “the best horror novel of all time” and claims the New York Times made the same proclamation.)
The power goes out one night, and Fanny shows up at Fred’s front door. Two horror writers with nothing better to do? Might as well swap spooky stories! And so the rest of the movie is Fred and Fanny taking turns telling stories to each other. In another film, this would be a mere framing story, and each narrated “story” would in fact cut to an actual horror short. But in Scare Me, we witness the characters narrate the story, with some radio play sound effects and spooky lighting thrown in for dramatic effect.
The result is boring. None of the stories narrated are any good. Ruben apparently couldn’t decide between making them funny or scary in tone, and the halfway point between those is deeply unsatisfying. Fanny is supposedly an acclaimed storyteller, one of her generation’s great authors, but if it shows up on the page, it doesn’t show up in her improvised ghost stories, which are 1990’s cable TV anthology fodder. Meanwhile, Fred’s are just woefully unfunny and rote; and even if they were meant to be sorta-bad on purpose, it’s not fun to sit through.
Scare Me is what I call a “lunch napkin” movie where the film never really developed beyond that first flash of an idea: it’s an idea you jot down on a napkin and no deeper than that. There is no insight into storytelling as a human necessity or the crafting engaging narratives. (The most we get is Fanny encouraging Fred to improve his dumb werewolf idea by saying — and this is the exact quote — “add more details.”) There are a few whiffs the story swapping operating as a strange seduction game between the pair, but it fizzles before it goes anywhere. And the film sets up that the pair are essentially living the exact scenario of a horror story they’d write about — power out, rain falling, house making creepy noises, figures appearing, etc. — but it’s mostly throwaway texture rather than actual mood setting.
What keeps it strung together by the thinnest and flimsiest of fibers is, again, Cash’s comic performance. Cash was terrific in the under-appreciated You’re the Worst, a TV show that flips rom-com tropes upside down, but this is the best I’ve seen her talents used in a movie. She is funny and hot and sympathetic; her face and physical acting are great, her silly voices are excellent, and her snarky line delivery is aces. I’m not sure why she doesn’t have a career halfway between Rachel Sennott and Zoey Deutsch — she should be in everything. Maybe it’s because she’s in that awkward early-40s age for actresses where they’re too old to play pretty young things but too young to face midlife crises. Toss her some MILFy roles, Hollywood. (And, to be fair, she’s worked steadily on TV shows, which is probably the real reason her Letterboxd page is lean.)
Meanwhile, Ruben lacks the charisma to keep up with Cash and pull off the two-hander. A better version of this film and performance would make Fred aggressively neurotic and flawed, or perhaps take the sympathetic route and make him a deluded sweetheart. He’s neither of these and so an unpleasant pest on screen. He also has remarkably little chemistry with Cash, and since I’m already being ungenerous towards Ruben, I’ll just blame him for that rather than Cash.
Perhaps most annoyingly of all, Scare Me gradually builds up a “theme” (he says in scare quotes with disdain). You see, Fred is resentful that a woman is more successful than him, and mad that she still corrects him when he makes misogynist remarks despite her good fortune. Men sure do be presumptuous pigs, don’t they? The movie’s climax half-heartedly pivots to real horror and psychological terror as if the previous 75 minutes weren’t just a bunch of wacky riffs. It’s painful — not because there’s anything wrong with the message (indeed, horror is still too often a sausage fest) but because it’s so awkwardly shoehorned in and poorly executed. (I feel bad being this mean to an indie, but Ruben’s made a career as a director and has had plenty of nice reviews written about his films.)
When it’s firing its comic cylinders, having fun with voices and stage lighting and all that, Scare Me is decently charming. Ruben is a seasoned comedian, right? But Scare Me constantly made me wish the film was operating more in a conversational comedy mode: just a bantery, single location rom-com rather than a pseudo-horror anthology gimmick, since the “horror” sucks. Shudder would not have distributed this hypothetical version of Scare Me, so maybe nobody would have ever seen it, but I contend that it would have been more watchable, damn it. I know I’m partially projecting my biases when I say that, though; I’m one of those rare champions of the mumblecore movement.
Alas. The Scare Me we have is a bummer more often than it’s the horror-comedy lark it acts like it is, let alone the incisive satire and piece of metafiction Ruben probably envisioned it to be.
Is It Good?
Not Good (2/8)
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One reply on “Scare Me (2020)”
I suppose the problem with being somewhere between Ms. Rachel Sennott and Ms. Zoey Deutsch is that you have to compete with not one, but two up-and-coming leading ladies or risk working mostly as the Diet Coke to their Real Thing.
Also, this film absolutely needed a bit more of that “Well a volcano happened, so Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron are stuck indoors making ghost stories to keep themselves amused” energy – which is to say the cast of characters needed some REAL weirdness and faintly Apocalyptic overtones to really set the mood.
God help me, this might have worked beautifully as a ‘Lockdown movie’ (Which would certainly excuse a budget too low to conjure up some real Horror Movie stuff).