Fede Álvarez
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Wait Until Dark (1967)
Directed by Terence Young
influenced Don't Breathe (2016)
Themes Plot Characters
Horror films have historically used disability as an easy source of tension by way of dramatic irony (see: everything from Wait Until Dark to this year’s Hush), but Don’t Breathe reverses that paradigm.
Scripted by Rodo Sayagues and Uruguay-born director Fede Alvarez (2013 “Evil Dead” remake), its cleverly crafted misdirection and night-vision shocks are reminiscent of “Wait Until Dark” (1967) in which a blind woman (Audrey Hepburn) was threatened in her small apartment.
Things go awry (as they generally do) when the blind combat veteran proves to be a more formidable opponent than our intruders anticipated, resulting in a chilling "Wait Until Dark" scenario of tiptoeing around and trying to remain silent.
It turns out a brutal, Blumhouse-produced tweak of 1967’s “Wait Until Dark” lies in store, replacing Audrey Hepburn with a blind Gulf War vet (Stephen Lang) armed with sadistic methods, who faces off against a trio of amateur criminals out to loot his home.
(Picture “Wait Until Dark” if Alan Arkin’s ruthless Harry Roat were the blind character.
The Exorcist (1973)
Directed by William Friedkin
influenced Evil Dead (2013), Don't Breathe (2016)
Plot Characters Visuals
Among its other cringe-inducing but impressive feats, “Don’t Breathe” contains one of the 10 most disgusting scenes I’ve ever seen in a horror film, and I’m going all the way back to Linda Blair’s antics in “The Exorcist” as a reference point.
The problem is that so much is lifted from other films (not just the original Evil Dead, but also most obviously Evil Dead II and The Raid , while The Exorcist is clearly an influence) that nothing feels very fresh or surprising.
We gather that David is afraid in the same way The Exorcist's Father Karras is afraid: afraid that he's been a bad son to a mother who died asking for him in a mental hospital; afraid that he's been a terrible brother to little sister Mia (Jane Levy), whom he abandoned when things started getting rough at home.
Alvarez evokes not only The Evil Dead, but the freaky-deakiness of The Exorcist and the outré "buckets of blood" stylization of pictures like Suspriria and Carrie.
But he has a clear zeal for bloody mayhem, and the chops to make a hodgepodge of borrowed gestures from The Exorcist and Raimi movies seem bracing again.
Soon, though, Mia is looking like Linda Blair in The Exorcist and telling her pals they’re all going to die there.
“Don’t Breathe” is an original story – never mind that it borrows liberally from David Fincher’s “Panic Room” and Adam Wingard’s “ You’re Next ” – that pits three thieves against a blind man who turns out to be a ruthless killer.
When David Fincher made the confined-space “Panic Room” in 2002, he first incorporated “pre-viz” into his increasingly digital work, pre-visualizing each and every camera move before building even an inch of the set representing a 94th Street Manhattan brownstone .
Imagine if the thugs from Panic Room (2002) broke into Jodie Foster’s house and found her whacked-out uncle waiting for them in his underwear.
A bit like The People Under the Stairs meets Panic Room, the latest collaboration from Alvarez and Ghost House pummels its viewers (in a good way, of course) as much as it punishes its characters, and just when you think that things can’t possibly get any crazier, Don’t Breathe kicks things up a notch, creating a blisteringly fun thrill ride that’s a perfect showcase for Alvarez’s macabre cinematic sensibilities.
Alvarez masterfully sustains tension in thriller mode, partly by shooting slick Steadicam moves and showing restraint in cutting (Alvarez seems to have taken a lesson or two from David Fincher’s similarly themed Panic Room).
Panic Room meets Wait Until Dark in this pitiless, uncommonly serviceable horror thriller.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Directed by Marcus Nispel
influenced Evil Dead (2013)
Visuals Themes
Sam Raimi, the Detroit-born director of no-budget 1981 classic “The Evil Dead,” understood that, effectively blending camp comedy and scares like no filmmaker since Tobe Hooper redefined the concept of familial bonding with “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Whereas Raimi's initial Evil Dead gave off a sense of its filmmaker's irrepressible fun in making it, Alvarez's version gives off a vibe of ruthless efficiency, earnestly establishing its cred with the brand of grimy grottiness modern viewers expect from remade '70s and '80s horror films (the redos of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and much of Wes Craven's resume) before moving on to gonzo horror with astonishingly disgusting imagery.
While some are pretty cool, like Alexandre Aja’s “The Hills Have Eyes,” others (like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and Rob Zombie’s atrocious “Halloween”) have been really awful.
But writer/director Fede Alvarez (2013's "Evil Dead") has more horror references stashed away in his locked house horror, his premise not too far afield from this year's earlier "Green Room."
As the thieves scramble around like frightened mice, there’s little logic to their escape plans, and the geography is too hazily mapped out for Alvarez to build sustained tension through proximity (as Jeremy Saulnier managed beautifully with “Green Room” and Dan Trachtenberg did with aplomb in “10 Cloverfield Lane”).
Add Fede Alvarez’s “Don’t Breathe” to the canon of instant-classic horror movies of 2016, joining “Green Room,” “Lights Out” and “The Conjuring 2.” Like “Lights Out,” “Don’t Breathe” revolves around an ingenious concept – a team of Detroit teen burglars rob the house of a blind man who isn’t so helpless – and like “Green Room,” it taps into devastatingly contemporary cultural undercurrents.
The Uruguan-born filmmaker shows no signs of changing his ways with his followup feature, Don’t Breathe, which is destined to battle it out with the likes of Green Room and 10 Cloverfield Lane for the title of Top Hollywood Fright Flick of 2016.
But the film has just as much in common with Jeremy Saulnier's recent room-escape movie Green Room and Dan Trachtenberg's similarly claustrophobic 10 Cloverfield Lane , and it joins them as one of 2016's tensest horror films.
Even the horror hardcore may discover that Don't Breathe pushes their buttons in ways they didn't expect - only Green Room has served up the same kind of claustrophobia and chills this year.
Whenever The Wretched ventures into the woods, an Evil Dead -ish layer is added.
The choice to utilise practical effects was in part inspired by The Pierce Brothers’ father, Bart Pierce, who was the visual effects artist on Evil Dead.
For a horror-movie aficionado, The Wretched is a swirling bloody cocktail of nods to some of the genre’s most beloved titles, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Rear Window and The Evil Dead .
The writer-directors are the sons of Bart Pierce, a veteran special-effects artist, and claim to have basically grown up on the set of Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead .
It’s similar in nature to Fede Alverez’s Don’t Breathe from 2016, another late-summer programmer that was also produced by Sam Raimi which found an audience through a solid understanding of horror fundamentals and a novel concept (if, ultimately, it came to a pitiful conclusion).
In that respect, Crawl reminded me of 2016’s Don’t Breathe , also produced by Raimi, in that it works despite mostly taking place in a single location with just two actors.
In the lackluster summer of 2016, The Shallows (in which a stranded Blake Lively matches wits with a shark) and Don’t Breathe (in which trapped young people match wits with a wily, murderous blind man) provided more efficient and consistent thrills than a lot of their super-sized, mega-budgeted counterparts.
From the Evil Dead franchise to Darkman to even his three Spider-Man films, Raimi’s talent is using a combination of workman-like craftsmanship and winking self-awareness to make movies that are technically proficient while never losing their sense of fun.
Crawl isn’t as well-crafted as either The Shallows or Don’t Breathe, though it shares a producer with the latter: Sam Raimi, whose first two Evil Dead movies are gonzo versions of the limited-location thriller.
But when you realize the film’s producer was the guy behind the “Evil Dead” movies, it’s tempting to wonder if with a little more craziness, “Crawl” could have been even better.
There are also several nods to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho within the shot selection, with Bernard Herrmann's celebrated score also being evoked on occasion.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
influenced Don't Breathe (2016)
Visuals Themes
Alvarez’s directorial sensibility is on much greater display here than it was in “Evil Dead,” executing a series of impressive shots starting with a Fincher-esque bit that goes places a cameraman cannot normally go (think “Panic Room”) and building up to a breathless sequence shot in near-total darkness that will recall a certain scene from “The Silence of the Lambs.”
You get the inevitable lights-out scene with the robbers trying to evade The Blind Man and Alvarez switching to night vision, just as Jonathan Demme did in The Silence of the Lambs with much more success.
In one especially effective, odds-evening sequence (after The Silence of the Lambs), Alvarez devises his own style of night vision (which turns the wide-eyed ingénues’ pupils and irises unnervingly big and black).
Though blindness has been an effective component of horror films past, it’s usually a tool to heighten vulnerability, like Audrey Hepburn fending off intruders in Wait Until Dark or Jodie Foster being stalked by a serial killer with night vision glasses in The Silence of the Lambs.
El artilugio de Demme en The Silence of the Lambs se reinterpreta así de manera magistral, en grises y negros, sin la necesidad de una justificación de punto de vista: aquí, el perseguidor es ciego.
Director Edgar Wright both pays homage and pokes fun at the walking dead films that inspired "Shaun," specifically George Romero's cult classic "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) and Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" trilogy.
There isn't nearly as much gore as in Jackson's Braindead or Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films, but there is one gut-cruncher moment that goes seamlessly from shock to hilarity as the victim is torn apart and the survivors, without missing a beat, use his disembodied legs to beat back the zombies.
A terrible boyfriend, Shaun (Simon Pegg) works at a small appliance store where, Evil Dead fans take note, someone named "Ash" calls in sick a lot.
"Shaun of the Dead" takes a zany, horror-as-comedy route similar to Peter Jackson's early bloody work and Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" trilogy.
Though the filmmakers are capable of staging home invasion sequences, they lack the visual wit of Jackson’s Dead/Alive or Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy.
The People Under the Stairs (1991)
Directed by Wes Craven
influenced Don't Breathe (2016)
Plot Themes
The premise is incredibly similar to Wes Craven’s underrated thriller The People Under The Stairs, which turns 25 this year, and which used the same basic plot to make harsh accusations about class warfare and social hypocrisy.
Wes Craven’s The People Under The Stairs and the French Livide have played this reverse-the-threat game – though another contemporary run of movies have regular criminals clashing with outright maniacs (No One Lives, The Neighbour, The Collector).
A bit like The People Under the Stairs meets Panic Room, the latest collaboration from Alvarez and Ghost House pummels its viewers (in a good way, of course) as much as it punishes its characters, and just when you think that things can’t possibly get any crazier, Don’t Breathe kicks things up a notch, creating a blisteringly fun thrill ride that’s a perfect showcase for Alvarez’s macabre cinematic sensibilities.
Fans of horror flicks like Livid, The Collector, and the off-kilter cult classic The People Under the Stairs know what I mean.
What he achieves is significant: A home invasion story that is as artfully terrifying as Home Alone was entertainingly hilarious.
In that sense, it's kind of like a twisted "Home Alone" for millennials.
It is a home-invasion thriller and, if we’re allowing those in, then surely Home Alone registers as horror.
Furthermore, The Blind Man is a sight-impared-war-veteran version of Home Alone ’s Kevin McCallister, Audrey Hepburn was a more reasonable blind person in Wait Until Dark, and Marshall Mather’s mom in 8 Mile and Rocky’s mom are the same person (which I can only deduce to mean that Rocky is Eminem’s sister).
With its “Home Alone”-style house of horrors, “Don’t Breathe” almost never goes where you’d expect.
Y es que, en su tramo final, No respires se transforma en un gozoso slasher cargado de sorpresas, ingeniosísimos giros de guion y algún detalle poético muy de agradecer –esa simbólica mariquita–, pero sin renunciar a guiñar el ojo a cintas de los 80 como Cujo (Lewis Teague, 1983) –es notorio el protagonismo del feroz perro que custodia la seguridad del invidente– o Noche de miedo (Tom Holland, 1985) –esa identidad oculta bajo la apariencia de vecino normal y un inmueble que alberga terribles secretos, aunque estos sean más terrenales que fantásticos en este caso–.
Even Stephen King’s Cujo is brought to mind more than once.
The cast also features the craziest dog in film since 1983’s Cujo!
There's an analogue in tales of Amazons cutting off their breast to better facilitate the drawing of a bow--your reminder that this is the original ending to the book that would become Jane Campion's brutal/beautiful In the Cut .
After briefly chasing them through the woods with camera moves reminiscent of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, it ends on a rather mean-spirited and more provocative closing note (a tone that rears its ugly head throughout the film) before we cut to the present day.
Let’s look at it as “Flatliners” combined with some gruesome elements in Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead”, albeit rather colder and more distanced.
Counterbalanced against the high-energy stupidity of teen horror, what you get is a movie that aims to scare the fuck out of you with an abyss that feels a little too real and often ventures into Evil Dead levels of violence and shock (i.e.
Yet the callbacks and references start to stack up, to Alien, Cameron’s Aliens, to Scott’s 2012 prequel Prometheus, and even to the 2014 game Alien: Isolation.
While Scott originated the space-thriller saga back in 1979, then returned to it with 2012's Prometheus and 2017's Alien: Covenant, now Evil Dead, Don't Breathe and The Girl in the Spider's Web filmmaker Fede Álvarez is on helming duties — clearly taking his cues from Scott's work, though, right down to specific mirrored shots.
Created, shepherded and (mostly) directed by Ridley Scott, the “Alien” films have lately gotten artful and brooding (2012’s “Prometheus” and 2017’s “Alien: Covenant”), with portentous themes and stone-faced performances.
Gone are any pretences regarding attempts to take the concepts further, or to try to ask deeper questions regarding the meaning of creation and life, as Prometheus and Alien: Covenant did.
The closes this comes to doing anything to build out this universe is to include a solitary plot point that attempts to shore up the position of Prometheus (and by extension Alien: Covenant) in the series' lore. Not even to expand on those movies, just to confirm that despite being divisive, they haven't been written out of continuity. Which makes sense, given that those films' director Ridley Scott is still here as a producer.
Scott himself seemed to abandon the sense of awe and meditations on mortality of Prometheus when he served up more conventional xenomorph action in the subsequent Alien: Covenant, which felt less like an artistic decision and more an obligatory one.
It calls to mind Fede Álvarez’s 2013 Evil Dead, and Jane Levy’s performance in particular, which similarly communicated paranormal psychosis and insanity alongside a much more interior, restrained terror.
Neither does the film’s finale, which is a ripoff of “Skyfall.”
Yet even with these missed opportunities, Alvarez’s version of Salander is far more of a fleshed out character than male action peers like ‘Mission: Impossible‘ hero Ethan Hunt or Bond (with the possible exception of “Skyfall,” a thematically similar movie involving a destructive visit home).
Director Fede Alvarez‘s new take on David Fincher’s previous work, is essentially a worse version of Skyfall .
A su manera, Fede Álvarez, responsable del remake de Posesión infernal, ha hecho con Millenium lo que Skyfall supuso para la saga 007.
“Don’t Breathe” is an original story – never mind that it borrows liberally from David Fincher’s “Panic Room” and Adam Wingard’s “ You’re Next ” – that pits three thieves against a blind man who turns out to be a ruthless killer.
From You’re Next and The Strangers to the recent favorite Hush and the classic Wait Until Dark, the set-up is usually the same: a few unwitting victims are set upon by some wildly unwelcome guests, and the fun is in seeing how the average person responds to an irrationally violent presence.
It’s far more clever than any home invasion flick in recent memory save Adam Wingard’s wry 2013 sendup of the genre, You’re Next.