Dread (film)
Encyclopedia
Dread is a 2009 horror film
directed by Anthony DiBlasi and starring Jackson Rathbone
, Shaun Evans
and Hanne Steen, based on the short story of the same name by Clive Barker
. The story was originally published in 1984 in volume two of Barker's Books of Blood
short story collections.
Quaid saw his parents murdered by an axe murderer as a child. This is his greatest fear and he wants to learn what makes others afraid and what it takes for them to overcome their fear. It is never revealed whether this is the character's forename or surname.
Stephen lost his brother as a teen, his brother was driving drunk and he wonders if he had driven if his brother would still be dead.
Cheryl, who is editing the project and who Stephen is in love with, was molested by her father as a girl, he worked at a meat packing plant and he smelled of meat while molesting her so to this day she can't stand the smell of meat and refuses to eat it. Quaid kidnaps her and locks her in a room with a huge piece of beef. After about a week, she finally eats the entire piece of rotten beef.
Quaid has a nightmare that involves his parents being murdered while he, as a child, is sitting on the floor on their pile of blood. Later Quaid buys the same model car that Stephen's brother died in off of Craigslist. He wants Stephen to drive it. Stephen does.
Joshua is a student who gets interviewed by Quaid where he reveals that his fear is becoming deaf again for he lost his hearing for a while after a childhood accident. The following night, Joshua shows up at Quaid's house because Quaid told him he had more questions for him. Quaid knocks him out, chains him to a radiator, fires a gun next to his ears, shattering his eardrums and leaving him deaf again. Quaid then drops Joshua off in an alley and goes home again.
Abby, a girl involved with the project, has a dark birth mark covering half of her face and also her body, which she doesn't want anyone to see and is terrified of being teased or shunned because of her birthmark. Quaid has video footage of her stripping naked before sex and he sets it up so every TV on campus is showing her naked, and covered in birth marks, he holds up signs in the video which read, "This is your reality", and, "You will never be normal". Humiliated she goes home, fills a bathtub with bleach and starts scrubbing off her skin with a Brillo pad. Stephen shows up at her dorm as she stumbled down the hall naked and bleeding. He gets her to the hospital and goes after Quaid, grabbing the fire axe off the wall to take with him. While he is leaving the hospital, Joshua, who is now clearly deaf follows after him, remembering that Stephen was with Quaid during his interview and assumes they are working together.
When Stephen shows up and confronts Quaid, Quaid knocks him out, when he awakens he is tied to a chair and Quaid is showing him video footage of him torturing Cheryl. Stephen demands to know where Cheryl is but Quaid claims that he let her go after she ate the meat. Stephen however, thinks that he is lying. Quaid hears a noise downstairs, and goes to check it out. Meanwhile, Stephen manages to break free. After cutting his bonds, Stephen runs into Joshua who stabs him with the axe that Stephen had brought to use on Quaid. Quaid, who had been hiding as this happened, appears and shoots Joshua in the back of the head killing him. Quaid stands over Stephen's body watching him bleed out from the axe wound. Once Stephen is dead, he drags the body downstairs where he unlocks a door in the basement. Cheryl is inside and he throws Stephens body in with her, along with a switchblade and says, "Let's see how hungry you have to be to get through that". He then slams the door shut and leaves her crying with Stephen's dead body.
The movie is noticeably different from Barker's original story. The setting is transposed from 1980s England to 2009 USA. Technology such as file storage, video streaming, image editing and mobile phones are shown to be contemporary to 2009. The original backstory of Stephen's deafness is transferred to Joshua. Stephen is given a different backstory and fear, that of dying in a car crash like his older brother. The reason for Cheryl's aversion to meat is developed from an ethical opposition to a backstory of childhood abuse. As with Joshua, the character of Abby did not feature at all in the short story. The ending of the story, which originally featured Quaid's comeuppance, is altered to reveal Quaid overcoming his own dread and keeping Cheryl prisoner after Stephen and Joshua die.
, where it picked up a distributor in After Dark Films
. It was announced that Dread would be included in the films in the fourth Horrorfest film festival in 2010. The film was released on 29 January 2010 in US Cinemas.
, and websites that focus on the horror genre such as Fear.net and DreadCentral.
GoreZone Magazine gave the movie 5 stars and did a five page article on the movie in issue 54. The Movie Spot gave the film a 4 out of 5 saying "It takes what people fear and dread and perverts it." However, Top 10 Films, which gave the film 2 stars out of 5, said that although director DiBlasi "knows how to draw a reaction out of his audience" his "style could have done with a little more substance."
Horror film
Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...
directed by Anthony DiBlasi and starring Jackson Rathbone
Jackson Rathbone
Monroe Jackson Rathbone, V , better known as Jackson Rathbone, is an American actor and musician. He is perhaps best known for his role as Jasper Hale in The Twilight Saga and for playing Sokka in The Last Airbender....
, Shaun Evans
Shaun Evans
Shaun Evans is an English actor.Evans completed a course with the National Youth Theatre before relocating to London at the age of eighteen to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His first major role was that of gay French teacher John Paul Keating in the Channel 4 comedy-drama...
and Hanne Steen, based on the short story of the same name by Clive Barker
Clive Barker
Clive Barker is an English author, film director and visual artist best known for his work in both fantasy and horror fiction. Barker came to prominence in the mid-1980s with a series of short stories which established him as a leading young horror writer...
. The story was originally published in 1984 in volume two of Barker's Books of Blood
Books of Blood
Books of Blood are a series of horror fiction collections written by the British author Clive Barker.There are six books in total, each simply subtitled Volume 1 through to Volume 6, and were subsequently re-published in two omnibus editions containing three volumes each. Each volume contains four...
short story collections.
Plot
"At a small unnamed English college, Quaid and his friend Stephen (a film student), do a Fear Study as a school project, recording people talking about their greatest fears and worst times in their lives. Quaid however is quite insane and wants to take the fear to "the next level".Quaid saw his parents murdered by an axe murderer as a child. This is his greatest fear and he wants to learn what makes others afraid and what it takes for them to overcome their fear. It is never revealed whether this is the character's forename or surname.
Stephen lost his brother as a teen, his brother was driving drunk and he wonders if he had driven if his brother would still be dead.
Cheryl, who is editing the project and who Stephen is in love with, was molested by her father as a girl, he worked at a meat packing plant and he smelled of meat while molesting her so to this day she can't stand the smell of meat and refuses to eat it. Quaid kidnaps her and locks her in a room with a huge piece of beef. After about a week, she finally eats the entire piece of rotten beef.
Quaid has a nightmare that involves his parents being murdered while he, as a child, is sitting on the floor on their pile of blood. Later Quaid buys the same model car that Stephen's brother died in off of Craigslist. He wants Stephen to drive it. Stephen does.
Joshua is a student who gets interviewed by Quaid where he reveals that his fear is becoming deaf again for he lost his hearing for a while after a childhood accident. The following night, Joshua shows up at Quaid's house because Quaid told him he had more questions for him. Quaid knocks him out, chains him to a radiator, fires a gun next to his ears, shattering his eardrums and leaving him deaf again. Quaid then drops Joshua off in an alley and goes home again.
Abby, a girl involved with the project, has a dark birth mark covering half of her face and also her body, which she doesn't want anyone to see and is terrified of being teased or shunned because of her birthmark. Quaid has video footage of her stripping naked before sex and he sets it up so every TV on campus is showing her naked, and covered in birth marks, he holds up signs in the video which read, "This is your reality", and, "You will never be normal". Humiliated she goes home, fills a bathtub with bleach and starts scrubbing off her skin with a Brillo pad. Stephen shows up at her dorm as she stumbled down the hall naked and bleeding. He gets her to the hospital and goes after Quaid, grabbing the fire axe off the wall to take with him. While he is leaving the hospital, Joshua, who is now clearly deaf follows after him, remembering that Stephen was with Quaid during his interview and assumes they are working together.
When Stephen shows up and confronts Quaid, Quaid knocks him out, when he awakens he is tied to a chair and Quaid is showing him video footage of him torturing Cheryl. Stephen demands to know where Cheryl is but Quaid claims that he let her go after she ate the meat. Stephen however, thinks that he is lying. Quaid hears a noise downstairs, and goes to check it out. Meanwhile, Stephen manages to break free. After cutting his bonds, Stephen runs into Joshua who stabs him with the axe that Stephen had brought to use on Quaid. Quaid, who had been hiding as this happened, appears and shoots Joshua in the back of the head killing him. Quaid stands over Stephen's body watching him bleed out from the axe wound. Once Stephen is dead, he drags the body downstairs where he unlocks a door in the basement. Cheryl is inside and he throws Stephens body in with her, along with a switchblade and says, "Let's see how hungry you have to be to get through that". He then slams the door shut and leaves her crying with Stephen's dead body.
The movie is noticeably different from Barker's original story. The setting is transposed from 1980s England to 2009 USA. Technology such as file storage, video streaming, image editing and mobile phones are shown to be contemporary to 2009. The original backstory of Stephen's deafness is transferred to Joshua. Stephen is given a different backstory and fear, that of dying in a car crash like his older brother. The reason for Cheryl's aversion to meat is developed from an ethical opposition to a backstory of childhood abuse. As with Joshua, the character of Abby did not feature at all in the short story. The ending of the story, which originally featured Quaid's comeuppance, is altered to reveal Quaid overcoming his own dread and keeping Cheryl prisoner after Stephen and Joshua die.
Cast
- Jackson RathboneJackson RathboneMonroe Jackson Rathbone, V , better known as Jackson Rathbone, is an American actor and musician. He is perhaps best known for his role as Jasper Hale in The Twilight Saga and for playing Sokka in The Last Airbender....
as Stephen Grace - Shaun EvansShaun EvansShaun Evans is an English actor.Evans completed a course with the National Youth Theatre before relocating to London at the age of eighteen to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His first major role was that of gay French teacher John Paul Keating in the Channel 4 comedy-drama...
as Quaid - Hanne Steen as Cheryl Fromm
- Laura DonnellyLaura Donnelly (actress)Laura Donnelly is an actress from Northern Ireland. She made her on-screen debut in 2005 in the Channel 4 drama Sugar Rush, where she featured as a love interest of the female protagonist in two episodes. She is also known for appearing in Casualty, Hex, and as a main character in the Irish film...
as Abby - Jonathan Readwin as Joshua Shaw
Production
The 104 page script was shot in just 28 days. The paintings in the film were created by Nicole Balzarini.Release
The film had its world premiere at the 2009 Montreal Fantasia FestivalFantasia Festival
Fantasia International Film Festival is a genre film festival that has been based mainly in Montreal since its founding in 1996...
, where it picked up a distributor in After Dark Films
After Dark Films
After Dark Films is a horror film production company and distributor founded by Courtney Solomon.-History:The company is the organizer for the annual independent horror film festival After Dark Horrorfest, also known as 8 Films to Die For, which is currently in its fourth year...
. It was announced that Dread would be included in the films in the fourth Horrorfest film festival in 2010. The film was released on 29 January 2010 in US Cinemas.
Reception
The film received positive reviews by FangoriaFangoria
Fangoria is an American magazine devoted to horror and exploitation films, which has a number of associated brands:* Fangoria Comics* Fangoria Films* Fangoria RadioFangoria may also refer to:* Fangoria , a Spanish electro pop band...
, and websites that focus on the horror genre such as Fear.net and DreadCentral.
GoreZone Magazine gave the movie 5 stars and did a five page article on the movie in issue 54. The Movie Spot gave the film a 4 out of 5 saying "It takes what people fear and dread and perverts it." However, Top 10 Films, which gave the film 2 stars out of 5, said that although director DiBlasi "knows how to draw a reaction out of his audience" his "style could have done with a little more substance."
External links
- Dread at the official Horrorfest website.