IMPOSSIBLE HORROR (2017)
This was a super low budget movie, a “micro” budget as some might say. Some productions in this situation lean into the budget, offering a winking meta commentary on the limited funds. This movie, “Impossible Horror,” doesn’t do that. It simply does what it can with what little it has.Â
We start with Lily, a young woman with insomnia. Her apartment is haunted. She aspires to live a creative life. She goes for a walk one night and hears a mysterious scream! She begins to go for night walks and encounters another young woman, Hannah. There are also strange hoodie people. Each night, after the scream, they find a random object where the scream originated. One night there is a typewriter, but the hoodie people take it first. Hannah fights them in a rather neat, low budget, fight.
Lily decides to make a movie of their adventures. She films them with her smart phone. One night the scream leads them to a buried journal, which she hides from Hannah. Lily reads the journal, which is by Amber, Hannah’s former girlfriend, who killed herself and now haunts Lily’s apartment! Turns out, Amber and other people were also hunting the scream, all for their own purposes, but each of the people ended up killing themselves.
They visit one dude who did not succeed in killing himself. Lily goes to talk to him, and he tries to munch of her feet. She grapples with a sheet before Hannah pulls her free. Lily then cuts herself and enters a crazed state. The scream leads them to a buried notebook, inside of which are Polaroid-style photographs of people who were hunting the scream, including Lily! There is an extended fight scene between Hannah and the hoodie people over the notebook, but she and Lily escape with it.Â
Hannah wants to destroy the notebook. Lily needs it for her movie, and she and Hannah have an extended struggle over the books. It’s nothing like the fight from “John Carpenter’s They Live” (1988), but it’s actually not bad. Lily ends up stabbing Hannah and then chases her into an underground garage. Lily stalks after her with a little metallic shove. She finally sees Hannah, but a security guard interrupts her. Lily approaches him and stabs him in the stomach with the shovel. Hannah runs to Lily’s room and hides in the bathroom. The ghost tries to help Hannah, but Lily finally stands outside the bathroom tell and tells Hannah that she should kill herself: “Aren’t you tired of failing? There’s nothing wrong with giving up.”
Hannah removes her own picture from the notebook, and there is a razor. She is about to slit her own wrist, but she hears Lily watching their filmed adventures. Hannah leaves the bathroom and joins her. “This is pretty cool,” Hannah says. “Yeah,” Lily says, “It’s not terrible.” Hannah says that Lily should keep working on the film. Lily says that she needs an ending. “What did you have in mind?” Hannah asks. Lily smiles at Hannah, and then the hoodie people attack! They overwhelm Hannah and knock the notebook out of her hand. They are about to stab Hannah, but Lily picks up the notebook and starts to tear out a page! She kicks her laptop to Hannah and tells her, “Film it. Please.”
The hoodie people attack Lily and disembowel her! She still manages to destroy the notebook, and the hoodie people disintegrate. Before Lily dies she has a vision of Hannah and herself going to a movie theater and watching her movie, “Impossible Horror.” Hannah gets up and stumbles to the porch, where she hears people screaming everywhere.
This was surprisingly…good. It’s a weird Lovecraftian horror movie about an unexplainable eldritch threat that drives people insane, but the filmmakers limited the scope to just two young people, so the plot didn’t overwhelm the skills or budget of the production. The filmmaking techniques drew from many inspirations, from found footage to your run-of-the-mill teenager terror flicks to kung-fu action movies. Most scenes were successful. The fighting scenes looked like a lot of fun to film, but I felt that they detracted from the overall creepiness of the movie. The acting was…competent. Lily and Hanna’s banter was reminiscent of a mumblecore movie from the early 2000’s. Hannah was flat and emotionless, but she was meant to be that way. Lily showed a bit more range, but even then her reactions were constrained by the typical young-person-only-speaks-ironically trope. Her physical acting was excellent. Early on, she walks outside with a baseball bat, but before she leaves the building she performs an awkward practice swing. Later on, as she’s chasing Hannah, she embodies menace and terror. She extends the blade of her metal shovel with a practiced flick of her wrist. She was creepy and deranged.
