Tuesday, October 31, 2023

October Horror Challenge 2023 #100: "To Become One (2002)"

I've wanted to see this movie since before it came out. The director did a feature in Fangoria (a horror movie magazine) about guerrilla filmmaking on a shoestring budget with little to no money, and he used his film "To Become One" as an example. He said it was made for like, two thousand dollars, and everyone who saw it couldn'tbelieve it cost less than two million. His story made me want to go out and make a horror movie like whoa (I've had an idea for a horror movie for years, and I always wondered what it would be like to make a horror movie. The director of this movie, Neil Johnson, made it sound, not easy exactly, but doable, and that was a big inspiration for me. I still haven't made my movie, but filmmakers like him, who are willing to share their secrets, are a big help to indie filmmakers who dream of following in their footsteps. Plus the movie just sounded cool. It was a slasher, abd everyone knows how much I love slashers, and the still shots from the movie had creative kills that i really wanted to see. Unfortunately, this movie is notoriously hard to track down. I ended up borrowing the movie from my friend Maddie, who was kind enough to lend me the movie so I could watch it this Halloween and finally see what all the fuss is about. Here we go!

The plot of this movie sounds pretty simple. A year after her mother's death, a young woman and her friends become the victims of a maniacal killer who wears a gas mask. They get slashed in some pretty gnarly ways, and the trailer for the movie is mostly shots of the cast getting offed in increasingly gruesome ways. My kinda trailer! I wish i could link the trailer for you here, but if you go to Youtube and search for "to become one" you can probably watch it. I'll warn you, you might become obsessed like I did with seeing this movie, but then I like low budget slashers. Anyway, the young woman in this movie is forced to face some harsh truths about herself and her life and her family. I hate it when that happens. My family is certainly not perfect, but compared to the family in this movie I think they seem pretty normal, so kudos to this movie for portraying an even more screwed up family than any I've ever seen.

I won spoil this movie for you, like someone did for me. Someone on a message board once said "oh, that's the movie about the girl who..." and then they just dropped a plot twist that you're not supposed to find out until at least halfway through the movie. When I finally got to see the movie myself, i saw how the twist fit in with the rest of the movie, and i also discovered that the twist comes halfway through the movie and not at the end. I like how the movie basically spits on religious fanatics for an hour and a half. I love me a good movie that mocks religious nuts. I do have some complaints about this movie, though. None of the characters are very likeable, so there's really no one to root for. I suppose I wanted the main character to survive, but that's only because I hated the religious fanatic doctor so much that anybody would be better than him. The scenes with the patients in the hospital writhing and screaming with religious fervor are genuinely chilling, but that's mainly because I spent a lot of time in creepy pentecostal churches when I was younger. I still remember those days well and this movie rings truer because of that.For such a short movie, it shouldn't have seemed as long as it did. It's only an hour and thirty minutes, but it seemed much longer to me. Im still glad I finally got to see it, though.

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