Perspectives on Horror - Frailty and Red Riding Hood

 I strongly suspect that this is not going to be anyone's idea of an obvious movie double bill, but bear with me.

Frailty is actor Bill Paxton's directorial debut, a Texas-set paranormal thriller in which a young man (then mega-heartthrob Matthew McConaughey, looking disheveled and ragged) attempts to convince an FBI agent that his brother was a serial killer through a tale of their father's religious visions, while Red Riding Hood is a Twiclone based on the titular fairy tale, complete with a forced love-triangle and a heroine with largely self-inflicted problems.

Not, I confess, a logical pairing.

But...

Here's the thing. Neither film is exactly a horror film, but both draw a vein of horror from the manipulation of perception.

First up, spoiler-free reviews:

Frailty is a compelling drama, well-acted and directed, and by turns chilling and thought provoking. It is well-worth seeing.

Red Riding Hood wants to be Twilight, without being Twilight, and has far less to say than it thinks it does. It is still worth seeing, because it's fun, and being from the director of Twilight it is very, very pretty to look at.

If you absolutely had to choose, I would suggest choosing Frailty.

Beyond this point, I need to discuss particular plot points, so there will be spoilers.

Frailty opens with Fenton Mieks approaching the FBI Agent in charge of investigating the 'God's Hand' killer to announce that the killer is his brother Adam. He proceeds to tell a story of the two brothers and their father, a good man who one night announces that God has sent an angel to tell him that the end times have come and that he and his sons must hunt down and destroy demons in human form. Only they can see the demons and their sins, he explains, and Adam accepts this, even as Fenton sees his father's descent into madness and relentless pursuit of a random list of names.

And then the film turns everything on its head simply by shifting its perspective, with a twist that does the two things that a twist ought to do: It takes you by surprise, and then immediately convinces you that it shouldn't have done.

Red Riding Hood is told almost exclusively from the perspective of Valerie, soon to be given the eponymous cloak, a good girl in a village beset by a werewolf. After the wolf kills her sister, a professional hunter is summoned and the long 'truce' with the beast breaks down, with Valerie caught in the middle of it all.

Except... if viewed from anyone else's perspective, the story is somewhat different. Valerie isn't the innocent people think, or that even she views herself as. She is actually resented by her friends, bears some indirect guilt for her sister's death, and when pressed proves to be selfish, vicious and somewhat amoral. She scorns the village catch, Henry (rich, handsome, honest, sharply intelligent and devoted) for her long-time inappropriate squeeze, Peter (moody, surly, emo hair, although he is at least also loyal to a fault), but won't do so openly and is then willing to stab Peter on a hunch that he might be the wolf, but when he is infected, decides that he's so dreamy he gets a pass. At the end of the film, she is also immensely dismissive of people who, despite their own fears, envies and frailties, when push came to shove were willing to stand up for her against a monster, be that the wolf or the hunter.

It also has a twist, which again I didn't see coming, but I'm not sure that I should have done, which makes it a little less sound.

And there's a rave scene in the middle which is as jarring as the one in the first non-existent Matrix sequel, and even more anachronistic.