Director Report Card: Adam Wingard (2007)

Last decade, a trend emerged out of the indie horror world. A group of low-budget filmmakers, heavily influenced by the horror classics of the eighties and nineties, started to create critically acclaimed films. These movies were more dependent on atmosphere or clever writing than full throttle scares and gore. Because some of the filmmakers hung out with Joe Swanburg, this mini-movement was dubbed “mumblegore.” (Even though it had little to do with the partially-improvised mumblecore movies Swanberg specializes in.) I'm talking about filmmakers like Ti West, Patrick Brice, E.L. Katz, Ben Wheatley... And Adam Wingard, who has gone on to become the most commercially successful of the gang. Enough time has passed for Wingard to become established and for “mumblegore” to be passé, so it should be interesting to watch this director develop and observe some of the changes the genre has undergone in the last ten-or-so years.  

1. Home Sick

Long before he started helming 200 million dollar studio tent pole releases, Adam Wingard was just an edgy horror nerd with a dream. While studying film at Full Sail University, he would meet E.L. Katz, another aspiring filmmaker with complimenting taste. Together, the two would begin to conceive a motion picture entitled “Home Sick.” Filming would begin before the two graduated, when Wingard was only 19. “Home Sick” would play festivals for six years, in various states of completion. There, it would required a reputation as an especially gory and explicit genre exercise. When the movie was finally picked up for a DVD release by Synapse Films in 2007, “Home Sick” was already a cult classic in-the-making. 

Robert and his new girlfriend Candice have recently returned from a trip to the west coast. To commiserate their return, and to celebrate the Christmas holiday, they gather at the house of their friend Tim. A number of other people are in attendance as well, even though nobody seems to like each other much. This is when a mysterious man carrying a suitcase enters the building. He reveals the suitcase is full of razor blades and demands that the party-goers all name someone they hate. After each name is mentioned, the man cuts himself. Tim names everyone in the room as someone he hates, after which the mysterious intruder sees himself out. Afterwards, the people named begin to be violently killed off, one-by-one. The survivors band together before this mysterious killer comes for them.

I first read about “Home Sick” in Fangoria, where I imagine a lot of people first encountered it. I was a subscriber to the magazine at the time, when its pages were awash in reviews and advertisements for low budget, shot-on-video, straight-to-DVD productions. Most of these movies were terrible. They were made by amateur crews and awash in watery fake blood, rubbery gore, and questionable acting. I'm talking about flicks like “Scarecrow” or “Skinned Deep.” “Home Sick” does not exactly meet these parameters – it was shot on film, for one thing – but does seriously remind me of this particular time in the genre. And, God help me, I must be going soft in my old age. Because watching “Home Sick,” left me somewhat nostalgic for this very specific and largely misbegotten time and place. 

This is not an era in horror history that anyone should feel especially sentimental about. Most of these movies are dreadful. The majority of them were made by people who had never made movies before. This is definitely true of “Home Sick.” Multiple times, the inexperience of the crew becomes apparent. The camera work is frequently rough, with shaky handheld shooting or awkwardly framed pans around rooms. There are a handful of shitty looking zooms. A couple of scenes are on the overly dark side, obviously being filmed without much in the way of proper lighting. When you read that “Home Sick” was made by literal teenagers and college students, you start to become slightly forgiving of some of this roughness.

But only some of it. Several times throughout “Home Sick,” the filmmakers greatly overestimate their own ability by including several stylistic touches. Such as dialogue being reversed for no particular reason in one moment. Or frequent inserts of gory special effects. The latter of which is usually accompanied by flashing white lights and a piercing noise on the soundtrack. The effect is obnoxious, offending the viewer's eyes and ears on simply a threshold level. By the way, “Home Sick” pulls this exact trick several times in its very first scene. 

There's a reason why the movie deploys such an off-putting visual technique so early on. The movie wants the audience to immediately understand how edgy, extreme, and in-your-face this movie is going to be. ““Home Sick” is made for hardcore horror fans!” is the message that is being sent. This instinct is most obvious in the movie's fixation on graphic gore. “Home Sick” has a bathtub full of blood, a crushed skull, a ripped-off head, someone axed in half, fingernail torn from the hand, and more entrails than you can shake a severed arm at. Two characters vomit on-screen, one atop a previously desecrated corpse. Of course, none of it looks remotely real. The blood is watery, the body parts are rubbery. It's not executed with much grace or skill. The then-juvenile filmmakers behind “Home Sick” just wanted to show off how hardcore they were, how fucked-up their imaginations could get.

This instinct, to prove how extreme they were, is obvious in many of Wingard and Katz' other choices. “Home Sick's” dialogue is often vulgar, full of colorful profanity. The dialogue often goes around in circles, in a way that I think is meant to be funny. Its characters usually mistreat each other, berating one another with abuse and insults. That is when they aren't all acting in aggressively eccentric ways. There's also a fair bit of nudity, the movie even beginning with a (entirely gratuitous) lesbian sex scene. In “Home Sick,” everyone is ugly, dumb, weird, or all three. It creates a nihilistic tone, that these are horrible people who deserve horrible things. Which is exactly the kind of approach you'd expect from an edgy teenager who watches a lot of horror movies.

Something else young horror filmmakers liked to do at the time, to prove their fidelity to the genre, was include shout-outs to the people and movies that influenced them. Admittedly, “Home Sick” is not as blatant with this as many other projects were. No directors are name-dropped and there are few cutesy homages on the surface. But they are present, if you know where to look. A flash of color across someone's eyes is an obviously callback to Italian giallo. “Evil Dead Trap” plays on the television in one scene. A swirling camera zoom was probably inspired by Sam Raimi. The most blatant call-back is an electronic score from a band calling itself Zombi. This was back before every low-budget horror movie had a retro, synth score. So that's something about “Home Sick” that might've actually seemed kind of refreshing back in 2006.

This kind of intensity-heavy horror film making, focused on trying to prove something, frequently values attitude over narrative coherence. This is especially true of “Home Sick,” as the plot makes very little sense. Who is the man with the suitcase full of razor blades? Where does he come from, what does he want? How does the ritual he performs summon the masked murderer? Why was this particular group of people targeted? Why does a scaly-faced demon – admittedly the film's best special effect – emerge in the last act? These are not questions you'll get answers for. “Home Sick” blows through any sense of logic on the way to its next gory set-pieces or wacky character interaction. “Making sense” is not something the film is too concerned about.

Like many movies influenced by the “splat-stick” classics of Raimi, Peter Jackson, and Lloyd Kaufman, “Home Sick” also fancies itself a horror/comedy. In this regard, it functions a little better. Some of the dialogue choices – a cashier assuring someone this Christmas will be the worst ever, a random shout-out to Planet Hollywood – are fittingly random enough to make me chuckle. In the last third, “Home Sick” goes on a digression into white trash country. A minor character delivers a rambling monologue about chili and Texas. Some folks dance around with guns and Confederate flags. It actually made me laugh, which is more of a response than any of the movie's attempts at horror elicited.

If there's anything “Home Sick” really succeeds at, at all, it's putting the viewer in the mindset of these characters. “Home Sick” is set in Alabama, where Wingard was living at the time. And it doesn't take place in one of the state's more glamorous locations either. Returning home pushes Robert and Claire into depression. (Which is, best as I can figure, what the title means.) Living in such a dead-end town is equal parts harrowing and boring. Which is why the characters are constantly doing drugs, sniffing coke and drinking beers. Anything to alleviate the tedium of being stuck in this place. I've lived in towns like this. I know people like this. I recognize the perpetual bags under their eyes, the unending sense of exhaustion wafting off them at all times. Leaning into this Southern depression more would've made “Home Sick” a more interesting film over all.

As you'd wholly expect from such a low budget production, “Home Sick's” cast is largely made up of amateurs and first-timers. Many of the performers never appeared in another movie. Most of them are quite bad. Matt Lero, as Tim, glares and sweats in an uncomfortably hammy fashion. Will Akers, as Robert, is never able to make his character anything but a massive asshole. The only names in the cast are familiar horror icons. Bill Moseley plays the man with the suitcase and brings his typical level of unhinged, manic energy to the role. Tom Towles appears as Uncle Johnny and gets to deliver that monologue about chili. Towles' towering intensity and off-beat delivery is a big reason why that scene is memorable. Both only have one or two scenes. Tiffany Shepis, who has appeared in literally a hundred movies just like this, has a bigger role. As always, Shepis is game, puking on a dead body, stripping her clothes off, and leaping around an empty kitchen. If only her character was actually given any hint of a personality.

”Home Sick” is pretty typical of the “underground” horror movies of the time. That would be films made by life-long genre fans – bolstered by the newfound availability of filming equipment in the new millennia – that rejected everything about the slick post-”Scream” studio horror movies of the time. Almost all these movies were crude, in content and form, and they all fucking ended with a growly death metal song over the end credits. The extreme content of these movies would eventually work their way to multiplexes, in the form of the torture horror trend that took over later in the decade. (Thanks to people like Rob Zombie, whose films “Home Sick” somewhat resembles.) The underground directors rarely got much further than the pages of Fangoria, which makes Adam Wingard and E.L. Katz something of a special case. “Home Sick” is fairly lousy, in a way common of its time and place, but it is interesting as the embryo stage of filmmakers who would go on to bigger and better things. [Grade: C-]