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alibi_shopVanishing on 7th Street (2010), directed by Brad Anderson, written by Anthony Jaswinski
Vanishing on 7th Street was not a successful horror movie by most people's standards, and it's easy to see why: there's very little plot and virtually no humor, the dialogue is often pretty bad, the characters are unmemorable to an unusual degree, and the force they're fighting against is barely visible and has no identity. I don't think those are entirely weaknesses, but they also don't have much to do with why this movie scares me.
Fear of the dark is pretty basic, but for me as a kid at least, it was always about thinking something would be lurking in the dark. In this movie, the monster literally is darkness: whenever you don't have any direct illumination on you, shadows can creep up and devour you instantly, leaving only your clothes. It's an exaggerated, literalized version of a notion Anderson played with briefly in his previous horror movie, Session 9, in a scene where a guy with a bad case of nyctophobia had to flee down a long basement corridor as the lights failed one by one behind him— but there, the darkness was only a problem in that one character's mind, and most of the horrors were localized in one creepy building; in 7th Street the threat is everywhere, all shadows are lethal, that's just part of the structure of reality now.
Even compared to other movie apocalypses, this one is absurdly unfair and unsurvivable: you can't beat shadows, forget it (and just to make that very clear, it's also established early on that whatever caused this situation has also made electricity unreliable and is gradually even reducing the hours of sunlight in a day). But still the temporary survivors must try to eke it out a little longer, even though staying alive means being scared all the time, hoping a candle flame or a light bulb holds out for the next minute. For this premise to offer suspense rather than just depression, there has to be a tension between the hopelessness of the situation and the hope that you can continue to beat the system a minute at a time; to make sure you can believe in the latter, the movie lays down the rules right away, with nicely economical visual storytelling so the keep-some-light-on-you rule is immediately obvious. It's basically a kid's game made into life or death, and I think that's why it gets to me so badly.
In childhood I spent a lot of time waiting, either in random rooms or on the road. Besides reading, drawing, and picking my nose, this involved a lot of mental games of the kind that aren't exactly fun, but offer a kind of tedious satisfaction by taking some feature of the place you're stuck in and making it the focus of point-scoring or death-evading. Don't step on the cracks; step on all the cracks; try to cross your eyes so you see the light bulb superimposed on the chair; hope that the cars in the opposite lanes on the highway line up with each other as they pass you; and so on, and so on. Some of these could be done in two-player form, but opportunities for collaboration were pretty limited (and so was your sibling's patience), so you were still basically alone with your task; having that kind of obsessive relationship with the physical environment is inherently isolating. And if you've ever been afraid that the grownups might never show up to rescue you from your very difficult and very boring game, this movie will push your buttons. Not only does nearly everyone in the world (or at least in Detroit) vanish at the beginning, but a series of minor characters disappear in rapid succession in a way that makes you more and more desperate for contact: first you lose the potential love interest, then you lose a random helpful person, then you lose a hideously maimed casualty who was awful to look at but whose sudden absence is even worse. The movie later wastes some time setting up standard horror scenarios of "don't let the other people out of your sight because then the thing will sneak up on you", but when it works it's on a simpler emotional level: "don't let the other people out of your sight because then you won't have people."
As for the people— in contrast to even the most inept horror movies that manage to throw together stock characters in a way that offers some conflict, romance, or comic relief, 7th Street gives you mostly ordinary people who, as you might expect in such a grim situation, have better things to do than expressing their personalities; it's a bit jarring to see even John freaking Leguizamo be mostly at a loss for words. Whether they were written in such a minimalist way, or the director cut out a lot of character-establishing dialogue (a few scraps of that remain, and they're not great), I don't know, but the result is at least conceptually if not dramatically interesting. (It's also noteworthy that all of the adult characters are non-white with the exception of the TV personality played by Hayden Christiansen, and we're not really given any reason to hope that he's the one to survive; the movie doesn't encourage you to root for any of these people over the others, they're all OK, there's not even a token asshole, there's just this token boring handsome guy.)
Aside from some good sound design (especially a moment where you hear everyone in a building start to scream, and then go silent half a second later), the movie's other rewards are mostly visual— Uta Briesewitz's cinematography is smoothly augmented with simple animation so that in a scene that's already full of many grades and textures of shadows, you see some of those shadows slowly moving in unnatural ways. This starts out as a subtle effect, and by the end they're swarming all over the place; but one of my favorite shots, near the beginning, is both minimal and unsubtle: a down escalator in a sunlit lobby starts out just a little more shadowy than it ought to be, then continues to fill up with darkness in the foreground, while the person in the background pays no attention. I know not everyone loved the washed-out look of Session 9 (which Briesewitz also photographed), but I love how both movies use space to create tension— for me they're able to suggest claustrophobia in an agoraphobic setting and vice versa. Detroit was a fortunate choice for this too, since it wasn't too hard to arrange for areas of total desolation.
The movie isn't coherent enough for the ending to matter much, but I will just say that it offers a mild note of hope that's pretty hard to justify. I do want to try to justify it, though— if only for my own comfort— so if you want to remain in sort-of-suspense, skip this next part. Who survives? Children. How do they get away? They find a horse and ride it out of Detroit at sunset. I don't know what the writer and director had in mind (and Anderson is on record as not being too interested in resolving ambiguity even in his own mind; he didn't even decide whether the supernatural part of Session 9 was real until the final edit), but to me this is basically an admission that there's no way to resolve this story rationally; the rules don't offer any hope, all you can look for is an emotional shift, and here it's provided by discarding the entire adult cast and also escaping the single city block where most of the story took place, so things finally at least look different. But on seeing the film again I realized there's actually a rational excuse there, if you want it: the shadows, which at first are formless impersonal monsters, by the end are more clearly the shadows of the people who have vanished, so maybe they're not everywhere— they're just in places where there used to be a lot of people. So to survive, you have to give up what's familiar; the empty space can't be filled or redeemed, it's time to move on.
Vanishing on 7th Street was not a successful horror movie by most people's standards, and it's easy to see why: there's very little plot and virtually no humor, the dialogue is often pretty bad, the characters are unmemorable to an unusual degree, and the force they're fighting against is barely visible and has no identity. I don't think those are entirely weaknesses, but they also don't have much to do with why this movie scares me.
Fear of the dark is pretty basic, but for me as a kid at least, it was always about thinking something would be lurking in the dark. In this movie, the monster literally is darkness: whenever you don't have any direct illumination on you, shadows can creep up and devour you instantly, leaving only your clothes. It's an exaggerated, literalized version of a notion Anderson played with briefly in his previous horror movie, Session 9, in a scene where a guy with a bad case of nyctophobia had to flee down a long basement corridor as the lights failed one by one behind him— but there, the darkness was only a problem in that one character's mind, and most of the horrors were localized in one creepy building; in 7th Street the threat is everywhere, all shadows are lethal, that's just part of the structure of reality now.
Even compared to other movie apocalypses, this one is absurdly unfair and unsurvivable: you can't beat shadows, forget it (and just to make that very clear, it's also established early on that whatever caused this situation has also made electricity unreliable and is gradually even reducing the hours of sunlight in a day). But still the temporary survivors must try to eke it out a little longer, even though staying alive means being scared all the time, hoping a candle flame or a light bulb holds out for the next minute. For this premise to offer suspense rather than just depression, there has to be a tension between the hopelessness of the situation and the hope that you can continue to beat the system a minute at a time; to make sure you can believe in the latter, the movie lays down the rules right away, with nicely economical visual storytelling so the keep-some-light-on-you rule is immediately obvious. It's basically a kid's game made into life or death, and I think that's why it gets to me so badly.
In childhood I spent a lot of time waiting, either in random rooms or on the road. Besides reading, drawing, and picking my nose, this involved a lot of mental games of the kind that aren't exactly fun, but offer a kind of tedious satisfaction by taking some feature of the place you're stuck in and making it the focus of point-scoring or death-evading. Don't step on the cracks; step on all the cracks; try to cross your eyes so you see the light bulb superimposed on the chair; hope that the cars in the opposite lanes on the highway line up with each other as they pass you; and so on, and so on. Some of these could be done in two-player form, but opportunities for collaboration were pretty limited (and so was your sibling's patience), so you were still basically alone with your task; having that kind of obsessive relationship with the physical environment is inherently isolating. And if you've ever been afraid that the grownups might never show up to rescue you from your very difficult and very boring game, this movie will push your buttons. Not only does nearly everyone in the world (or at least in Detroit) vanish at the beginning, but a series of minor characters disappear in rapid succession in a way that makes you more and more desperate for contact: first you lose the potential love interest, then you lose a random helpful person, then you lose a hideously maimed casualty who was awful to look at but whose sudden absence is even worse. The movie later wastes some time setting up standard horror scenarios of "don't let the other people out of your sight because then the thing will sneak up on you", but when it works it's on a simpler emotional level: "don't let the other people out of your sight because then you won't have people."
As for the people— in contrast to even the most inept horror movies that manage to throw together stock characters in a way that offers some conflict, romance, or comic relief, 7th Street gives you mostly ordinary people who, as you might expect in such a grim situation, have better things to do than expressing their personalities; it's a bit jarring to see even John freaking Leguizamo be mostly at a loss for words. Whether they were written in such a minimalist way, or the director cut out a lot of character-establishing dialogue (a few scraps of that remain, and they're not great), I don't know, but the result is at least conceptually if not dramatically interesting. (It's also noteworthy that all of the adult characters are non-white with the exception of the TV personality played by Hayden Christiansen, and we're not really given any reason to hope that he's the one to survive; the movie doesn't encourage you to root for any of these people over the others, they're all OK, there's not even a token asshole, there's just this token boring handsome guy.)
Aside from some good sound design (especially a moment where you hear everyone in a building start to scream, and then go silent half a second later), the movie's other rewards are mostly visual— Uta Briesewitz's cinematography is smoothly augmented with simple animation so that in a scene that's already full of many grades and textures of shadows, you see some of those shadows slowly moving in unnatural ways. This starts out as a subtle effect, and by the end they're swarming all over the place; but one of my favorite shots, near the beginning, is both minimal and unsubtle: a down escalator in a sunlit lobby starts out just a little more shadowy than it ought to be, then continues to fill up with darkness in the foreground, while the person in the background pays no attention. I know not everyone loved the washed-out look of Session 9 (which Briesewitz also photographed), but I love how both movies use space to create tension— for me they're able to suggest claustrophobia in an agoraphobic setting and vice versa. Detroit was a fortunate choice for this too, since it wasn't too hard to arrange for areas of total desolation.
The movie isn't coherent enough for the ending to matter much, but I will just say that it offers a mild note of hope that's pretty hard to justify. I do want to try to justify it, though— if only for my own comfort— so if you want to remain in sort-of-suspense, skip this next part. Who survives? Children. How do they get away? They find a horse and ride it out of Detroit at sunset. I don't know what the writer and director had in mind (and Anderson is on record as not being too interested in resolving ambiguity even in his own mind; he didn't even decide whether the supernatural part of Session 9 was real until the final edit), but to me this is basically an admission that there's no way to resolve this story rationally; the rules don't offer any hope, all you can look for is an emotional shift, and here it's provided by discarding the entire adult cast and also escaping the single city block where most of the story took place, so things finally at least look different. But on seeing the film again I realized there's actually a rational excuse there, if you want it: the shadows, which at first are formless impersonal monsters, by the end are more clearly the shadows of the people who have vanished, so maybe they're not everywhere— they're just in places where there used to be a lot of people. So to survive, you have to give up what's familiar; the empty space can't be filled or redeemed, it's time to move on.
