The Roost is for horror fans who fondly recall the heyday of drive-in theaters and pot-addled midnight screenings. Director Ti West’s über-low-budget debut mines the less-is-more approach carved out by the likes of George A. Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead and early John Carpenter pictures.
The premise is lean. Four young people (Karl Jacob, Sean Reid and real-life siblings Wil and Vanessa Horneff) are on a late-night road trip to a friend’s wedding when their car crashes on a lonely country road. Their cellphone dead (damm the luck!), they hike to the nearest farmhouse for help. Bad decision. What our hapless kids don’t know is that an elderly couple has just been swallowed up by something lurking inside the barn — something hungry and horrific.
That’s it. West devotes only token energy to character development, and he doesn’t trouble himself with how the aforementioned menace came to be or why it happens to be at this particular barn in the middle of nowhere. The delightfully simple concept is enough to offer swarms of bats, flesh-eating zombies and a music score boasting more violins than an Italian hootenanny.
West and cinematographer Eric Robbins keep things creepy through a constant interplay of light and darkness, German expresisonism meets Friday the 13th, with a coal-black country night illuminated only by the bilious glow of yellow porch lamps. The Roost has the unmistakable DIY feel of a feature debut by a film-school student, but its roughly hewn theatrics — shaky handheld camerawork, grainy film stock, compositions that seem almost fussily meticulous — work to the movie’s advantage.
West, one of the most interesting genre directors working today, deserves credit for creative thinking even when the ideas don’t land entirely. The Roost is bookended by Tom Noonan as a late-night TV horror-movie host, but the conceit sounds better than its execution. The winking postmodern irony seems a trifle gluttonous when killer bats and zombies are already on the menu.
Still, effective atmospherics only go so far. The lack of even cursory characterization keeps viewers at arm’s length; it’s tough to care much whether these kids end up in bat guano. Even The Texas Chain Saw Massacre made sure audiences had an emotional investment in its terrorized college kids.
One final note: The movie owes much to the aesthetic of executive producer Larry Fessenden, who had developed a cult around such films as 1997’s Habit and 2001’s Wendigo. Fessenden briefly appears in The Roost as an ill-fated paramedic.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 