In my opinion a back-story or lack of one can completely make or break a story, be it a movie, game, book or other form of media. Especially if a story is set in fictional or partially fictional universe a lack of back-story can completely shatter something which had the potential to be very good.
The reason I’m bringing this up is because I just had my 12-year-old niece over for two days and she just loves horror movies. She thought it would be a great idea to have a movie night consisting only of horror movies. And I HATE horror movies. I’m not scared of horror movies, I genuinely hate them because the quality of the story in such movies is almost always puke worthy.
If it’s a story about a serial killer there is always a group of young kids who get slaughtered and by the end of the movie we still have no idea who the killer is or, even more important, why he became a serial killer to begin with. There is no real story to begin with, there is no hidden plot, it’s just a group of people who keep getting killed in hilarious ways without any real motive and the movie is over once they are a) all dead, or b) if one manages to survive in which case you can bet your ass there will be a sequel.
If the story features monsters it’s even more stupid. Often you get the same type of scenario but instead of a serial killer the group gets to deal with unnatural monsters of all kinds. What these monsters are, how they came to be, where they came from or why they are attacking the group remains unknown for ever, they are just in the movie to make it scary and not to support some sort of interesting plot line. Again the movie ends when either everyone is dead or if the last person makes it out alive.
This brings me to the movie my niece brought over; The Decent. When we started watching I was pretty skeptical about the story since the description on the cover didn’t leave much room for interpretation. Group of women in a cave, scary monsters, the end. I was surprised however when the story started to climb to an okay level at some point when there was still no sign of the monsters 45 minutes into the movie and small signs of back-story and subplot started showing up. But it soon dropped back to the ‘stupid’ category as soon as the first monster showed its face.
Spoilers!
The monsters in this case were blind cave dwelling creatures who hunted based on sound, much like bats. When one of the women finds an old piece of cave exploring equipment, while the cave is supposed to be new and unexplored, the suggesting is made that the creatures are actually evolved humans, evolved from the explorers who set foot in the cave over 100 years ago.
When that theory is first told in the movie you are left with a lot of questions. Why didn’t the explorers starve to death? How can something evolve in just 100 years time? With any other movie you’d laugh at the theory itself, but because up to this point the movie had a pretty solid story, you tend to think that you’re going to get an answer to those questions as the story progresses. But from the moment the monsters show up the movie drops down to a classic ‘hunt down and kill’ scenario. No back-story of any kind is given about the creatures from this point on. The creatures simply serve as the means to killing the victims and nothing more while there was plenty of potential to tell more about these creatures and the explorers who came before.
End of Spoilers
Like with any low grade horror movie, though, this movie also gets a sequel which will be released (or has been released) this year. It will offer the original writer and director of the movie a chance to fix his early mistake, though from what I’ve read so far I doubt the second part will be any better than the first part. Most importantly, I think the writer created an impossible scenario to create an explanation for which is something you should at all time avoid. If you’re going to create something, at least make the back-story something that could have happened in that particular universe.
I will be watching the sequel, I want to find out if the writer is going to make any effort into explaining the things he left untold in the first part. But like I said, I suspect it’s going to suck just as much.
Robin
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