HERD opens with a real deep-down kind of scare. I’m not talking movie fright scenes. The first thing that happens is that one person makes a call to another person from whom they are long estranged. The call goes unanswered. The person making the call believes the person who didn’t answer was ignoring them. That’s not the reason, but it only makes the caller, who may never know that, hate the person who ‘ignored’ them more. This is something that plays to a fear deep in me. That someone will reach out to me, someone who I’ve not spoken to in many years, because as the years pile on, there are more than a few of those someones, I’m sorry to say. And I will not answer the call, and they will continue to hate me forever, but it’s not that I didn’t want to reconnect. They will call, and I will not answer, but the reason will be because I am dead.
That’s not exactly the direction HERD eventually goes, but it’s a good approximation of what’s so special about this movie. Some horror movies want to scare you, and some want to make you laugh, and a few want to move you, but most are lucky to manage any one of those things, let alone the last one in particular. HERD gripped me tight, and not just in my gut, where the frights take hold, but in my heart, where everything else in me lives.
HERD is the story of Jamie Miller (Ellen Adair, tremendous in the role) and her partner Alex (Mitzi Akaha, painfully sweet) and their camping trip, which they were hoping would mend their splintering relationship. Since the trip will be putting them somewhere in the vicinity of Jamie’s father Robert (Corbin Bernsen), she makes the tough choice to make that call I was referring to up top. Robert doesn’t get a chance to pick up, because Robert is facing down a representative of the walking dead, referred to as “Heps” in this movie. Robert’s fate is unrevealed in that moment, but for Jamie, it’s just another instance of him failing to be there for her, just one more disappointment in a long line of father-forced failures.
Will you be able to relate to something like that? I can. I bet there are plenty others of us out there. If not, maybe you can relate to being one half of a couple that is failing because of the lurking trauma your partner may be grappling with, or avoiding. HERD is a relatively short film, but it takes plenty of time up front with Jamie and Alex, making sure we care for them both even if we may not be sure yet what is haunting them both, together and apart. One of many things the filmmakers are so smart about is how cautiously and deliberately they parcel out information about the couple. It’s tremendous work by writers James Allerdyce and Steven Pierce and by Pierce in the role of director.
Jamie and Alex end up finding out exactly what became of Robert, after the first day of a camping trip that is as vivid and beautiful as it is fragile and sad and bound for an unpleasant halting. The poster tells you what kind of movie this is, but it would be bad form for any reviewer to spoil the way Jamie and Alex find out. Let’s just say it simultaneously invokes the work of two of the greats in horror, while also being its own unique scene of unfolding chaos, involving as it does the appearance on a lonely road of a solitary shambling ghoul, but then introducing into the mix a wild-eyed, shotgun-toting character named Tater (Jeremy Lawson), who could have stepped right out of any Stephen King adaptation (it’s in the overalls, baby). Tater knows just what to do with that gun and that ghoul, but how he’s going to deal with a couple of city-slicker females is another question entirely.
The world has changed in an instant. America’s heartland has been overrun with an outbreak. Dispatches come in over television sets from the Cuomo-esque Governor Diraldi (Matt Walton, absolutely on-point), promising the masses that science has the problem under control. Does it? Might there be another way? Again, without revealing too much about HERD‘s surprises, maybe the answer is more complicated. Or maybe it isn’t that complicated at all, and all of us, with our human messiness, insist on making it that way.
The Royals are mentioned more than once and the film was shot in Missouri, so we’re in red-state territory here, with Jamie and Alex pretty clearly coded as blue-state types, even if Jamie for sure was born and bred in the red. Just as they were with their unfortunate canoeing trip, Jamie and Alex are swept along by rapidly unfolding events, ending up within a community of friendly-enough-on-the-outside hold-outs committed to standing strong against the infected, led by Big John (Jeremy Holm from THE RANGER, in a role the late Bill Paxton could have played).
Among them are Bernie, a former high school classmate who Jamie would just as well rather not be locked up in a fortified garage with — Brandon James Ellis threatens to walk away with the entire movie in the role — and Diane, who seems kind and motherly and safe right up until she doesn’t, played perfectly by Amanda Fuller of STARRY EYES. Outside the walls are more heavily-armored types led by Sterling (the incredibly busy character actor Timothy V. Murphy, whose face you know even if you think you don’t recognize his name, doing a kind of comfortably-badass Ed-Harris-in-THE-ROCK tribute performance). When Sterling and his riot-gear brigade show up, like Jamie and Alex, you might at first think that things are about to get safer, although maybe that feeling of safety is contingent upon how safe you feel upon seeing the NYPD, or the US Army. Your mileage may vary. Again, shit’s complicated.
HERD is the finest post-2020 movie about America I’ve seen yet, full-stop. This is what horror does best: Shows us our world at the moment and ourselves in all our monstrous reality. The subtext is in plain view — in case you may find yourself asking why the movie is called HERD, just give it a minute to kick around your brain and it’ll register soon enough — but even if it’s clear enough what the movie is investigating in matters of theme, there’s so much nuance and feeling in the script by Allerdyce and Pierce, in the early sun-kissed and later heat-scorched images crafted by Pierce and the gifted cinematographer Brennan Full, in the impressively epic score by Alexander Arntzen, and in the diverse range of lived-in performances by the entire cast, all the way down to young Ronan Starnes as a boy who represents a sort of Rosetta Stone to HERD‘s view of humankind: Is he LITTLE MAN TATE, or more THE OMEN? Even worse: Is he an OMEN III in training? Ellen Adair is a terrific ‘final girl,’ steely and vulnerable, alternately and at the same time, and Jeremy Holm is fascinating, a little inscrutable, sort of heroic and sort of ‘off,’ in maybe the most complex role in the story. Truthfully, this is the kind of film where every speaking role, however brief, feels like they’ve got their own tale to tell. One is again put in mind of the better tendencies of Stephen King, where the plot and the telling matter, but character reigns above all.
How did we get where we are today in America? Every last one of us plays our part. This is a movie of uncommon awareness of the moment we’re in. Without question, HERD is one of the finest and most keenly-observed horror movies of the year, all the more impressive for being such an independent production.
Full disclosure: Jeremy Lawson, who plays Tater in HERD, is one of my dearest friends, and I was lucky enough to get to see HERD with cast and crew the day before it opened in limited theatrical release. It’s fair for one to suspect that I was already inclined to like the movie, but I maintain that I had no idea until I saw it that I would love and admire the movie this much, and besides, there’s a strong chance I never would have known it existed otherwise. I would have missed out. Don’t miss out — catch HERD if it’s playing theatrically near you, or find it streaming online right now on AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime Video.
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Tags: 31 flavors of horror, Alexander Arntzen, Amanda Fuller, America, Brandon James Ellis, Brennan Full, Columns, Corbin Bernsen, Dana Snyder, Ellen Adair, Horror, James Allerdyce, Jeremy Holm, Jeremy Lawson, Jon Abrams, Matt Walton, Mitzi Akaha, Ronan Starnes, Steven Pierce, Timothy V. Murphy
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