There’s been a noticeable shift in the last year in way film depicts violence against vulnerable young women. In Pascal Plante’s RED ROOMS, no violence against women is ever directly depicted onscreen, and the audience is left to imagine the horror as the camera remains fixed on Kelly-Anne’s (Juliette Gariepy) face as she watches unspeakable atrocities sourced from the dark web. In Anna Kendrick’s WOMAN OF THE HOUR, the film pulls us progressively further away from the violence as the film unfolds and the blocking of sequences that contain violence ground their focus on the victim and the limitless sky. The movie uses an authentic love of natural beauty to keep our focus on the victims. We stay angry that the victims will never see another sunset. Both are suggestive of the restraint exhibited by HALLOWEEN 46 years ago. When numerous copycats flooded cinemas during the golden age of the slasher they often lost sight of what made HALLOWEEN special. The movie’s heart beats because Laurie, Annie, and Lynda are real. They had lives, and even if they live, as in the case of Laurie, their belief that they can ever be safe is irrevocably destroyed. “Was that the boogeyman” is an elegy for innocence, and entirely fits in with the restrained approach of RED ROOMS and WOMAN OF THE HOUR. I was wondering when we would see something that feels like a slasher that centers the victim’s perspective and underlines that even if they live, they are changed. There’s been a lot of lip service to trauma in horror in recent years, but the depiction is often fetishistic. With Warren Skeels’ THE MAN IN THE WHITE VAN, we have a slasher navigating that space and endeavoring to center victims.
Warren Skeels is new to genre territory. His previous directorial experience includes THESPIANS, a documentary about troupes of young actors on their way to a national high-school theatre competition, and the reality television series Siesta Key. Skeels directs and created the show focusing on the coming-of-age dalliances of Florida teens and twenty-somethings. So while his background isn’t steeped in genre work, he comes to THE MAN IN THE WHITE VAN with a director’s eye for the authentic when it comes to teens.
THE MAN IN THE WHITE VAN invites further comparisons to HALLOWEEN with its mid-’70s setting. The film’s primary setting is October 1975, with the third act set on Halloween night itself. Its structure leaves more room for those moments like the one in HALLOWEEN, where Laurie is sitting through a lecture on the literary implications of fate. The film introduces us to sisters Annie (Madison Wolfe) and Margaret (Brec Bassinger), growing up in a conservative family in small town Brooksville, Florida. To give you an idea how damn small Brooksville is, the biggest thing going there was the annual blueberry festival until that left. Really. Exurban locations make for great storytelling possibilities with the restlessness of adolescence. Empty country roads and general stores become cages. Shortly after the film establishes Annie as our lead, her family hosts a dinner where her older sister Margaret brags about her upcoming debutante presentation. For these girls, adulthood seems like an escape.
Annie is shown wistful and often lost in her own teenage interiority. She can’t bring herself to tell the boy she likes that she’s attracted to him. She has one very close friend, Patty (Skai Jackson), but feels isolated from the rest of her town’s teens. She seems most at home in the saddle of her horse, and when the stresses of the world are too much, she’s been known to spin tall tales to alleviate the pressure. It’s the propensity for yarns that make Annie’s parents (Sean Astin and Ali Larter) doubtful of stories of an ever-nearing, stalking van. Effective teen horror often makes the point that even when adults love their kids, they don’t always listen to them.
As with HALLOWEEN, the ever-present stalking shape seems to become more metaphor in the first and second act. It’s the encroachment of adulthood. It’s the lack of choices for a future in rural Florida in the 1970s. It’s the need for social connection without knowing how to put oneself out there. It’s the danger of teenage romantic and sexual desire. Most importantly, it’s the inescapable knowledge that each night, the version of you that goes to sleep will never exist again. Your parents will never be infallible again. The future will never be limitless again. You will die. The Shape, standing immobile between lines of drying laundry, is this knowledge, and, to the delight of the horror fan, so is a battered old white van whose headlights cut into the Florida night.
Wolfe and Bassinger find a great, believable tempo as sisters. There’s a tug of war between them over finding a foothold for establishing their identities which makes so many of their interactions feel adversarial, but never in a way where we believe they don’t love each other. One of these little battles, Margaret being granted a phone extension in her bedroom, becomes pivotal in the third act in way that sells the film’s earlier explorations of adolescence while amping the tension.
Cinematographer Gareth Paul Cox previously collaborated with Skeels on Siesta Key and has a background full of reality and documentary work. This leads to something that feels like William Friedkin and Owen Roizman’s “induced documentary” style. The way the camera tracks Annie often feels like the camera movement of reality television, which heightens the tension of the proceedings. It feels like the camera is a conscious thing, choosing not to intervene in this potential tragedy. What HALLOWEEN accomplishes through Jamie Lee Curtis banging on a neighbor’s door and screaming for help, THE MAN IN THE WHITE VAN does through camera movement. It conveys, “Won’t someone do something?”
Despite focusing so intensely on the victim’s experience, the film never loses sight of its killer. The way it keeps that in the viewer’s mind is by punctuating the film with a series of flashbacks to previous victims of the killer. It’s not dissimilar to WOMAN OF THE HOUR’s shuffled structure, but by anchoring the documentary style to the ‘now’ of 1975, we feel powerless in these flashbacks. The killer, whose face is never shown, through a combination of careful lighting and blocking, will kill in the flashbacks. There’s a sickening sense of dread in them. The flashbacks show us bite-sized slices of the victim’s lives before the killer shockingly intrudes. The third such flashback has a Hall-of-Fame jump scare. Each of these flashbacks seen as the years creep forward brings our stalker inevitably into focus for Annie.
Something else I appreciated in THE MAN IN WHITE VAN is the overall sense of careful restraint in the film. Sure, HALLOWEEN is Rated-R, but in a way that seems to teeter on the edge of PG-13. A phrase that is often bandied about in horror discourse is “gateway horror,” and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there a surge of conversation about this film in youth-oriented online spaces in six months. This seems like the kind of movie that earnest, bright-eyed TikTokers will assure us is “so scary.”
Maybe that’s the point. By decoupling from the Grand Guignol excesses of John Kramer and Art the Clown, THE MAN IN THE WHITE VAN reminds us why we embraced the genre in the first place and invites in new young fans.
THE MAN IN THE WHITE VAN is now playing in theaters.
them, not even once. When he’s not disappointing his cats he’s watching and writing about film.
His interests run toward naturalism, SOV and forgotten thrillers. Against his better judgment he
has hosted a podcast, Impossible Coin, for six years.
Tags: Ali Larter, Anna Kendrick, Brec Bassinger, Gareth Paul Cox, Horror, Juliette Gariepy, Madison Wolfe, Pascal Plante, Red Rooms, Sean Astin, Siesta Key, Skai Jackson, The 1970s, Thrillers, Warren Skeels
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