Horror is fun. Even when it is pretty scary, it is fun. The physiological response our bodies have when exposed to fright is a trip and if experiencing that doesn’t scare you away from the genre at large, odds are that even when you’re hiding your eyes behind your hands, you’re having a good time. It’s a beautiful alchemy and when you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that horror filmmakers pull it off as regularly as they do.
It’s tough to articulate just how I feel about Ti West’s 2014 horror film The Sacrament. I am very glad that I took the time to watch it and the craft behind the film is truly second to none, even in this era of so-called “elevated horror.” It’s ruthless in its effectiveness and manages to spin a fresh take out of both a stagnant medium (found footage) and a subject matter (cults) done to death in horror at large. It is, having distance from it, one of the great horror accomplishments of the decade.
It’s also the one horror film that I like that I’ll also never watch again for as long as I live.
If you haven’t seen The Sacrament, don’t read another word of this column. It’s the sort of horror film best experienced cold. If you need to know something before you see it, this should do: The Sacrament is a mockumentary about a group of VICE reporters investigating a commune established by a new religious movement (some might say a cult) in remote Africa. It covers the weekend they spend there. That’s it. That’s all you need. Don’t watch a trailer, don’t read a review, don’t even look at the poster.
Photo Credit: Magnet Releasing
Those who have seen it would attest to this. Knowing anything more about the film risks spoiling the twists and turns it takes you on, which is not so much to say that it’s a film full of shocking plot upheavals or surprises so much as it is a film based on subject matter you may find yourself surprised to find familiar. Much of the horror works because of the way this reveals itself, the way it slowly begins to dawn on you what’s going on in this story and the ensuing inescapability of it all.
Because The Sacrament is, and I cannot stress enough that if you read any further you’ll be delving into serious spoiler territory…
More or less a fictionalized retelling of the Jonestown massacre.
There’s a good chance you’re already familiar with the details of Jonestown, the events of which are infamous to the point that they’ve infiltrated cultural consciousness in ways you may not even realize (if you’ve ever wondered where the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” in reference to blind allegiance, this is the answer). But unless you’re a cult or true crime fanatic, you may not know the details. Jonestown, like the Kennedy assassination or Pearl Harbor, is the sort of tragedy that comes with an infamy that distills everything about it down to a couple of key points. The facts are readily available for anyone who wants them, but for the most part, folks are fine with knowing that there was a cult led by a man named Jim Jones and one day he convinced them all to commit a mass suicide by way of poisoned Kool-Aid.
When something becomes that infamous its horror often becomes an abstraction, buried beneath memes and cultural references and lousy lightly-fictionalized adaptations like Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor that often bend the truth or twist facts to suit a narrative.
Photo Credit: Magnet Releasing
The Sacrament, rather than take this approach, aims to fictionalize the events of Jonestown so deftly that you don’t know you’re watching a movie about the tragedy until it’s unfolding in front of you. It operates from an intimate level, showing us the world of the commune and the people in it through the eyes of newcomers. Through them we get to know the commune’s eventual victims intimately, as we do the filmmakers themselves. When the events we associate with Jonestown begin to play out onscreen, we can feel the proverbial knife go in, and in the film’s most horrific scene, West slowly twists it, setting your every nerve aflame.
West is a master of slow-burn horror, as evidenced by his 2009 breakout hit The House of the Devil and its follow-up, the wry haunted hotel flick The Innkeepers. Both display a stellar understanding of tension, tone, and pacing and prioritize building character over cheap jump scares.
He brings this approach to The Sacrament as well. As soon as Sam, Jake, and Patrick (the reporters covering the story) arrive at Eden Parrish, we know something is amiss. It, like The Wicker Man before it and Midsommar after, thrives in showing us moments and micro-interactions that clearly foreshadow tragedy and function on the idea that our characters are too polite (or too dedicated to making their film) to leave. We know what fate has in store for them from the jump, and the beauty of the film is that you get the vibe that they might, too. They’re just afraid to say so.
Photo Credit: Magnet Releasing
Eventually the inevitable happens – the cult leader (who simply goes by “Father”) sets a mass ritualistic suicide into motion and chaos breaks out as our filmmakers try to both save however many lives they can and escape with their own. Patrick, who has traveled with Sam and Jake to the commune to find his sister Caroline, ends up being held hostage by Caroline herself. Her devotion to Father remains absolute and the film’s most disturbing moment plays out from there.
There’s very little to describe. It’s disturbingly simple. She forces her brother to participate in the ritual suicide by injecting him with cynaide. We see this play out in full in a single extensive take from a camera left on a table. You know it’s coming. You know he’s not leaving the room alive. You can’t stop it from happening and can’t help but watch, utterly transfixed in terror as Patrick’s sister sticks a needle in his arm and holds him as he twitches and foams at the mouth, dying a slow and painful death inflicted on him by the family member he came here to rescue. Shortly after, she takes her own life, having suffered a full mental collapse.
The Sacrament’s scariest moment works as well as it does not only because of how real it feels, but because of how closely tied it is to truth. When you allow yourself to be frightened by a haunted house movie or repulsed by a particularly gory SFX shot, you’re doing so under the suspension of disbelief. You know it’s not real. You’re allowing yourself to be fooled. I think it’s that measured distance between fiction and reality that allows even the most unsettling of horror set pieces to be fun.
Watching The Sacrament is different. Patrick and Caroline may not be real, but the events in which they’re participating are, and you’re experiencing them through the (literal and figurative) lens of a found footage film, by nature a format designed to feign intimacy as convincingly as possible. It feels like seeing something you’re not meant to see, private horrors made public when they should have stayed locked away. It is a masterclass of a horror set piece, one that you can appreciate and even enjoy for its merits, but will likely never want to revisit. It is, all in all, the only time a horror film has felt too real – after all, it is.
More on Geek.com:
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- Top 8 Scariest Places to Visit in the United States
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