stuart gordon

Imagine that you lost your job and your house in the same day. Imagine that you were then hit by an obnoxious nurse (Mena Suvari), who proceeds to drive home with you embedded in her car's windshield and then leave you to die in her garage as she goes about her business and occasionally returns to quite literally nag you to death.

It would kinda suck. This is what Stephen Rea has to endure in Stuart Gordon's remarkably unpleasant thriller, Stuck, and suffer he does. Though based on a true story of a woman who caused a hit-and-run and then let the man die in her home instead of notifying authorities, I doubt that the real-life criminal was nearly as selfish and shrill as the corn-row-wearing Suvari manages to be here, and all of the extra hell that her character puts Rea through only earns him an increasing rooting interest on the viewer's part.

After all, he's just a good man having one really bad day. I'm not saying that anyone deserves such a situation, but Rea is a pity magnet from the start in a way that a genuinely homeless individual, your token wino or something like that, would be harder for the audience to know and care for beyond obvious concern. Our Mr. Nice Guy, though -- his fate is almost worse than death because he seems to have done so little to deserve it.

Plus: corn rows.

Horror can be a straitjacket. As much as I loved Stuart Gordon's seminal 80s horror flicks Re-Animator and From Beyond, I have to say that this decade's trifecta of King of the Ants, Edmond, and, especially, Stuck, demonstrated his finely-honed ability to drive the narrative forward while stretching genre boundaries into truly warped territory. None of the latter films were strictly "traditional horror," but each in their own way was a devastating horror story.

Thus, the news that he's "returning" to horror doesn't mean that he's slinking back via a soulless studio sequel or any such nonsense as that. Instead, word is now circulating that Gordon will direct The House on the Borderland, according to paid subscription-only site Tracking B, via Bloody Disgusting. Based on a novel published in 1908 (!) by British fantasist William Hope Hodgson, the story follows two friends who travel to a remote village in Ireland and discover a ruined house and a diary that details the horrors suffered by the owner of the house: half-man, half-pig "swine-things," a vast plain of demons, the world grinding to a halt. As scripted by David Benullo (Hallowed Ground), the film expands it to a family moving into a relative's house only to make the same terrible discoveries.

The original novel was supposedly a big influence on H.P. Lovecraft, and Gordon has already adapted multiple Lovecraft stories (Re-Animator, From Beyond, Castle Freak, Dagon). So that, along with his recent work, gives me great hope that Gordon will come up with another startling work of horror.