The Signal

Invariably, it all comes down to guts: can the movie commit, without morals or miracles or consoling white noise, to its own tortured logic? Can it make terrible things happen and not take them back or cancel their evil with some ludicrous, Jobish gesture of compensation? Can it leave its audience in the world it created for them? If yes, it's a good horror movie.

Consider Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which Slothrop is still too chicken to watch. Like its earlier incarnation, Night of the Living Dead, the sequel, if it is one, throws itself wholly into the purposeless, ravenous nightmare that is dead people stumbling around in search of live people to eat. Cannibalism, in western societies, especially, is taboo par excellence; even incest is less disturbing to us, and if you don't believe me, ask yourself: which is the more abject, having sex with your sibling or eating your sibling? Most of us will choose the Biblical alternative. To appreciate just how unwavering Romero's ethical vision is, try to imagine yourself in a world overrun by reanimated corpses. Law--human or natural--no longer moves us. Reason malfunctions. God demonstrably does not exist, or, if He does, intends us to breathe and bear children in a universe far crueler and more horrible than any vacuum spun into lonely consciousness by a hundred million cosmic accidents. That's a hideous, hurtful, and irrational place to be.

It's also--and this realistic touch paradoxically adds to rather than diminishes the film's terror--hysterical and goofy. Zombies are absurd, their groping appetites no less clownish when chewing on your arm or neck than when chasing you, at two miles per hour, through the mall's food court. Romero accounted for every single possible implication of this alternate reality, and he blended its disparate features--some funny, others noxious--into a whole both perfectly faithful and unrelentingly psychotic. The technical term for this marriage, I believe, is grotesque. And as the Czech linguists argued so many years ago, humor grows its roots in disbelief mutated into fear. To cite my favorite example from Dawn of the Dead: the blood-pressure machine. What makes this scene so intelligent and creepy is its necessity. In a mall terrorized by vigilante motorcycle gangs and stray zombies, yes, some fool is likely to push his luck, deciding in the midst of an epic battle between living and dead, to test his blood-pressure. When he does, zombies, however slow and stumbling, will eat him. These are the facts. All Romero had to do was let them happen, and he did, which is why his movie is a masterpiece.

The Signal presents us with a glib but captivating premise--the heart of any horror movie is its hook--that is both simple enough not to need explaining but improbable and obtuse enough not to make sense. This is standard technique, and all the best horror movies use it. Great horror turns improbability to its advantage, exploiting our wonder and disorientation and resolutely defying our demands that it all add up. Unfortunately, The Signal tries a little too hard, or else doesn't trust its viewers quite enough--I can't tell which--and, in order to ease the strain of random, lethal shit happening to everybody, gives us the happy couple, in love, fighting against fate, and homicidal maniacs, to be together forever. That's a gimpy trick to pull, and it proves The Signal--otherwise quick, deft, and memorable--entirely gutless. It's an okay film but a bad horror movie. It learned enough from Romero to balance, but not oppose, humor and panic. But it lacks its mentor's ruthless fidelity. It plays a good game, but when nerves really count, it becomes lost in self-doubt and self-consciousness. It chokes.

Unfortunately for us, it's nevertheless an interesting movie and deserves at least one look, however hateful its gutlessness, however unabashed its pilfering of Joy Division classics. C+