What do you get when you cross John Carpenter, Stephen King, and HP Lovecraft? Well there are a lot of answers, but one might be The Void. It's a tight little horror movie that, apart from some bewildering editing, keeps taut pace with its visceral scares. Fabulously unpredictable and thick with atmosphere, the film's low budget is no hindrance to its efficacy, thanks to directors Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie.
A cop finds a man crawling along a forested road and takes him to the nearest hospital, a small rural building manned by a skeleton crew. The hospital had recently suffered a fire, and the staff on duty are preparing to move; they are not as well prepared for a patient. The doctor, nurse, and intern already have one sleeping (or comatose?) patient, as well as a very pregnant Maggie with her grandfather. After the cop and his new patient arrive, all hell breaks loose. The nurse removes the skin on her own face before murdering the unconscious patient. Two strangers brandishing guns show up intent. A tentacled monster attacks the group. The cop has a seizure and envisions an alien landscape and enormous black pyramid. Cult members -- robed with bizarre KKK-inspired hazmat suits -- gather outside brandishing knives, though they seem more intent on keeping the hospital on lockdown than on invading. And that's just the beginning.
"Lovecraftian horror" gets thrown around a lot without much consideration for what it means. In the case of The Void, it's an apt descriptor of the horror at work, so let's talk about it. The film's immediate descent into senseless horror (the first scene features two young people fleeing a farmhouse before its inhabitants shoot the young woman in the back and set her on fire while she's still alive) effectively breaks any moral sense we bring to the movie. The characters are thinly drawn and thinly acted, suggesting that they don't matter; this is supported by (SPOILER ALERT) the fact that almost all of them die. In fact, only two survive, and they didn't seem to deserve it (I don't mean to sound harsh, but it is a horror movie, and I expected at least some conventional logic). The monsters -- oh, right, there are lots of re-animated corpses that play host to monsters with tentacles -- are slimy and fluid, with too many limbs and tendrils; these beasts are obviously not of terrestrial origin. (That said, the monsters are fabulously realized with hardcore old-school practical effects, and rubber aliens haven't looked so good since John Carpenter's The Thing!)
These elements are essentially Lovecraftian. The thin veil of reality is shredded by The Void as the impossible horrors of the unknown are made visible. Senseless terror and violence make the movie memorable, especially when we learn their cause. The doctor, bereaved by the death of his daughter, has been experimenting against God and nature and opened a portal to an "abyss", a triangular hole to another world or dimension. He attempts to re-create his daughter, to defeat death, to -- well, who knows what all? I'm not even sure he himself knows. In a lengthy, nightmarish monologue, he says, "You'd be surprised at the things you find, when you go looking," seemingly enchanted by the arcane knowledge he's absorbed. And, of course, though the climax does bring an end of sorts to the horror at the hospital, it by no means wraps things up cosmically. At least two characters remain stuck in the void, staring up at the shadowy alien pyramid. One of the two surviving characters in the hospital cries, "Is it over? Is it over?" We know it will never truly be over.
IMDb: The Void
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