Eighth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #16 The Hallow

When Adam, an arborist/forester/biologist/science-y type, is assigned to identify part of an ancient Irish forest can be cut down, he and his young family (wife Clare, baby Finn and good-dog Iggy) are met immediately with a cold reception.  The local townspeople believe that the forest belongs to The Hallow - faeries, banshees, etc. - and that anyone trespassing in the forest will have to answer to those fey folk.  And cutting down the trees is the worst kind of trespassing, obviously.  As Clare busies herself with settling into their amazing old stone farmhouse, including removing all the pesky iron bars that crisscross the windows, Adam, accompanied by baby in backpack and dog, identifies trees to come down.  He finds some weird, oozing black fungus covering a dead deer, organic spikes protruding from the carcass's throat.  Because he's a scientist, he takes a sample home and finds that it is aggressively parasitic, like that zombie ant fungus (Ophiocordyceps).  Well, that doesn't bode well.

Indeed, it doesn't take long before the Hallow come calling, breaking windows, disabling the family car, oozing through ceilings and floors and poking Adam's eye out.  Note to viewers squeamish about eye trauma:  this may not be your favorite movie.  Adam becomes infected/connected to the Hallow (iron burns him, light makes him flinch, he grows spikes, etc.), baby Finn is endangered and there is much yelling and screaming whilst running through the woods once the monsters make themselves known.

I feel more positively about The Hallow than negatively but I didn't love it.  I loved the setting, the practical creature effects (skittering, oozing, very yucky), the body-horror make-up was strong, the cinematography effective.  But at only 1:36, the movie still felt long, especially since I didn't much care about Adam, Clare or the baby  (I did care about Iggy the dog), and once the flaming scythe came into play, I was over it.  Seriously: there is no way that scythe stayed burning for that long.  I think part of my disconnect was also that the film couldn't decide what the monsters were.  Were the monsters really faeries?  If so, what was the point of the sentient fungus?  Was it the fungus (a la Splinter) that turned humans into the Hallow monsters? If so, how did the changeling baby happen?  Either one - faeries or fungus - would have worked but both just seemed a little undecided to me.