“Sorry, I don’t
converse with loonies.” – Sarah, The Ward
When people talk about the greats in horror filmmaking,
there are a few names that always come to mind.
Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, and George Romero are three of the older era of
horror directors that helped to make the genre what it is. There’s a newer generation as well, with
people like Eli Roth, James Wan, and Ti West moving things forward while paying
tribute to those who came before. One
name that hasn’t been mentioned yet that deserves recognition is John Carpenter.
This week’s movie is The
Ward, which is why I held back on mentioning John Carpenter. It’s his most recent movie. Released in 2011, it told the story of
Kristen (Amber Heard), a young woman sent to a mental institution after burning
down a farm house. She quickly made
friends with Emily (Mamie Gummer), Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), Zoey
(Laura-Leigh Claire), and Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), four other patients. Kristen worked hard to try to escape while
the spirit of a girl named Alice (Mika Boorem) began killing her new friends.
John Carpenter was one of the directors in the seventies and
eighties that helped to make slashers such a large part of horror. This came about because of his movie Halloween, which was released in
1978. It followed a group of teens as
they were stalked and killed by The Shape, an adult version of the murderous
child Michael Myers. The Fog and The Thing, though not standard slashers, followed the same sort of
“bad force shows up and people die one by one” formula. He knows the blueprint for these kinds of
movies, but for some reason, The Ward
wasn’t as successful. Let’s get into
where the movie went wrong.
Something that must be discussed in order to properly
analyze The Ward is the twist at the
end of the movie. This will be a major
spoiler that will ruin much of what happens.
If you don’t want to know anything about The Ward, stop reading now and come back once you have seen
it. So, at the end, it was revealed that
Kristen and her friends were all split personalities of Alice and that their
being killed off was Alice fighting her way back to sanity. She had been kidnapped and abused. Her only way out of the torture she endured
was to split her personality. Now she
wanted her life back.
One of the biggest reasons to watch a slasher movie is to
see the characters die and how that affects the main character. The deaths are as good a place to start as
any. There was an inconsistency to what
happened during the deaths. Some of them
happened on screen while others happened off screen. Some of them happened in front of characters
while others happened on their own. Now,
there were always at least two of the six personalities involved in any of the
deaths. Alice was the killer and the
other characters were the victims. The
problem was that if the personalities were being killed off so that only one
personality reigned supreme, then all of the personalities should have known
about the deaths. They shouldn’t be
happening where the other characters don’t know about them. Iris and Sarah were killed while alone with
Alice. Zoey was killed off screen. The only death that happened in front of
Kristen, the protagonist, was that of Emily.
For a movie where we were supposed to be following one character, not
all six of the personalities, the shifting of points of view from Kristen to
whoever was going to die muddied the waters.
Another major factor that brought The Ward down was that John Carpenter seemed to restrain himself
from being himself while making it. The
movie didn’t look like anything else he had made. That was probably due to the advancement in
technology between when he had made his previous movie, 2001’s Ghosts of Mars, and when he made The Ward
nearly ten years later. There was a
shift from film-based shooting to digital-based shooting that influenced how The Ward looked. Another major absence was a John Carpenter
score. He did not do the music this time
around. He had created interesting
scores for many of his previous films including Halloween, Escape from New
York, and Big Trouble in Little China. Having someone else score one of his movies
felt like a betrayal to the John Carpenter aesthetic.
The other major factor that took away from The Ward was the lack of character
work. That was intentional, based on the
twist. Every separate personality was
only a fragment of Alice’s whole, which meant that they were each lacking some
of the essential pieces that made you want to care for them. Kristen was solely trying to solve the
mystery and escape, with nothing else to her personality. She was fighting the norm. Iris was trying to be the artistic good girl,
and Zoey was the childlike character.
Sarah was the sexual character, trying to sleep with the orderly at the
asylum. Emily was the crazy and insecure
character. None of them had layers
beyond those basic types. It makes
sense, though, since they were fractured pieces of one person. Put them together and you get a whole. You get Alice. It just didn’t make the movie interesting
when the majority of it was spent watching those five interact. Inside
Out, a Pixar animated film from 2015, managed to do better with the idea of
fractured personality traits. Each of
the traits had deeper character to them than what they were. They may have revolved around being Joy,
Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear, but they had more to them. The
Ward didn’t give the characters much more than their basic concepts, which
made it hard to care for most of them.
Stock characters are a staple of slasher movies. Who really cares about the camp counselors in
a Friday the 13th movie? The
thing is, the characters still feel like characters. They might be there to have sex and party,
but they have full personalities while they are alive. They’re not these personality fragments that
were put forward in The Ward. They have complete character quirks. Well, maybe not complete. Sometimes they don’t even have names. But the main characters that we are meant to
follow through the action, similar to the five girls in the mental institution,
get fleshed out enough that we care about them.
We get to know them before they get killed. We aren’t judging them based on initial impressions. The
Ward felt like we never got past that first meeting with the girls, even
though they interacted and even had a dance scene together. They still felt like hollow shells of what
they could be. It’s like when you reach
for that chocolate bunny at Easter, and instead of finding solid milk
chocolate, you find a chocolate shell shaped like a bunny with a lot of empty
space inside. It’s a hollow shell of a
chocolate bunny. You feel
disappointed. That’s the character work
in The Ward.
None of this is to say I didn’t enjoy The Ward for what it was.
There were some major problems with it, which made it feel like John
Carpenter wasn’t trying. He may not have
been. He hasn’t been shy in saying that
he felt burned out by the time he made Ghosts
of Mars. Coming back to movies might
not have been the right decision, made more apparent by how much it didn’t feel
like one of his movies. It still had its
good moments, though. The cast was good,
regardless of their one note characters.
They still managed to bring energy to their performances, raising them slightly
from where they would have been otherwise.
Some of the horror worked well.
I’m not too good with pointy things going into eyes, and one of the
deaths involved that sort of stuff, so it got me. There were some solid moments that showed
that, were he to try, John Carpenter would still have it. There was a lack of effort on his part that
probably murdered the movie like the victims in much of his filmography. He went too broad with the focus instead of
narrowing it to the one character who was trying to solve the mystery, which
ended up disconnecting the audience. He
stepped back from the amount of work he usually put in, changing how everything
felt. And, most of all, he didn’t do
much work on the script to make his characters feel real. There was potential for something great to
come out of The Ward, but it ended up
being average. Sadly, John Carpenter’s
directing career will likely end on this average note. It’s a drastic step down from the highs of
his older work, and to leave off on it feels wrong. But there are much worse horror movies out
there, so that’s something.
These notes are something too:
- The Ward was suggested by @GabnDad, who also suggested Furry Vengeance.
- I mentioned Halloween in the post. Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers was covered in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
- Friday the 13th also got a quick mention in the post. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning and Jason Goes to Hell were covered for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
- One actor from The Ward was in Jonah Hex. That actor was Milos Milicevic.
- Have you seen The Ward? What do you think about it? Let me know in the comments.
- I’m always looking for movies that I should watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. This week was a suggestion. If you suggest a movie, I might watch that one too. Let me know about any suggestions in the comments or on Twitter.
- Sometimes when I’m watching bad movies, I’ll share clips of them on snapchat. I did that with next week’s movie, which I have already watched. Add me (jurassicgriffin) on snapchat if this kind of thing interests you.
- Speaking of next week’s movie, it’s going to be Spawn of the Slithis. It’s about a monster coming out of the water and attacking people. It’s a pretty basic premise with some environmental message stuff in there as well. I’ll have something written next Sunday for that one, so come back then and read it. Okay? Okay.
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