Hallowarrior Review: Halloween at the End of the World
By Devin Smock | More Horror
SPOILERS THROUGHOUT
I try to avoid trailers for movies I plan to review unless I cannot escape them at a theater. With a title like Hallowarrior, though, I needed some evidence before committing my time. This could have been a fun, scrappy horror movie or a huge piece of trash. Nothing in that title eliminates either possibility.
The trailer made me curious. The movie, while far from great, is not a waste of time.
Writer-director Ben Sottak and cinematographer Steven Jacob Russell establish the movie’s strongest qualities almost immediately. The rural setting is beautifully photographed, the lighting has actual shape and the compositions feel considered. Sottak shot the movie around Syracuse, Tully and Jordan, New York, taking advantage of the real autumn landscape rather than trying to manufacture October in postproduction. It pays off.
I really appreciate horror filmmakers who treat location and composition as essential parts of the movie instead of things to worry about after the blood, masks and jump scares have been figured out. That does not happen nearly enough. Pumpkin’s farmhouse feels isolated without looking like somebody simply found a cheap place to shoot. The fields, trees and empty roads give the apocalypse a scale that the budget probably could not have created any other way.
Pumpkin, played by Milly Shapiro, has apparently survived alone for four years after a plague wiped out most of humanity. She is sixteen, living in her old family home and still celebrating Halloween as if trick-or-treaters might wander out of the wasteland at any moment. She decorates the house, sets out candy and sends radio messages hoping someone, somewhere, will answer.
Her Halloween obsession is more than production design. It is routine, memory and probably the only thing separating her from complete despair. The early suggestion that Pumpkin is considering suicide gives all the pumpkins and decorations an unavoidable sadness. She is not pretending the world is normal because she is naïve. She is desperately preserving the last thing that still makes her feel connected to the world that disappeared.
You really feel her need to interact with another person. Shapiro makes Pumpkin talkative and socially awkward without turning her into a joke. Four years alone would probably destroy anyone’s ability to read a room, especially someone who was barely a teenager when the world ended. When strangers finally arrive, we understand why she overlooks every warning sign. Loneliness has made her vulnerable in a way that no amount of practical survival experience can fix.
I knew I had seen Shapiro somewhere, and yes, she played Charlie in Hereditary. This is reportedly her first major feature role since that film, and she carries nearly every scene here. She is easily the strongest part of Hallowarrior. Pumpkin could have become an irritating collection of Halloween quirks, but Shapiro finds the sadness and hope underneath all of it.
The visitors are Thalia, played by Shannyn Sossamon, Royce, played by AJ Bowen, and Wendy, played by Ajani Russell. They initially entertain Pumpkin’s excitement and allow her to believe she may have finally found people again. That does not last, obviously. The movie shifts from a lonely post-apocalyptic character piece into a home-invasion story with a little Home Alone survivalism thrown in.
That transition mostly works, but the movie becomes less interesting once it settles into more familiar territory. The opening gives us a distinctive character in an unusual situation. The second half gives us scavengers, masks, traps and people trying to kill each other inside a house. It is competently done, and sometimes fun, but I have seen variations of that part before.
Sossamon is effective as Thalia because she never has to push very hard to seem dangerous. Bowen is dependable as Royce, although the character never becomes much more than another threatening man wandering around the property. Russell gets more to work with as Wendy, whose guarded hostility slowly gives way to an actual connection with Pumpkin. The performances are generally okay. Nobody is outright bad, but Shapiro is operating on another level from most of the supporting cast.
There are some nice practical effects and a few properly nasty moments. The syringe near the eye is a solid piece of gross-out horror, at least until the neon-orange drug begins pushing the movie into a much more artificial visual world.
The orange is intentional. It belongs to the hallucinogenic substance Thalia calls medicine, and when Pumpkin is injected, the movie attempts to show us her distorted perspective.
Fair enough.
But what in the bullmess is this trippy syringe shit?
The oversaturated orange hallucination sequence feels like it wandered in from another movie. Up to that point, Hallowarrior has built a tactile world out of real locations, autumn light, old Halloween decorations and practical grime. Then the contrast gets cranked up and everything starts looking cheaper and more digital. Understanding the purpose of a choice does not automatically make the choice effective.
Some digital work was probably unavoidable. This is a post-apocalyptic movie with limited resources, and the filmmakers cannot destroy civilization for real. Most of the effects stay within the scale of the story, and the movie wisely keeps us close to the farmhouse. At its best, it becomes a nice little monster-outside-the-house movie, even though the monsters are other people.
The Halloween imagery helps distinguish those familiar home-invasion mechanics. Pumpkin’s decorations and homemade traps make the violence feel like an extension of how she has kept herself alive. She has turned the house into a haunted attraction because the whole world has effectively become one. The title itself is clunky, but it also sounds exactly like something Pumpkin would invent for herself, so I can forgive it.
The screenplay is less convincing when it makes the characters explain too much. Pumpkin’s loneliness is strongest when we see it through her rituals, behavior and desperate excitement. We do not need every emotional detail spoken aloud. Some of the dialogue feels designed to catch the audience up instead of coming naturally from people trapped in this situation.
The supporting antagonists are also fairly disposable. Thalia has enough presence to register as a genuine threat, but most of her followers exist to give Pumpkin and Wendy somebody to fight. The movie hints at a larger, uglier world outside the farmhouse but never develops much of it. At around 80 minutes, it moves quickly, although the short runtime also keeps its better ideas from growing into anything substantial.
The relationship between Pumpkin and Wendy gives the ending some heart. Both have been damaged by isolation in different ways, and neither fits comfortably into the group that was supposed to protect them. Watching them bury the bodies, gather what remains of Pumpkin’s Halloween decorations and leave together on their bicycles is quietly hopeful without pretending the world has suddenly become safe.
Hallowarrior is strongest when it is about a lonely girl using Halloween to keep herself alive. It becomes more ordinary when the scavengers arrive and the killing starts, which is an odd problem for a horror movie to have. The setup promises something stranger and more emotionally complicated than the home-invasion story ultimately delivers.
Still, the location work is strong, the cinematography is consistently above what I expected, several effects land and Shapiro gives Pumpkin enough humanity to hold the movie together. Sottak’s feature debut shows real visual instincts, even when some of the writing and that bizarre orange hallucination sequence work against them.
I went into Hallowarrior wondering whether the title belonged to a movie worth watching. It does. Just barely more trick than treat, perhaps, but certainly not an empty wrapper.
6.2/10
Hallowarrior is now streaming on Shudder.
