There’s a potent nostalgia that permeates through many a horror director’s work. Depending on what they grew up with, genre directors like Rob Zombie and Ti West pay homage to their era of choice, hoping to replicate those warm and fuzzy feelings of gritty 70s exploitation (Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects) or golden age VHS (West’s The House of the Devil).
Steven C. Miller is definitely a guy from an Amblin age when kids battled with aliens and monsters in a largely parentless world. Like the much grander Super 8, Miller’s Under The Bed creates and harks back to a world before mobile phones and the Internet; it’s a world where kids live in big suburban houses, where boys ride their BMX’s to the local diner, and where action figures line the walls of their bedrooms. Indeed, it’s the Spielbergian touches that give Under The Bed its heart and an endearing quality.
Neal Hausman (Weston) has returned home after spending two years with his aunt in Florida, following the tragic death of his mother. However, something’s not quite right in the Hausman home. A strange evil lurks under the bed in Neal’s old room, which tormented him for years, and now it wants a shot at Paulie. With nobody believing their far-fetched story, the brothers try to survive and attempt to figure out a way to destroy the demon once and for all.
Certainly, it’s during the slow, puzzling build up where the movie works best, when the film taps into those childhood fears and teases with the prospect that something like many of us as kids assumed all along might well be under the bed, just waiting for us to fall asleep.
It’s a creepy prospect that Miller deals with in an intimate and restrained way. The film is ambiguous at first (we don’t know if the horror aspects of the story are all in Neal’s head, with his fears projected onto his kid brother) and treads safely on PG-13 ground. Then a contrasting final act undoes all of the hard work, turning into a bloody monster movie complete with decapitations and face melting.
Less is more is the key here, but Under the Bed is still a memorable experience and establishes Miller as a name to look out for. In fact, his remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night is already on its way.
Overall Verdict: An uneven mix of Amblin-esque horror and bloody monster movie.
Reviewer: Lee Griffiths