31 Nights of Horror: Night Thirteen, "Eden Lake"

Eden Lake is perfect evidence of a couple of things: there is not enough nihilism in modern horror, and not enough Kelly Reilly, either. Somewhere along the way, as slashers and final girls became the face of the genre, the bitter edge of late-seventies thrillers and early-eighties horror was dulled by the unfounded belief that someone needs to survive in order for such movies to have good, dramatic arcs--in short, to make them more palatable. Shortly after Eden Lake, one of three horror movies starring Kelly Reilly, Kelly Reilly stopped taking roles in horror movies and committed to tepid period pieces, dramedies, and shlock like Heaven Is For Real, despite being well-poised to do much, much more.

Reilly plays Jenny Greengrass, a schoolteacher in a relationship with Steve Taylor (Michael Fassbender). We know what’s going to happen the moment we realize they’re heading for a remote lakeside camp in the woods, but what we don’t expect are the antagonists. Eden Lake, like other British horror-thrillers Citadel and Heartless, is part of a rash of movies tenuously connected to one another by their thematic preoccupation with “Broken Britain,” a political term meant to evoke a country overrun with underage crime and immorality and threatened by “hoodies,” shorthand for dangerous youth identified by--you guessed it--the wearing of hoodies. From this angle, Eden Lake is a modern day exploitation movie (neo-exploitation? Maybe hoodiesploitation?), taking advantage of public fears for entertainment's sake, and it doesn’t do much to shake that classification. Nor should it. Eden Lake is uncompromising horror: a brutal, despondent, and angry movie that offers every reason to give groups of teenagers the side eye for weeks after. It’s sickly blue pallor lends the movie’s rampant cruelty an unnatural glow, and its impenetrable shadows seem to ooze blood and sweat. 

Reilly, throughout, is a born genre star, imbuing her character’s emotionally complex progression from victim to aggressor and back with a lived-in authenticity that lingers just as long as the movie’s terrifyingly hopeless climax. Like Britain itself, the movie stands on the shoulders of its forebears, so it’s not hard to spot shades of The Wicker Man and the influence of Hammer Film’s darker, unsmiling side reflected through Eden Lake; but the movie’s gut-level punch and the nasty psychological bruise it leaves are wholly its own. This is the antithesis of palatable, just as horror movies should be.

-Brian L.

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