Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: David Charbonier, Justin Powell
Starring: Lonnie Chavis, Ezra Dewey, Kristin Bauer Van Straten, Scott Michael Foster, Micah Hauptman
Following their recent impressive debut
The Djinn, writer/directors David Charbonier and Justin Powell
return with The Boy Behind the Door. Like their debut, it's another confined thriller that sees a young boy
battling evil inside a house. This time the evil hasn't been summoned from
some other dimension, but rather it's of the very human variety.
12-year-old buddies Bobby (Lonnie Chavis) and Kevin (The Djinn's young lead Ezra Dewey) are on their way to a Little League game
when they're abducted by an unseen assailant. Hours later Bobby wakes up in
the trunk of a car, which he manages to break free from. Making a dash for
freedom, Bobby hears the cries of Kevin coming from inside a house. Rather
than leaving his best bud to who knows what form of hardship, Bobby turns
back, enters the house and sets about freeing his friend, who is locked
inside an upstairs room.
What follows is initially similar in setup to The Djinn, with a young boy skulking around a house trying to evade an antagonist.
As it progresses it becomes something of a mini Die Hard, with Bobby taking on the role of a pint-sized John McClane as he turns
the tables on his adult enemies. It could be compared to a thriller riff on
Home Alone, but of course that movie was just a family friendly version of the French
thriller 3615 Code Pere Noel, in which a resourceful young boy battles a home invader dressed as Santa
Claus.
Bobby is similarly resourceful, which is crucial in elevating the film
beyond icky exploitation. Putting young kids in peril in horror movies often
can easily come off as distasteful. Yet despite various physical wounds
inflicted on our two young heroes,
The Boy Behind the Door never uses Booby and Kevin as punching
bags. This isn't torture porn, rather it's the tale of a resourceful child
fighting back against an adult foe.
What's refreshing about The Boy Behind the Door is how it
reverses the gender dynamics of most horror movies. Here we get a "final
boy" and a female antagonist. Like the best final girls, Bobby's
resourcefulness is balanced with vulnerability, allowing us to both fear for
his safety and applaud his ingenuity. Chavis is as impressive in the lead
role here as his co-star Dewey was in The Djinn. Charbonier and Powell make great use of the expressive nature of
children's faces, and I can't help but think of their two movies to date as
horror appropriations of Little Rascals shorts. There's an
element of Tom & Jerry in how the directors keep the
camera at the level of their young leads, with Kristin Bauer van Straten's villainess only shown from the knees down for a large chunk of the
film.
As the tables begin to turn and Bobby and Kevin turn to violence
themselves, the movie adopts the feel of the great 1970s grindhouse
thrillers in which mild-mannered folk were forced to turn homicidal to save
their skins. There's something wonderfully transgressive about how
Charbonier and Powell have their leads clad in a symbol of American
innocence - the Little League baseball kit. With an ambiguous absence of
modern technology, The Boy Behind the Door has a timeless
quality. The film is dated however by the presence of a "Make America Great
Again" bumper sticker. Based on their first two movies, Charbonier and
Powell seem intent on making American genre filmmaking great again.
The Boy Behind the Door is on
Shudder now.
