Film Review: Head Count (2018)

(This review contains minor spoilers.)

I picked up a Screambox trial so I’m checking out one of their featured movies, Head Count. Like an increasing number of films in the indie horror space, it opens with a warning that signposts pretty well where we are going:

A HISJI is a vengeful thing

Five times its name you never sing

With skin pale white and eyes of green

It’s something you’ve already seen

This set me up to be immediately dismissive, as I’m mildly annoyed when a poem, presumably detailing the evil spirit of some indigenous culture, rhymes in English. Any misguided accommodation my decidedly European ancestry might feel is trumped by the college kid in me who once took an introductory Linguistics class and loved it.

Fortunately, some immediate Googling revealed that the HISJI is not a real fixture of native folklore, but rather something invented for the purpose of this movie. Pretty smart play, as this directs anyone curious to results about the specific film rather than Wikipedia. Take note, writers.

From there the film abruptly cuts to a close-up of a green-eyed young man, Evan, and with the poem still fresh in my mind, I hope we’re not being too obvious. He drops some friends off at an airport terminal, then proceeds to drive across the city leaving messages on his older brother’s voicemail as he goes. We are somewhere in the southwestern United States, an always-excellent place for horror.

After a brief travel montage, Evan arrives at a lonely trailer where the aforementioned older brother, Peyton, lives. I don’t know why, but the aesthetic of single-wide trailers in the West hasn’t really evolved since the 1970s. All is wood paneling, leather, paisley, and shoehorned saddle shapes where saddle shapes need not be (I would love a trailer that stayed in the 1970s but adopted the space exploration fantasy aesthetic of the time. Crisp, colorless plastic walls. Shiny, oval windows through which mankind shall peer. Tight-metallic on anything that moves. No HISJIs here, just my Bowie Bulge).

Immediately, we understand that Evan is somewhat estranged from his older brother Peyton, and the two are spending a weekend together in an attempted first step to fixing that. They set out into the desert, their destination an ill-defined enclave where one might procure a sound bath.

Petyon, a hippy-type, cannot wait. Fortunately for Evan, between the bathhouse and the trailer is a wild group of handsome twenty-somethings, and one of them, a lovely young woman named Zo(e) will engage and waylay him for pretty much the remainder of the film. Evan and the nine (yes, nine) strangers smoke weed, all while the clean-lunged-and-livered Peyton works his way through a series of unsociable yoga stretches on a nearby rock for the remainder of the afternoon.

I begin to suspect the two brothers may not reunite until some trauma has played out. Perhaps a lot of it. The group of young folk ensure this is to be the case when they invite the brothers back to their vacation house–an offer Evan alone accepts.

At this point the setup has been routine, but I’m pleased with both the pacing and execution. It may be familiar territory, but the creators aren’t phoning it in, and the acting, writing, and development are all slightly above-average. The small touches of cynicism I felt at the outset recede, and am plugged in for wherever the film wants to go next.

Now at the rental house, we get our inciting incident for the horror to come: the characters take turns telling scary stories. However, there’s no creativity involved: apparently the current generation of young people, rather than make something up, just read creepypastas from the internet. Whatever.

Evan, of course, settles on the story of the HISJI, the first four lines of which are at the beginning of this review. Oh yeah, he also begins by repeating the word fives times, so we’re kind of rushed past the point of no return. The group promptly loses interest in the storytelling thereafter, and our cast takes turns chugging tequila from a bottle.

Right now my impression remains positive, the story treads old ground but with a lively step. I’ve seen films try less. The actors are likable, and the desert at night is a naturally isolating and creepy place.

As the party moves into later hours, we get a brief omniscient third-person sequence showing a view outside the house and a figure moving in the foreground. Phantom noises in the middle-distance scare Evan and Zo, driving them from the hot tub and their awkward kissing. The film is about to get going, and hopefully become a bit more interesting, as the solid energy it had at the outset has begun to taper off just a bit.

Hard cut to Evan waking up the next morning with five missed calls, presumably from Peyton. He wanders out to the shack behind the house and finds a mysterious, five-pointed symbol drawn into the wall. At the top of the sigil is a face that kind of looks like a devil, if said devil were a Canadian in South Park. The kids decide to move on, hiking up to a mountain top where we get a genuine holy shit moment as things go from creepy to dangerous.

I appreciate that Head Count decides to ramp up its horror in the daytime, as this makes for a natural build as the day wanes. This also means there’s a good bit of diversity in the scary moments, and the story has its finest moments as the HISJI torments the members of the group, both collectively and in isolation. I won’t be a Blumhouse trailer and give away all of the best moments, but the horror in this movie is where the creators show their best work. I’m more than happy to take a familiar setting and setup if you’re going to spend your creative capital on good scares, and I wish more indie creators took this approach.

The weirdness ramps up as characters start appearing in two places, and pretty soon it’s clear that the HISJI is a shapeshifting psionic who can distort perception and take on a new identity every time a back is turned or the lights go off. We have more tropes, including the always-fun blogs of dead people who have encountered the creature in another time and place, ham-fisted numerology, and completely unnecessary visual reveal of the CGI monster, but what’s important is that Head Count remains fun and entertaining. The plot has rules that it sticks to, and the weight of personal relationships is used to undermine the characters’ recognition of unexplainable events. No one questions that they are seeing the same person in succession without explanation for how the person got from point A to B. Even with this in mind, the denial seems natural, as people are so hesitant to acknowledge what they know to be impossible.

The end is solid in my assessment, with no serendipitous weakness in the creature or Peyton turning up with a shotgun to save the day (wait, that might have been fun). Head Count is a film that knows its purpose and avoids the sin of being boring, which is pretty much what audiences ask for at this level.

Verdict: 6/10

Strengths:

• Good scares

• Plays by the rules it defines

• Decent acting

Weaknesses

• Doesn’t do anything ambitious

• Unnecessary characters