From Within - dir. by Phedon Papamichael Jr.

Netflix has really been ramping up their Instant View selection this year, in preparation, I’m sure, for an eventual total switch from physical DVDs to streaming films. For a while, their Instant catalogue, particularly the horror section, was kind of a grab bag, featuring some pretty bizarre, random—mostly lousy—movies, mixed in with a few classics. Now, at the end of 2010, I’m finding tons of interesting-looking films available to watch instantly, and coming across horror films I’ve never heard of that boast excellent user reviews and star ratings; it’s almost become difficult to keep up with the selection.

I don’t remember how I came across this one. It’s part of the After Dark/Lionsgate “8 Films To Die For” series, not all of which I’ve gotten around to yet. But I believe I discovered it from simply scanning the horror section in the Instant View for plots that sounded intriguing.

Well, here’s an intriguing plot: a small, conservative, religious town is besieged by a rash of suicides, which the pastor’s son and his cohorts believe are the work of a family who live off in the woods, and whose matriarch, a supposed witch, was burned to death a few years ago, blamed by the townspeople for the murder of a local man.

Fast-paced, yet sometimes very subtly spooky, From Within (2008) catches your attention in the first scene. A young girl (Rumer Willis, daughter of Bruce) sits outside with her boyfriend, sharing a romantic moment that ends with the boyfriend shooting himself in the face. Naturally distraught, the girl heads into town, to her father’s shop, barely able to speak, covered in blood. Before ten minutes are up (real time, not movie time), the girl and her father have both killed themselves in differing, equally disturbing, ways. So begins a wave of bizarre suicides that baffle the local community.

There’s a kid who lives on the outskirts of town, played by Thomas Dekker (John Connor from the two-season series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles), whose brother got the whole thing going by offing himself in front of Willis. It turns out, their mother was burned to death a few years back, after being accused witchcraft, and implicated in the death of a local man. It seems likely her death wasn’t the accident the newspapers reported it as.

The kid played by Dekker makes friends with a friend of the Willis character (Elizabeth Rice), and they go head to head with the pastor’s son (Kelly Blatz), a fired up, righteous, 18-year-old Pat Robertson, who makes no secret of his desire to wipe the witchcraft-practicing family off the map.

Everything moves very quickly. The above is only a very basic plot summary; there’s enough in this movie for a film twice as long—but the fast pacing and action aren’t presented in lieu of good characters or storytelling. There are some nice dramatic moments between Dekker and Rice, and Blatz is perfectly cast as the pastor’s son.

Director Phedon Papamichael Jr. shows us a church sermon, towards the beginning of the film, with Steven Culp, as Pastor Joe, giving an energetic sermon to help the townspeople deal with the three suicides of the day before. The scene ends with Pastor Joe’s son confronting him, looking at his father with nothing but disgust, and telling him, “What those people need to hear is faith. You just gave them a cheap Hallmark card,” or something to that extent. It sets the tone for the rest of the movie. At first, it seemed hard to swallow that the most popular kid in school is the pastor’s son, but shortly in, I accepted this, and also began to hate the Blatz character, who uses his position as a local leader of sorts to gather together a large group of hateful, pissed off fundamentalists to take on the devil in their midst.

There’s a lot about religion, Christianity, witchcraft, dark magic, and whatnot, but the movie doesn’t get preachy with it, and there are plenty of scary images and sudden, violent deaths to remind you that it’s a horror film, first and foremost.

Intense, occasionally thoughtful, disturbing, and overall fairly scary, From Within is one of the best films After Dark has brought us yet.