Trench 11 (2017): written by Matt Booi and Leo Scherman; directed by Leo Scherman; starring Rossif Sutherland (Canadian Lieutenant Berton), Robert Stadlober (Reiner), Charlie Carrick (Doctor), Shaun Benson (German Kapitan Muller), Ted Atherton (British Major Jennings), and Luke Humphrey (U.S. Captain Cooper):
Enjoyable low-budget Canadian horror movie filmed in Manitoba and Ontario. Rossif Sutherland is an appealing Everyman as a Canadian 'tunneler' in WWI. He's supposed to be on leave as the war enters its last days. But British Military Intelligence needs him to help a small group investigate a mysterious underground German complex in the Ardennes.
Well, and we all know how respectful British intelligence officers are of human life, allied or otherwise. Because the Ardennes are under American control, the squad consists of four American infantry, two British officers, and our Canadian tunneler.
It's no surprise to discover that the Germans were developing a new weapon before something happened and they sealed the complex, badly. Once the squad enters the complex, things rapidly go sideways.
Trench 11 becomes something of a surprise at this point, focusing on humanity's capacity for monstrosity rather than on some pitched battle against super-zombies. The film-makers do a nice job of conveying the claustrophobia and confusion going on far below the surface of the Earth. It's a terse and effective film. Recommended.
The Terror by Arthur Machen (1916): Written in a straightforward journalistic style that's unlike Machen's earlier works of weird fiction that include "The White People" and "The Great God Pan," The Terror is instead the great-grandfather of Max Brooks' World War Z. The Terror depicts its events as real, investigated by the unnamed narrator.
Those events aren't zombie attacks -- they're mysterious deaths breaking out in various locations throughout Great Britain during World War One. Have the Germans landed some sort of hidden force on the British Isles? Is someone using a mysterious 'Z-Ray' to smother people or send them running off cliffs to their deaths? Or is there something wrong with the animal kingdom?
Machen was writing furiously at this time in his life, forced into newspaper work in order to pay the bills. The Terror isn't the imaginative and literary triumph that the aforementioned stories were, but it's still an enjoyable and often weird book. It's also an important permutation in horror's long love affair with the pseudo-documentarian style. Where 'letters' and 'journal entries' once told us that what we were reading was 'real,' now the journalistic voice does.
It's also a mutation of something going back to at least Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. In that early 18th-century work, DeFoe told a fictional 'you-are-there' story about a real event. Machen embeds The Terror in the real, early events of the Great War and then, like DeFoe, tells everything as a piece of actual reportage. It's a major stylistic leap.
There are many fine moments of horror and pity throughout The Terror, along with some marvelously weird images. Machen captures the way fear can travel through gossip when the official channels are trying to hide the problem. A late-novel tableaux of horror at an isolated farm is especially well-managed through the description of the aftermath and through a dead man's journal describing the mysterious and terrible events that led to that aftermath.
There are a couple of flaws to note. One isn't so much a flaw as a relative lack of closure. Things just sort of stop. This first flaw is exacerbated by the second, which is the narrator's jaw-dropping, climactic theory about why what happened, happened. It's an explanation totally in keeping with Arthur Machen's beliefs about society. But it's a moment of political and social commentary that will leave a sour aftertaste with anyone who doesn't long to live in a medieval fiefdom. I kid you not. Recommended.
