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(How do YOU Halloween?) COBWEB: An Underrated Halloween Treat with a Terrible Trick

By. Bee Delores

 

COBWEB is a better version of BARBARIAN. Chris Thomas Devlin’s script “twists the bones and bends the back,” as the Sanderson Sisters cast a haunted, torturous spell on Thackery Binx in HOCUS POCUS. Devlin tips his hat to Wes Craven’s THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS while supplying plenty of terrifying tricks and terrible treats of his very own. Director Samuel Bodin masterfully takes the material and launches it into the stratosphere with spin-tingling camera work and a polished, yet moody, visual style. The filmmaking team wraps upsetting child abuse and bullying inside a Halloween haunt that lands a spot in yearly rotation next to the likes of HALLOWEENTOWN, TRICK ‘R TREAT, HELL FEST, HELL HOUSE LLC, and TALES OF HALLOWEEN. Where BARBARIAN featured a plethora of questionable decisions from its lead, COBWEB sees its two protagonists do everything right in the face of evil.

Peter (Woody Norman) has it rough. He’s not only being bullied at school by Brian (Luke Busey), but he also endures emotional and psychological torment from his parents, Carol (Lizzy Caplan) and Mark (Anthony Starr). They reprimand him for little thing and shrug off his claims that he hears a voice coming from inside his walls. “Flights of fancy,” his mom calls them. Mark embodies toxic masculinity, his stern expressions, even when he’s joking around, feel like a thousand black widows creeping up your spine. Carol and Mark bear a striking resemblance to Mother and Father in THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, with their mental mania informing how they carry themselves and approach the world around them. Their house appropriately captures that suffocating feeling of decay, its derelict facade hinting at the horrors that rattle and shake behind chipped paint and crumbling boards.

Peter’s substitute teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman) is the only adult in his life that checks in with how he’s doing. Whether that’s dealing with Brian throwing a pencil at Peter’s face or questioning why he isn’t out playing during recess, Miss Devine emerges as a beacon, a life jacket for Peter as he doggy-paddles through the muck of his sad existence. He can never get any peace. During art class, Miss Devine instructs the kids to draw monsters, but Peter sketches a troubling picture of him being swallowed by darkness in his bedroom. “Help!” is scrawled in a speech bubble above his head. While Miss Devine probably should have checked with the principal, she did the right thing by going to his house and sharing the drawing with Carol. Well, she thinks she’s doing the right thing, but she has no idea of the terror Peter experiences.

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It’s not until much later that Carol reveals the picture to Mark. And he fills with rage and damns his son to a night locked in the basement. Carol is visibly distraught but complies, nonetheless, pulling out the refrigerator that hides a secret door. The night falls like dominoes, and by the morning light, Carol slinks down the stars with a tray of pumpkin cupcakes–a frightening image that hammers home the film’s innately unshakable scares. COBWEB mines its allegorical soil for a tremendous story that presses the audience to dig a little deeper and excavate unsettling layers of the human mind. At this very moment, there’s a child in despair somewhere in the world–or rather, countless children. Abusive parents take out their own long-buried pain on their offspring in increasingly violent ways. Remember The Turpin Family?

Inside the walls, a strange voice of a young girl named Sarah (Aleksandra Dragova) keeps calling to Peter in the midnight hours. It’s sweet, almost lyrical–until she reveals that she’s actually Peter’s sister. Carol and Mark didn’t want her, so they trapped her in the walls and placed an antique grandfather clock in front of the entrance. Sarah lay in wait for many years, counting down the days until Peter was grown enough and could help her escape. Peter also faces his own dilemma: what to do about his menacing, meddling parents. 

In one of the film’s most essential conversations, Sarah convinces Peter that, perhaps, it is time to put an end to the relentless abuse. Much like Gypsy Rose conspiring with her boyfriend to murder her mother, who suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and Lyle and Erik Menindez shooting their parents after years of sexual abuse, Peter and Sarah reclaim their lives, and Peter pours rat poison into his parents’ soup. They’re dead within minutes. After releasing Sarah from her imprisonment, she reveals herself to be a monster. Years of no human contact and sunshine turned her into the thing Carol and Mark had become. She took her time, manipulated Peter, and ultimately symbolizes the failed system that ignores abused children, leading many to eventually abuse others.

With the help of Miss Devine, Peter traps Sarah in the floor of the basement. But what Sarah says next chills the blood: “Do you really gonna think this is gonna keep me down here? Every night... when you lie in bed... you'll wonder if you locked the door, or saw a shadow move,” she whispers with a ghostly moan. E”very creak, every groan, every tap in the wall, you'll think of me. We're family Peter.”

Chris Thomas Devlin’s inclusion of that final moment both twists together the thematic threads, but it also demonstrates exactly how horrifying the film really is. With Samuel Bodin’s expert direction driving the horror, COBWEB more than earns its place among the great, cult classics of Halloween. The film has been needlessly decimated online, but it has plenty to offer in the way of pure fear, strong emotional blocks, and performances that force the knife further into the skin. This Halloween, give it another chance, you just might learn to love it.

Bee has been willing to go to bat for horror movies whose reputations deserve another look before. Her revisit of HOUSE OF WAX (2005) digs beneath the wax to find a distinctly millennial nightmare shaped by the anxieties of its era.