For
horror enthusiasts, story-tellers sometimes become as important as their
stories. Think of the fandom inspired by the likes of Poe and King and Wes
Craven and Dario Argento. When done right, the act of story-telling stirs something
primal on an archetypal Beowulf level. These girls are perhaps not the
greatest story-tellers, but they inadvertently reveal much about themselves as
they spin their yarns in screenwriter-director Graham Swon’s The World is
Full of Secrets, which opens this Thursday at the Anthology Film Archives
(check them out getting into the Halloween spirit).
Clara
survived whatever happened that fateful night in 1996, but it had a profound
impact on the rest of her life. Her parents left her alone while they took some
kind of trip, as they always do, but they had no problem with her inviting a
few friends over (no boys, of course). To pass the languid time, Susie
challenges each girl to tell the most disturbing real-life anecdote they ever
heard. Looking back decades later, Clara can’t really remember the first story
itself, but we can see how innocently animated her friend gets in the telling.
Emily’s
story might just confuse and discomfort a lot of viewers, because it chronicles
the brutal martyring of a young Christian women during the repressive pagan
years of the Roman empire. However, Clara drops ominous hints that the horrors the
Roman protagonist would later befall the storyteller as well.
By
far, the scariest story we hear is the one told by Suzie, who suggested the
competition in the first place. It is a brutal tale that describes how easily average
people can slip into criminal madness through boredom and peer pressure, but
what really makes it frightening is the way Swon and young thesp Ayla Guttman
insidiously hint that perhaps Susie was in fact one of the participants in this
grisly affair.
Secrets
takes
an elliptical, almost experimental approach to horror, but it still manages to
burrow under your skin. The tone might be described as something like Picnic
at Hanging Rock on hallucinogens. The audience will have to concentrate a
little, but it is worth it. As a genre bonus, Swon stages two spooky incidents
in between the story-telling that will truly raise the hair on the back of your
neck. Frankly, the first fifteen minutes or so could have been tighter and one additional
bit of supernatural suggestiveness would have made it easier to recommend Secrets
to more aesthetically conventional viewers. However, adventurous horror
fans will definitely find the film rewarding.
