The Pale Door, on Shudder

The Dalton Gang would be better off trying to rob two banks simultaneously in Coffeyville, Kansas than spending a night in this sinister town. There are no banks in “Potemkin,” but the bordello offers more dangers than mere communicable diseases in Aaron B. Koontz’s The Pale Door, which premieres tomorrow on Shudder.

In this Weird West, the Dalton family is much smaller. After the bloody prologue, only Duncan, the leader of the Dalton Gang, and his younger, straight-arrow brother Jake are still alive. However, Lester, a freed slave and fellow gang-member, has been like a surrogate father to Jake. Naturally, the one heist Jake volunteers to help with turns deadly dicey. They thought they were stealing some valuable cargo from its Pinkerton escorts, but they find a woman chained up in that trunk.

She is a strange one alright, but with Duncan slowly dying from a gut-shot, they agree to follow Pearl to her home town of Potemkin. Of course, entering town is the easy part. Leaving is another matter. The one-horse burg seems to consist entirely of a suspiciously hospitable brothel-saloon and an abandoned church. Needless to say, the ladies are not what they appear—and they are quite interested in Jake’s innocent blood.

The narrative of Pale Door (a reference to a Poe quote, the relevance of which will not be immediately obvious) is pretty standard stuff. An ancient coven of shape-shifting, blood-consuming witches preys on a pack of dumb cowboys. Eh.

Shudder: Scare Package

It is getting to the point where a lot of horror viewers will not have any personal memories of video stores. Sadly, the Upper Eastside holdout, the Video Room, closed last year and Vulcan Video, the store thanked in this film’s’ credits was shuttered because of the CCP-Virus shutdown (thanks again, Xi). Yet, the archetype of the horror movie nerd-video-store clerk persists. At least it does in the horror-comedy anthology-mash-up Scare Package, which premieres today on Shudder.

Package sets the ironic-meta tone early and often in Emily Hagins’ “Cold Open,” where we meet a struggling actor, coincidentally named Mike Myers, who is desperate to stay in his next film past the prologue set-up. Of course, it does not work out as he hoped. This segment segues into Aaron B. Koontz’s “Rad Chad’s Horror Emporium,” which sort of acts as a framing device for the other constituent stories that will be introduced as films-within-the-film, playing on the store’s monitors.

Weirdly, Chris McInroy’s “One Time in the Woods” and frequent genre thesp Noah Segan’s directorial debut “M.I.S.T.E.R.” would probably be funnier if they were in separate anthology films, because they both start out pretending to be about one sort of monster, before revealing the more pressing horror is something else entirely. Still, the ensembles for both (including Segan portraying a frustrated husband) are impressively energetic (even manic, in the case of “Woods”).

Perhaps the funniest segment is Anthony Cousins’ “The Night He Came Back Again! Part IV: The Final Kill,” where we see the Fourth of July Killer’s favorite victim try to turn the tables on her tormentor, yet again. Thematically, this is a lot like Shant Hamassian’s short film, Night of the Slasher, but Cousins and co-screenwriter John Karsko take it to much gorier and more absurdist extremes.

Courtney & Hillary Andujar’s “Girls’ Night Out of Body” has an appealing retro vibe, but they do not have a chance to fully develop their concept before the abrupt O.Henry-ish ending. Baron Vaughn’s “So Much to Do” also earns considerable style points, but the tale of shadowy figures and a struggle for control over an earthly body does not make a lot of sense.

Camera Obscura: Another Unusual Camera

It is like the camera in the Twilight Zone episode “A Most Unusual Camera,” but it has an even more sinister backstory. Once owned by a serial killer, it develops pictures that foretell grisly deaths, including that of a PTSD-suffering war photographer’s wife. Suddenly, Jack Zeller must scramble to arrange for substitute victims. Of course, that sort of makes him a serial killer too in Aaron B. Koontz’s Camera Obscura (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Zeller’s last assignment really messed him up. To get him back on the horse, his wife Claire gives him a vintage German camera and arranges a gig taking photos of her company’s latest real estate development. Somehow, he manages to find a photo developer still in business (you’d think a pro like him would have his own darkroom facilities, but whatever). However, his pictures turn out a little funny. For some reason, the color film prints in black-and-white. Several shots also depict gruesome death scenes he surely would have noticed at the time.

Of course, each sinister photo soon comes to pass. The first are merely accidental deaths, but they become increasingly gory. They also start to feature Claire as the dead body, but Zeller discovers he can replace his wife in the photos by killing another victim in the same place and manner. He tries to pick replacements who have it coming, but his substitute killings really get complicated when the cops start to suspect.

Even though there are several forerunners to Koontz and Cameron Burns’ tale of evil photo prescience, including a Goosebumps YA chapter book, Obscura is still a rather stylish exercise in the macabre. In fact, it works rather well, precisely because it abides by its own internal rules. (Those time-stamps are a hard and fast deadline Zeller must observe.)

Christopher Denham’s moody brooding is almost too much of a good thing. It is hard to imagine living with Zeller after a while, but during the first act, he and Nadja Bobyleva’s Claire make an appealingly down-to-earth everyday-people-looking couple. Genre regular Noah Segan (The Mind’s Eye, Redeemer) also brings a lot of attitude and energy as Zeller’s best friend, Walt. Plus, Catherine Curtin and Chase Williamson (SiREN, Beyond the Gates) provide a credible foil and the voice of reason, as the “bad cop” and “good cop” dogging Zeller.

A horror film structured around uncanny photography had better look right, but fortunately cinematographer Chris Heinrich gives it an eerily effective shimmer of mystery. Visually distinctive and well-cast (especially in its supporting roles), Camera Obscura is quite a promising debut from Koontz. Recommended for horror fans, it opens this Friday (6/9) in New York, at the Cinema Village and in LA at the Arena Cinelounge Sunset.