Duplass & Duplass: Baghead (2008)

In some ways, it’s surprising that mumblecore didn’t gravitate into horror sooner, since there’s such an affinity between its low-key, lo-fi look and the kind of handheld horror that was also becoming popular in the mid-00s. At the same time, though, mumblecore was already attuned to a different kind of horror from what we normally witness in horror films – the horror of there being nothing really at stake, rather than the horror of everything being at stake. Perhaps that’s why, in Baghead, the Duplass brothers can only approach a more recognisable horror register through a kind of mumblecore self-parody – the film opens with a group of aspiring mumblecore actors, directors and screenwriters (played by Ross Partridge, Elise Muller, Steve Zissis and Greta Gerwig) who want to skip over the micro-indie demographic entirely and make a low-budget blockbuster that will launch them into the big time. From the very beginning, that aspirational vibe sets it apart from other mumblecore films, which often seem to exist in a kind of austere monadicism, completely indifferent as to whether anybody watches them or not. That’s not to say that it’s more streamlined than mumblecore, but that it’s a more inclusive awkwardness – at one point the script quotes Curb Your Enthusiasm – that propels the foursome to a cabin in the woods, where they start working on a screenplay. After discarding a wonderfully parodic mumblecore treatment – a “relationship film” that takes place in a single bathroom – they finally settle on a horror film about a cabin in the woods, at which point fact and fiction starts to fuse in unsettling ways, not unlike Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin In The Woods some five years later. However, because there are still traces of mumblecore, and mumblecore is such a low-key genre, the horror creeps up on you quite subliminally – it’s as if mumblecore silence gradually modulates into a different kind of silence, absorbed, gradually, into the hush of the woods. That makes for a remarkably atmospheric thriller, even or especially when it’s funniest – the foursome spend so much time trying to scare each other that they only start to get really scared (and scary) in an incremental, imperceptible way. Preciousness is very much a hallmark of mumblecore, and something it does quite distinctively, but there’s also something refreshing about seeing its charms, tics and nuances shorn of their cloistered insularity in the way that they are here, as the foursome have to start shedding their hangups just to survive. It’s perhaps ironic that that connectivity comes from being more physically isolated and constricted than ever before, but cabin-in-the-woods horror often works in just that way, taking you to what seems to be the very edge of the grid, only to reveal that you’re absolutely integral to it.