[Note: To do the sort of detailed analysis of the film that I like to do requires some spoilers. I’m not going to tag each one. If you’d rather see this movie cold, go watch it, then come back.]
Here’s the official marketing blurb:
20 years after a horrific accident during a small town school play, students at the school resurrect the failed show in a misguided attempt to honor the anniversary of the tragedy – but soon discover that some things are better left alone.
After reading a review that literally begged the reader not to go see The Gallows I was a bit disappointed. I’d seen the original movie trailer and the movie had seemed promising, so I’d been looking forward to it for some months. The scene in the trailer used my favorite filming technique of allowing something to slowly move out of the background without further comment. I was hoping that it would be a film that had the confidence to let things be scary without trying to force it to be scary. Despite the awful reviews I read, it largely succeeds in that regard, and the movie is scary.
However, the movie has some serious problems as well, and the signs of those problems were evident right from the trailer. While those problems are very real, I don’t think this movie deserves the harsh reviews it’s received. Hopefully I’ll be able to highlight some of the things that make this film very worth watching (and you should watch it), but I’m not going to go easy on its flaws.
The two biggest complaints I’ve read about The Gallows are bad acting and predictability. I’ll address these first: I don’t think the acting was bad in this film. The characters were teenagers, and they acted like teenagers. They made a lot of stupid decisions, and are generally asshats, but that isn’t out of character. A specific charge I read said that the actors seemed like they were in fact attempting to method-act being bad at acting—but were themselves bad at it. I quite simply don’t agree with that charge. The acting seemed lively to me; their fear was convincing. I think that the reviewer I read was conflating the fact that he hated all the characters with his perception of their acting skills. While I partially agree in that I don’t like some of the characters, I thought their characterization was good, and I think the overall writing of the characters themselves was smart—more on that later.
Regarding predictability in the twist, I’m going to have to agree on this one, but I don’t think the twist specifically harms the film. There are some problems with the specifics of the plot, but overall I think the plot was strengthened by the twist rather than weakened. Without it, there wouldn’t have been any point to the events that happened, which, while still scary, would have strained credulity as to why such serious incidents had not taken place in the school’s theater before then—and credulity is a thing that this film cannot afford to spend freely. More on that later as well.
There are few things scarier than heavy footsteps above you.
The setting—and I’m a sucker for setting—is great. (On the other hand, the stage doesn’t have a ghost light, so what the fuck did they expect was going to happen?) The film does an excellent job of showcasing the labyrinthine bowels of their high school, full of cramped and forgotten spaces that come about only in structures that have had time to become cancerous. Despite the characters becoming trapped inside by an unlockable door that mysteriously repairs itself and becomes unopenable, they roam all over the place, giving the film a sense of pace and context. The supernatural events only reach full swing after the audience has had time to become exposed—but not familiar—with the layout, such that when the bad things start to happen the audience’s state of spatial disorientation is only n+1, with just enough mental picture of where things are happening to create a sense of isolation without frustration.
Let’s get back to that scene from the preview. The scene is simple: A girl—her name is Cassidy—sits on the landing of a stairwell, looking into the camera. Over her right shoulder—viewer’s left—are the stairs down. Over her left shoulder—viewer’s right—is presumably a set of stairs up, though we can’t be sure; it could be a hallway; it’s shrouded in complete shadow to the point that we can’t see more than a few feet behind her. She is crying.
The scene doesn’t rush itself. This is where the film shines: the viewer is given enough time to become comfortable with the scene. It takes time to absorb all the details of a shot, and until the disorientation of a new visual context subsides the only possible effect that something scary appearing can have is to startle the viewer, not scare him. It doesn’t pay to wait too long, but dread—infinitely more effective than its cheaper imitators—requires patience. The Gallows understands this, and many many scenes in the movie take full advantage.
Eventually, once the viewer has absorbed the scene, he will—if he is smart—begin to look for the avenues by which something awful could appear. In this case, the two avenues that make sense are the corner at the bottom of the stairs down (something could slowly come around the corner in the background, slightly out of focus) and the shadows (mostly in focus, but the penumbra is far enough back that anything appearing out of it would be close enough to be extremely threatening but far enough away that it wouldn’t seem forced—in other words, the distance to the penumbra leaves room for dread). I think either would have been effective, but the film sets itself up with a theme of loose claustrophobia, meaning that the characters are trapped but they have plenty of room to move around, and so the shadows make more sense in this context—and that’s exactly where the Scary Thing does come from.
It appears slowly, with a smooth action that seems almost like gliding, but with enough
ambiguity virtue of the shadows that the viewer cannot immediately determine whether the thing is actually gliding or whether it is merely walking smoothly. This ambiguity ultimately increases the uncanniness. The figure appears to be a hangman, complete with dark hood. Holy shit.
The camera zooms in on Cassidy, so that the viewer can only make out a tiny fraction of the space behind and over her shoulder. Though Cassidy’s tears are highly effective (much more so than the similar shot in The Blair Witch Project), it’s that tiny spot over her shoulder that the viewer watches. We see some movement as the Hangman gets rapidly closer to Cassidy, and she turns around as if she felt the movement—there’s nothing there. In this situation, there are two options for where the Scary Thing has gone: it has either disappeared, which would be consistent with the Hangman’s supernatural behavior elsewhere in the film, or it has gone down the stairs and around the other corner out of 
sight, which is also possible, but makes less sense than simply disappearing. The camera zooms back in on Cassidy for a moment, so that the viewer can see only her face, before pulling back gradually, much like the movement of the Hangman into frame a moment earlier. The movement is so gradual that the audience is unlikely to recognize the rope that has appeared around Cassidy’s neck before she does; she realizes it not in one moment but in a series of heartbeats in which the viewer can plainly see her move from confusion to recognition to disbelief and finally to understanding—she gently touches the rope, which makes it real. Then she is jerked down the stairs and off camera. (The appearance of ropes, shown to the audience and characters without any jarring cue is used several other times to great effect elsewhere in the film.)
As I said earlier, this scene made me extremely hopeful for the movie, and it showcases the very best things about itself. I also said that the seeds of its problems were sown plainly as well. The first issue is why Cassidy is hugging the camera, and thus reveals the first hints that the camera point-of-view is going to cause problems: it doesn’t make sense for Cassidy to do this. She didn’t bring the camera here, and if it were truly just a matter of her being panicked and desperately grabbing onto anything for comfort, she would have been backed into the corner using the light from the camera to shine impotently against the shadows. Cassidy is a strong character, and not someone easily cowed (this is evident every time her asshole boyfriend Ryan is an asshole and she just raises her eyebrows at him and waits for him to back down). Thus, her character and the need for an in-character camera operator are in conflict. I’ll discuss this problem further below.
The second, and far more minor, issue with the scene is the fact that she gets dragged down the stairs rather than into the shadows. Now, flat out, I think it was way scarier to have her dragged down the steps in plain sight and past the focal point of the camera than it would have been to have her simply vanish into the shadows. It also wasn’t what I expected, so subverting my expectations was good. The trouble is that it doesn’t quite fit that the Hangman is in a position to do so, since he never had a chance to get down the stairs. Within the greater context of how the Hangman operates throughout the course of the movie, this is no longer a difficulty, but especially with only the knowledge the audience has in the trailer, it sticks out. The difficulties with the blocking of this scene, while not problematic within the full context, still disrupt the unity of the (admittedly scary as shit) scene, and leaves the audience with the nagging scent of artifice. But like I said, the scene is terrifying, and I loved it. It was wonderful to hear the people in the theater see the Scary Thing at different times, because it was never forced down their throats, and some people process visual information faster than others. The best horror is paced at the absorption speed of its audience.
The patient camerawork in which the audience—as well as the characters—resolves visual details in a realistic amount of time, and gradually at that, is evident throughout. The best examples are when Reese (or was it Ryan? I can’t remember, but that’s my fault, not the movie’s) finds a body hanging high up among the ropes. At first all he hears is the telltale creaking of a rope, and when he moves into the shadows to look for the source among all the other ropes, the hanging body is not immediately evident, though it is there from the beginning of the shot, too distant to be seen clearly. He gradually zooms in, and it takes him quite a while to recognize what he’s seeing. He doesn’t immediately freak out, probably because he can’t quite accept what he’s seeing—this adds believability, because most people take time to adjust to horribleness even if it is staring them plain in the face; they don’t immediately become genre-aware and go full munchkin. He gets called away by his friends before he can really absorb what he’s seen.
That technique was used extensively in the film, to its credit. The precedent was set in the very first example of supernatural events. Ryan is shown opening a locker, and out of his sight a different locker quietly swings open, and swings back shut with a bang at the same time Ryan closes his locker. Much like if someone is matching your footsteps, you can’t make them out, but it sounds off, and you notice. Ryan noticed, but had no reason to think anything out of the ordinary had happened yet, so he looks around, slightly confused, before his friends call him away. Just before the Creepy Thing happens, the audience is given a Paranormal Activity-esque clue via a low rumbling in the audio. That type of audio cue, combined with the fact that it came in a rare shot where the camera was sitting still, combine to create a sort of “creepy frame” indicating that it was time for the audience to be looking for something. I don’t think this in itself is bad, but it seemed ever so slightly out of touch with the filming style every time it happened (to the film’s credit, not every creepy frame had a Creepy Thing happen, and not every Creepy Thing happened in a creepy frame).
Camerawork makes or breaks a film. The smoothness throughout The Gallows is what makes it work, in contrast to the choppiness that ruined Saw and the 1999 remake of House on Haunted Hill. Regrettably, for all the skill with which The Gallows is rendered, it is camerawork that undermines it most. Recall that in my analysis of I brought up how a fully framed found footage format in which all the film the viewer sees was filmed by characters within the film puts severe limits on the film as a whole. I praised Banshee Chapter for avoiding and subverting this problem by using a silent narrator, and only using in-character footage selectively, when someone was watching said film. The Gallows is an equally perfect example of what happens when a director ignores the limitations imposed by a fully framed found footage format.
Throughout, I found myself being pulled out of the movie by asking myself who was holding the camera, and why. These instances ranged from the humorous—for example, who holds a camera steady when desperately climbing a ladder?—to the puzzling: one scene in particular made me wonder why Pfeifer, who had run into the other three characters separately and was not involved in their filming of their activities, was holding the camera and dutifully filming everything clearly while they were running around. Clearly, what happened was that the director realized he needed a trailing shot, but due to the blocking of the scene, Pfeifer was the only character available to hold the camera, even though it made no sense for her to do so. At the end, after the twist, I was able to come up with a motive for her doing so, but if she had come to the theater with the intention of filming her and her mothers’ victims she would have brought her own camera, so it still doesn’t work.
Seriously, if you thought you saw something like this and you knew you’d had a camera rolling, wouldn’t you rewind to take a look?
Similarly, if all the characters seem to be holding cameras that are always filming, why do they never once review what they’ve filmed, even when they’re arguing over what they think they just saw? When one member of your party goes “I saw it, I swear to God I saw a shadow,” don’t you think it might be worth rewinding twelve seconds to see? Again, the format of the film places idiotic restrictions on the characters.
In addition to the problems imposed by the camera format, the film also suffered from overly intrusive “camera glitches.” Despite the fact that every horror film using found footage seems to think it’s cool, creepy, and ominous to have the camera glitch out, I have yet to see any camera glitch out in a way that cameras actually glitch. Everything instance of it in The Gallows seems artificial, and thus forced—a true shame, considering how restrained the overall cinematography is otherwise.
Regarding, the actors, the characters, and their characterizations: I think these were all done more smartly than people seem to realize. Each of the characters seems to have a personality; they are distinct from each other, and despite falling into tropic roles they have distinguishing features that separate them from flat stock characters. Cassidy is a hot cheerleader but she’s a being of free agency, not an airhead. She has an asshole boyfriend, and she lets him get away with more than she probably should, but she doesn’t give him free rein to be an asshat—when Ryan clearly oversteps his bounds and she holds her ground without arguing, it’s hilarious every time he spontaneously caves without her having to do anything but look at him without even changing her expression. Pfeifer rises above the drama geek role she’s put in and deflects completely Ryan’s attempts to stir up drama by telling her about Reese’s crush on her. Reese is more than an asshole jock or a sensitive jock; he seems to genuinely want to avoid letting anyone down, and allows Ryan to influence him into doing bad things. He’s ultimately a good person, evidenced by the fact that he goes back into the theater after escaping to try to save Pfeifer. Finally, Ryan is clearly an asshat, but he is not an irredeemable one. Once it becomes clear how badly his idea to destroy the set has hurt the people around him, he takes responsibility for his actions in an attempt to spare Reese in the eyes of Pfeifer.
“He’s only coming for me.”
Finally, the ending, and the twist. At the end, it seemed to me both natural and poetic when Reese realizes that he needs to slip into his character from the play; when he begins reciting his lines they seem both utterly appropriate and cast a backward glance over his efforts throughout the earlier parts of the movie. Reese’s struggles to learn his lines at the beginning echo his growing into his role, both in the sense of the play he is rehearsing for and the kind of man he wants to be. Pfeifer’s assurances to Reese and others that she knows he’ll do well and that he “knows his lines” becomes fascinating in light of the fact that she ultimately betrays him for the sins of his father. As Reese says his lines for the final time, he says them clearly, because for the first time he truly understands them. He has become the man he wants to be, and his death to protect Pfeifer is deliciously ironic.
I wish the film had ended there, with Pfeifer’s mom clapping in the audience like Shia LaBeouf. The film gave just enough focus on the “woman who had been there for the original run of the play” to foreshadow her involvement with later events, but it made no sense at all that she was Pfeifer’s mom. Unless she changed her name (something we are given no evidence for), why would nobody at the high school have picked up on the fact that the girl who proposed they rerun the play was the daughter of the previous victim’s girlfriend? Why had nobody at school ever met Pfeifer’s mother? Unfortunately, without this connection, Pfeifer has no motive, so there’s nothing to be done about it.
All of this could have been overlooked if not for the final section of found footage, this time from police officers arriving at Pfeiffer’s house to either look for or arrest her/her mother. The supernatural happenings at their house make no sense in the context of the rules of the Hangman, who seemed to haunt the school where he died, and not as some magical power of the Ross women. Don’t even get me started on the way that the policeman in the final bedroom films events (it did not look like a bodycam), or how the final frame of the film end in a cheap jump scare appearance by the Hangman that fell just as flat as Bagul’s at the end of Sinister. I read that Pfeifer is supposed to be the daughter of Charlie, which would explain some things, though I completely missed that on my viewing.
Overall opinion? This film has problems for sure, but it was great fun, and it was genuinely scary in ways that I loved. You should absolutely see it, just be aware of its flaws.
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2309260/
