Flasz On Film

In a conversation about horror filmmaking, or genre filmmaking in general, originality is by no means important to the success in the field. I think this is a well-established fact. Moreover, the comfort of familiarity is what often breeds interest. However, any rejection of originality while concocting a genre movie should never be seen as an invitation to abdicate authenticity. Which is what people behind Cobweb were probably not aware of.  

On paper, this feature directorial debut from Samuel Bodin presents itself as something anyone even vaguely aware of what’s been going on in the world of mainstream horror filmmaking over the last two decades would easily see through. And it’s totally fine because, as we have established, originality is not a requirement to a successful horror film. Therefore, when we meet little Peter (Woody Norman) and see him suffer through nightmares, we already might have an idea about where the film could go. Are we in The Exorcist land? Are we in Poltergeist world? Or maybe are we feeling frisky today and what we are in is something more akin to The Sixth Sense or The Others? Or maybe we are in an elevated horror rendition of any of those templates and maybe Cobweb wants to stay closer to Insidious, Malignant, The Night House and Hereditary?  

Who knows? So, we push on. The filmmakers do make sure to invest some effort into establishing a dreadful tone of the movie with sparse lighting and occasionally effective scare generation as they develop a narrative suggesting we might be after all either in a ghost story with a twist, or one with a metaphorical layer running close to its epidermis. Therefore, we do pay attention to why exactly Peter’s parents (Lizzy Caplan and Anthony Starr) behave so strangely, why there are pumpkins all over the garden, and why the presence with whom Peter engages in nightly conversations might be setting him up to fall into a trap. This is all telegraphed using very rudimentary shorthand, which also function as primary references to other more successful movies. You know – plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. And as long as the movie works, it’s all fine and dandy.  

But the movie doesn’t work, that’s the issue. I mean, it does work infrequently in building scares by way of deploying music, using negative spaces, camera movements and creepy looking makeup, but that’s expected. And just reacting to semi-competent use of scare tactics does not good movie make. You watch anything on an adult version of YouTube which shall remain nameless and what you watch may elicit a physiological response. It won’t mean what you watch is a good film. It’s just biology.  

If you really think about it – and it won’t take long for you to start scratching your head and maybe even reach the same conclusions I came to while watching this movie – Cobweb lacks something. We know for a fact it renounces originality because we can firmly establish right off the bat it is trying to tap into grooves, we should find familiar. So, what is the difference between a film like this and Barbarian or X, both of which clearly draw lots of inspiration from other works and openly relish these references? 

Authenticity. Cobweb does the same things. It plays the same notes. Uses the same genre chords. But you know in your heart of hearts that the musician playing those notes and using those chords does so not because they are driven to use them, but because the playbook says they must be used. It is as though Samuel Bodin and his entire gang of co-conspirators worked out of a hymn sheet. They used these genre-specific tools because “this is how you make horrors” not because they instinctively felt it is cool to make horrors. And that’s a big difference.  

Therefore, the entire movie plays out like a product rendered by an AI model trained on the last two decades of horror movies. You can even call it WanGPT to feel sassy. But the point is that it looks and feels like a product assembled using a well-engineered algorithm, not a movie made by people and propelled by a genuine passion for making an entertaining and authentic genre piece.  

Sadly, Cobweb – effective as it may be on occasion – is nothing but an inauthentic collage of tropes put together because they mathematically add up to a cohesive piece in the subgenre Bodin and his peeps were trying to make their movie exist. Once you realize it, the entire experience of watching it becomes effectively worthless because the whole point of watching any horror movie – even the most unoriginal ones – is to feel the passion the filmmakers had for the idea of telling a scary story you might already know by heart anyway. I’m sorry but Cobweb comes across as a product that came together in meeting rooms, where a bunch of people argued over PowerPoint slides about whether to give nightmare-mom long fingers because it is 21% more likely to generate a positive response in the viewer, with an added 6% if the image is included in the trailer.  

Therefore, it becomes impossible to excuse the film’s abundant stupidities, because you know deep down they are not there because someone didn’t know better or because the filmmaker’s favourite movies were just as dumb. You know it because you know the people behind the camera are not having fun either. They are playing from sheet music they don’t even like. Have you ever heard a wedding band playing a Metallica song? It’ll sound correct. But it won’t have the heart a cover song performed by a garage band of teenagers who love Metallica would have. It just isn’t the same.  

As a result, Cobweb fails at its primary mission of providing familiar entertainment because it lacks authenticity. It is nothing more than a medley of images, themes and ideas pooled from all over the genre – from J-horror to the elevated haunted house stories of the recent past – that somehow do not add up to a fundamentally fun experience. Sure, the movie is occasionally scary, but then again, I think I’d be able to put together a scary scene with my own personal knowledge of the genre.  

The sheer lack of vision and principal belief in what making scary movies means to devoted genre filmmakers is Cobweb’s ultimate undoing. This entire movie – on the back of its mercantile approach to storytelling – is just a waste of time and money because it does not have the one thing a good horror movie should have – a heart. It’s a tin man. A hollow shell. A campfire story with a sizeable budget that makes Mama from a decade ago look like The Conjuring. And don’t even get me started on the villain, because what the filmmakers decided on simply must have originated with the aforementioned WanGPT.