‘Mass Hysteria’ is a fun little horror-comedy about a witchy plague
A review of the horror film, premiering Wednesday on Facebook
The COVID-19 pandemic currently ravaging the Earth has led to wide-ranging consequences that have touched every aspect of life, from education to unemployment to healthcare. The entertainment industry in America has shut down as well, with production suspended just about everywhere and movie theaters around the country closing to prevent the spread of the disease.
With blockbusters being yanked from the release schedule and currently-running films slapped online for rental months ahead of time, smaller films have been turning to the web to innovate new release strategies at a time when more people are at home, consuming entertainment through the Internet, than ever before. One such film is the horror-comedy Mass Hysteria, directed by Arielle Cimino and Jeff Ryan; in partnership with the Salem Horror Fest, where it premiered last year, Mass Hysteria will have its online premiere Wed. 4/1 on Facebook Live. You can RSVP for the virtual screening here! It’s a fun little slice of escapism that’s definitely worth your time.
Filmed on-location in Salem, Massachusetts, Mass Hysteria is about a troupe of modern-day actors who put on a re-enactment of the Salem Witch Trials for annoying tourists. Paige (Geena Santiago), the actress who plays the witch on trial, is excited to be leaving Salem for an acting gig in New York; she just has to get through one last Halloween performance first. Unfortunately for Paige, just at the moment in the play where her character casts a curse, someone in the audience stands up, coughs up black goo, and keels over, dead.
Before long, as they continue to get sick, the tourists have convinced themselves that Paige is an actual witch. The night becomes a fight for survival as the cast flees the angry villagers, who are out to hang the witch before they all die from the spreading plague.
Mass Hysteria feels timely, given what the country’s going through right now. Half the country is afraid of getting sick or spreading the disease, and the other half thinks the whole thing is, well, mass hysteria. People around the country have made the 2011 film Contagion one of the most popular movies of the month, but that film may hit too close to home. Thankfully, Mass Hysteria offsets its respiratory illness plot with a fair bit of humor.
The opening of the film contains a number of sight gags reminiscent of the opening of Shaun of the Dead, as Simon Pegg wanders obliviously through what viewers can clearly see is the beginning of a zombie outbreak. Here, as Paige heads in to work on Halloween, chatting away on the phone, she crosses paths with a tourist dressed as a black cat, accidentally bumps into someone who drops a mirror they were carrying, and ducks under a ladder, never noticing all the bad luck she’s accumulating for her night. While it’s clearly low-budget, the film is shot and edited very well, maximizing the comedic impact of its visual jokes.
The film feels like a fun inversion of zombie films, which is neat, too. Usually the mindless hordes are the dead ones, chasing down the living to feast on their brains. Here, though, the frightening mass is made up of the survivors of the plague; they’re getting sick, so they still look gaunt and scary like zombies often do, but they’re acting as a scary horde so they don’t die. We even get a classic-zombie shot of the horde pressed up against glass, pawing to get inside, one of several winking acknowledgements of the genre.
My biggest complaint is that, at barely more than an hour long, the plot feels a tad undercooked. I wish they’d either taken more time to develop the characters before kicking off the curse — the first tourist drops dead less than 15 minutes in — or had trimmed some of the slightly-repetitive running-and-hiding scenes that make up the final act and made it a solid half-hour, 45-minute short instead.
In addition, much of the film takes place at night, and in some of the scenes, it’s difficult to make out what exactly is going on because everything is so dark. It’s probably a function of the budget, but I wish they’d chosen to set more of the film in the daytime, or at least in well-lit areas of the town, since it’s supposed to be a big tourist destination on Halloween.
Overall, though, it’s very solid. The actors acquit themselves well, especially Geena Santiago as the lead, director Jeff Ryan as her best friend, and Louis Cancelmi (of Boardwalk Empire and The Irishman) as an unlikely re-enactment ally. Everyone gets a chance to stretch their range a little bit — comedic bits and scary bits and romantic bits — so the film should serve as a great calling card for its cast of mostly-unknowns. It’s also impressive just how massive the cast is; they managed to get dozens and dozens of extras in some of the crowd shots, which really helps open the film up beyond its core group.
In this uncertain age, where everyone is trying to conserve their money but maximize their distraction from the horrors outside their doors, you could do a whole lot worse than spending an hour with Mass Hysteria. Here’s hoping more smaller films follow their lead!
