30 in 30: A MONTH OF HORROR. KILL LIST
DAY 28
KILL LIST (2011)
This is something different.
Director Ben Wheatley creates one of the best horror/thrillers I’ve ever seen. KILL LIST is a movie crafted with patience and constructed around the certainty that the audience knows something big is coming up next. This is confident filmmaking. Wheatley doesn’t rush, he takes the necessary time to create bubbling tension that will, inevitably, come to a horrible end. Like a pressure cooker left on a slow fire, it will take its time but it’s going to blow up pretty spectacularly.
KILL LIST is about a retired military man turned contract killer. He’s been off the job for 8 months, but now in financial distress, he will have to take one last contract to secure his family’s economics. One last KILL LIST.
The set up of this film is perfect. You know who the main character is and you know his objective, but what you don’t know is how strange his journey is going to be. The contract takes Jay, the killer, and Gal, his partner, into the unknown. Soon they will learn that they are in over their heads.
We’ve talked about how “the unknown” is usually a scary place and why is so important to horror, but in KILL LIST the unknown is slightly different than usual. THEY, Jay and Gal, are in the unknown, the people they kill are in the know. Which is a fascinating subversion. In this movie the “victims” are in control.
When Jay goes to kill the first person on the list, the target says “thank you” just before his shot in the head. The second target on the list also seems to know more about Jay, than Jay does about him. This is chilling for our protagonist, but creates a great mystery for the audience.
KILL LIST deals with isolation and alienation. We know that Jay and his wife are having trouble at home. Jay doesn’t want to keep working as a contract killer, but he has no other choice if he wants to bring money home. In a way, Jay is an outsider inside his own house. He wants to stay, but he’s asked to go out into the world and make money.
Jay is not a part of his family and he’s not a part of whatever is going on around him in the world. The adventure even creates a rift between Jay and his partner, Gal. Jay is left completely alone inside a world he does not understand. He’s like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.
KILL LIST is scary because information never really comes, we get to experience what is like to be outside of a cult. “They” understand. The others know. We are left out of the circle, forever wondering. Never part of the group. A group that seems to know something about the world that’s ancient, dark and powerful.
KILL LIST is about a man who thought he was in control, but at the end of the film he’s shown as he really is. A leaf blowing in the wind, always at the mercy of something bigger and stronger than him.
At the end we see Jay as a victim, as alone as a man can ever be. A puppet.
It is simply chilling.
Tomorrow: CORALINE (2009)
Yesterday: THE WITCH (2015)
