Edge of Civilization

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This is not a movie to be watched by someone with PTSD.  I watched Outpost for the scenery (I’ve been to the area it was filmed many times) and because the New York Times highlighted it.  It ended up being the scariest movie I’ve seen since The Shining.  I mean the kind of scary where your heart is still battering around your chest even after the credits roll.  As an indie horror film it may not be well known.  For clarity’s sake I need to say it’s the Outpost released in 2023.  The one about a woman who goes to spend a summer in a fire tower to recover from domestic abuse.  If you haven’t suffered PTSD, and you’re not as emotionally involved as I let myself become, you might guess by about halfway through what’s really going on.  But there are a bunch of people in the northern Idaho woods that you just don’t trust.

I’ll try not to spoil the ending, but here’s how it goes: Kate was beaten by her husband.  And sexually abused by an uncle when she was growing up.  Against the advice of her best friend, whose brother works for the forestry department, she takes a summer job on a fire lookout tower.  The locals at the store, all men, are threatening in her eyes.  Her new boss doesn’t think she’s a good fit for the post, but to help smooth things over with his sister, he lets Kate have the job.  Along with lighthouses, fire lookout towers are some of the loneliest places in the civilized world.  When a couple of young guys hike by, noting she’s all alone in the tower, your skin begins to crawl.  She keeps having flashbacks to the violence in her past.  Then she meets an older woman hiker who stays awhile and teaches her how to shoot.  A local retiree teaches her how to chop wood.

Kate still doesn’t trust the local retiree.  One of her colleagues from the forestry service has surreptitiously taken photos of her and ogles them.  And day after day after day she has to follow a routine and sees no one.  You get the picture.  I don’t want to give too much away, but for some of us this may be among the scariest movies we’ve ever seen, despite most of it being in the clear summer sunshine of northern Idaho.  The movie ends with a contact number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline.  Joe Lo Truglio, the director, is an actor known for comedy.  Outpost makes me think there’s something else behind the laughter.

Numbers Game

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I once asked a movie expert—this must’ve been when I was regularly on a campus somewhere, but not Nashotah House—how many movies had been made.  He sighed and said “There’s no way to know that.”  What I was thinking at the time was the Motion Picture Association of America (now the Motion Picture Association) number that comes near the end of the credits.  I wondered how many of those there were.  Of course, the number keeps changing.  It doesn’t account for television movies or straight to video, although, I see it does now include Netflix.  In any case, I was really interested in the statistics.  I still am.  I may not be a math person, but big numbers are intriguing.

The more I read about movies, and I seem to be moving in that direction, the more I realize how nobody can be an expert on all of them.  Even those of us with decades of experience watching horror can’t keep up with that genre.  Many of the books I’ve read are by authors whose families don’t like horror, so they have to carve out time alone to see the films.  This is on top of their jobs, which for some, admittedly, is film analysis—perhaps they’re the lucky ones.  I selected many films to discuss in Holy Horror.  There’s no index of the Bible in films, as useful as such an index would be.  As I continue to watch, and sometimes rewatch, I keep finding more and more material.  At some point, however, you just have to say “what I have written, I have written.”  But how many movies actually engage the Good Book?  There may be a way to know that, but it will take a lifetime of research.

Speaking of large numbers, the stats for how many Bibles are sold each year is a phenomenon unto itself.  It seems inevitable that it would find several of the cracks in American culture and leak in like rain water.  At times it’s the antidote to horror, while at others it’s the dote itself.  Holy Horror was never intended to be comprehensive.  It limited itself in intentional ways.  As I was writing it my naive question kept coming back to me.  When I research a topic I like to read as much written on the topic that I possibly can.  Of course, I spend over eight hours a day for most of the year doing something else.  The number of days like that, I suspect, is frightfully large.