B+


After Midnight Meat Train, Dread is another adaptation of a Clive Baker short story and while I did enjoy the former film, Dread is truly the best Barker adaptation since Hellraiser. The plot deals with three students who conduct a story on fear as their thesis project. While they are researching the deepest fears of other people they realize that they're not free from fears either. As they start confronting each other about it, things slowly, but gradually spin out of control for most participants.

As you can expect from a Clive Barker adaptation, Dread is a bloody and gory film, even though the most brutal scenes take place during hallucinations of one of the main characters. However the true horror here is psychological and not visceral. It is about facing your deepest fears as an extreme healing method. I don't want to go much further into it as the less you know about the film prior to seeing it the better. It is not a film for soft people. It is violent, harsh, depressing and very harrowing. While I am rather desenthesized when it comes to horror movies nowadays, it still made me feel somewhat uncomfortable during a couple of scenes. While I don't want to spoil much, let me just say that this film will be a livid nightmare for vegetarians.

It's not as great as it could have been with its subject matter, though. The running time of almost 110 minutes is certainly a little too long for it and some of the changes from the original short story were not necessary. The main character of the film is probably the biggest asshole I have seen in any movie all year which made me ask myself why the hell the other students of this group are actually hanging out or talking with him. All in all, while I do have some gripes with it, it is still a chilling exercise in fear and, well, dread. In its best moments (most of them in the second half of the film) it is psychological horror at its finest. Certainly recommendable!