Scare Me

Scare Me
Official release poster
Directed by	Josh Ruben
Written by	Josh Ruben
Produced by	Alex Bach Daniel Powell Josh Ruben
Starring	Aya Cash Josh Ruben Rebecca Drysdale Chris Redd
Cinematography	Brendan H. Banks
Edited by	Patrick Lawrence
Music by	Elegant Too
Production companies	Artists First Irony Point Last Rodeo Studios
Distributed by	Shudder
Release dates	January 24, 2020 (2020-01-24) (Sundance) October 1, 2020 (2020-10-01) (United States)
Running time	104 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Scare Me is a 2020 American comedy horror film written, directed, and produced by Josh Ruben. It stars Aya Cash, Josh Ruben, Rebecca Drysdale and Chris Redd. Their characters improvise and act out scary stories in a dark house, but one of them is gradually creating a drama scarier than most Halloween monsters.

Scare Me had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2020. It was released on October 1, 2020, by Shudder.

Plot

Fred, a struggling writer and actor, rents a mountain cabin to try to write in isolation, and hires similarly aspiring writer Bettina to drive him to and from the cabin. Suffering from writer's block, he goes for a run and meets Fanny, the author of recently acclaimed horror novel Venus, who's staying in a nearby cabin. Fanny is unimpressed by Fred's attempts to justify himself as a writer, and the two go their separate ways for the night. When a thunderstorm knocks out the power on the mountain, Fanny visits Fred's house. Because the place is dark and a storm is beginning to rage, she orders him to build a fire. The two drink Fred's beer together, and Fanny challenges Fred to tell her a scary story and frighten her. Fred's first attempt at telling his story doesn't engage Fanny, but as she eggs him on, he tells her a tale about a young boy who saw his parents killed by a werewolf and grew up to take revenge, embellished by minimalistic sound and lighting effects and voice acting. Fanny criticizes Fred for making his story about a white man, to which Fred challenges her to tell him one of her ideas in progress.

Fanny instead improvises a story about a young girl who attempts to kill her creepy grandfather but kills his dog instead, and is haunted by the old man and the dog after their deaths. Fred's cell phone has rung a few times during the night, and it is unclear whether these calls are from his ex-wife, perhaps in response to his own calls. In a moment of vulnerability, Fred admits that he's been searching for a purpose ever since he had a mental breakdown after his wife left him — because he threatened to kill her.

After ordering a pizza, Fred and Fanny collaborate on a story about a troll who lives in the walls of an Edible Arrangements store, who entices a put-upon secretary to murder her sleazy boss in exchange for 300 years of life. This drama is interrupted by the arrival of Carlo, the pizza delivery man. Fanny invites Carlo to stick around and tell stories with them. Carlo agrees, admitting he is a huge fan of Fanny's work. Together, Carlo and Fanny do cocaine and re-enact the story of Venus for Fred, who is visibly annoyed by having to share their fun night with Carlo, and by what he sees as her flaunting her success in his face.

Fred proposes a new story about a singer who makes a deal with the Devil to perform on a nationwide talent competition, but is possessed and forced to sing about widespread murder. Afterwards, Carlo leaves to go take care of more deliveries (after getting an autograph from Fanny). Fred's cell rings again, and this time, he decides to accept the call, while Fanny goes to the bathroom. Fred reads Fanny's notebook while she is away, realizing she's been writing down all of their stories, as well as taking notes on his personality and his inability to accept that she's the better writer. Drunk and angry, he confronts Fanny, with her notebook in one hand and a fire poker in the other. When Fanny berates Fred for his lack of talent and asks for her book back, he chases her around the house with the poker, but during the chase, he trips down the stairs and impales himself on it.

Bleeding and in pain, Fred begs Fanny to kill him so he won't have to suffer any more; she retrieves a log from the fireplace and raises it, but instead puts it down and leaves the house, leaving Fred to bleed out. Bettina arrives the next morning to check on Fred. She finds Fanny's notebook and begins reading it, while completely oblivious to Fred's corpse on the stairs. A mid-credits scene reveals that Bettina has stolen the stories in the notebook for a book of her own and is now a famous author in her own right.

Cast

• Josh Ruben as Fred Banks
• Aya Cash as Fanny Addie
• Chris Redd as Carlo
• Rebecca Drysdale as Bettina

Release

Shudder acquired distribution rights to the film prior to its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2020. The teaser trailer was released in August, 2020, and made available for streaming on October 1, 2020.

Themes

Story-tellers and audiences

As self-referential movies like Scare Me demonstrate, the relationship between horror movies and their audiences is a matter of popular recognition. (Since the mid-20th century, horror moviegoers have enjoyed sharing the reactions of fright, laughter, and shouted conversations at the characters onscreen.) Enthusiastic audience participation exponentiates and, in movies like Scare Me — as the title exhorts — filmmakers can encourage it to the point of self-parody. Fred, Fanny, and Carlo are each others' critics and audiences, and they stand in for us, the viewing public. Jessica Scott, writing for the Film Cred website, is one of many to analyze the movie's "smart meta-commentary on horror films," on the way they are conceived but may be repeatedly re-conceived. "Fanny is an incisive workshop partner. She provides invaluable feedback based on their shared knowledge of horror films and tropes that molds Fred's half-baked ideas into compelling stories." Scott calls Scare Me "an ode to and an indictment of writers."

Fred's sexism and Fanny's superiority

Film critics had much to say about the turns in Fred's characterization which create the startling scary climax. Jessica Scott notes how Ruben reminds the audience of the character Jack Torrance in the 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining when Fred amuses himself with a vocal impression of Jack Nicholson, foreshadowing "the creepy turn his writing retreat will soon take." Scott writes, "The script provides clever clues to the twist along the way, leading up to a moment that most, if not all, women will recognize. Misogyny and professional jealousy combine to create a story that terrifies not because of its supernatural beasts but because of its mundane relatability," which she names plainly "toxic masculinity." Scott concludes, "It serves as deceptively dark commentary on 'nice guys,' professional integrity, and the business of storytelling."

Reception

Scare Me received positive reviews from critics. The film has an approval rating of 82% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The site's consensus reads, "Smart, well acted and suitably chilling, Scare Me uses its familiar horror setting as the backdrop for a fresh deconstruction of standard genre ingredients." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 66 out of 100, based on 8 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

Writing "Simply put, Scare Me is superb," Kristy Puchko regards the movie as a horror anthology film and considers its relationship to that genre: "Typically, in anthology scenarios like this, the storytellers are a framework, stepping aside as the film or TV show gives way to showing us the tale unfurled. Ruben shakes things up by keeping us with his storytellers, full time. [...] Unlike most anthologies, where the stories are static, Fred and Fanny's are subject to change as they go. The pair grow competitive, even combative. She challenges his choices, pushing him to veer away from cliché. This keeps the stories feeling spontaneous and alive." Because of such organic development, Puchko says, "horror fans will revel in the film's panoply of allusions, from Alien, Jaws, and Halloween to Tales From The Crypt and The Lovely Bones." Similarly, comedian Bill Bria sees it as "a rather ingenious riff on the horror portmanteau film," while evaluating both sides of the comedy-horror structure and commending how the violent conclusion "drains as much of the comedy out of the proceedings as possible."

Jeffrey Zhang of Strange Harbors praises the film, writing, "Aided by lighting, tricks of the camera, and some rip-roaring sound design, Scare Me transforms simple conversation into a fun horror romp."

Tasha Robinson, considering the relationship between tellers of horror tales and their audiences in a comprehensive review for the Polygon site, says that the "real tension comes from the growing dynamic between Fanny and Fred. She's visibly more talented and confident than he is, with ready access to ideas and the skills to make things up on the fly. But she's also judgmental, harsh, and dismissive of Fred, in ways that highlight all his insecurities, and puncture his enjoyment of the storytelling every time he really relaxes into it. Fred, meanwhile, is defensive and jealous of Fanny, and he swings back and forth between wanting to impress her, and resenting her imposition. Ruben calculates all of that into the stories they tell and their commentary on each other." Robinson concludes that the film "acknowledges the unspoken contracts between horror writers and horror-lovers, and puts them on the screen in creatively twisted but recognizable ways. Even if viewers never entirely lose themselves into these stories, they can at least feel like they're fully in on the joke."

External links

• Scare Me at IMDb
• Scare Me on Wicked Thrilling Freaks