Baskin: Damn, It Feels Good To Be A Horror Fan
Being a horror fan is tough. The more you consume the more complacent you become. It becomes more and more difficult to be actually scared by a movie. Intellectually, you might find them frightening but those good, old-fashioned “close your eyes and scream” moments are harder and harder to come by.
This is why Baskin is such a disgusting delight.
Horror fans often bemoan the lack of character development in films, but in Baskin the central characters are all sharply drawn thanks to realistic dialogue and terrific acting. They aren’t clichés or ciphers; they are real people with distinctive personalities that we latch onto immediately. That’s not to say we necessarily like them, but we are still invested in what happens to them. This is why when shit starts to go down, we are right there with them, freaking out and confused.
The lighting and framing in Baskin is superb, combining sickly earth tones with vivid reds and blues and cleverly placing shadows for maximum effectiveness. The film excels in the way it both obscures the grotesque but also shoves it in your face, a balance that is incredibly difficult to attain as evidenced by the plethora of movies where you either see too much or not enough.
To be clear, there are some hideous, utterly nauseating visuals in Baskin, so much so that at times I literally could not look at the screen, which is saying a lot for someone who watches a lot of horror. Yet, there are still things we can’t see clearly, which make the horrors depicted in Baskin seem like they might be even worse than what we are actually witnessing.
Such terrifying imagery is introduced slowly and subtly in the film. Certain images seem to be non sequitur, and either frightening or just peculiar, until they are repeated enough to become menacing. Seemingly random characters and actions add to the flow of the narrative as well as the sense of creeping dread, but not so much that they interrupt your involvement in the events unfolding on screen. This is all aided and abetted by some chilling music that feels of a piece with iconic horror soundtracks from John Carpenter or Goblin, but not so on the nose that it feels like it’s trying too hard to be something it’s not.
What’s most remarkable about Baskin is how much it references other films but still manages to be bracingly original and scary as fuck. There are a few obvious homages to other films that genre fans will recognize (and some that are less obvious), but Baskin doesn’t come across like it’s ripping off decades of iconic imagery. Instead, it manages to elevate these images into something more like horror archetypes.
Consider that Baskin is a Turkish film and there are likely some cultural associations that Western audiences will not grasp. That doesn’t make it any less powerful; on the contrary, it proves that some horrors are universal. Baskin traffics in the semiotics of fear to evoke maximum terror in the audience. While Cabin in the Woods used a similar approach, it went for the knowing wink. Baskin goes for the throat, literally, resulting in a film completely informed by post-modernism yet shockingly original.
If you’ve heard anything at all about the film you likely know that there is some association with the occult, but Baskin succeeds where other films fail in this regard by not utilizing any of the stereotypical markers like pentagrams or Baphomet drawings. The unknowable quality of this element contributes greatly to the fear factor. We know just enough to be terrified but not so much so that we feel like we can predict what’s going to happen.
That lack of predictability is possibly Baskin’s greatest achievement. It slips around within and outside of genres with a bizarre looping logic that both isolates the viewer from any kind of comforting structure while also tying everything together in a overarching nightmarish scenario.
Baskin is nothing short of stunning. That it’s Can Evrenol’s feature debut is mind-blowing. It comes out on VOD on March 25 and if you are invested in the current state of horror as well as the future of the genre, you owe it to yourself to check it out.