Suburban Gothic 2014

Suburban Gothic 2014 Movie Review/Trailer

Very fun and well directed low budget horror comedy

According to the director Richard Bates Jr. his sophomore film is best viewed at "a slumber party in your parents basement with all your best, weirdest friends." I agree with that statement.

Richard Bates Jr. got the attention of many horror geeks with his debut Excision in 2012. Much deserving that, I'd say Excision may be my favorite modern horror movie. While Excision got as much critical acclaim as that type of movie could get, it wasn't really a hit and Bates was back in the square one again. Bates got frustrated & depressed. I don't want take too much space writing about it but I thought the making of & the story of how this movie got started is really interesting. If you're interested I recommend listening to interviews with the director online, there's lots of interesting stories about it.

Suburban Gothic started out as a super dark and bleak ghost story. Bates was just miserable and depressed while he wrote it but at some point he got the idea that maybe he should not do something miserable when he was so depressed himself. Suburban Gothic got rewritten as a comedy, Bates was not miserable anymore and now that I've seen the movie, I'm glad they made it a comedy.

A big trend with horror comedy is often making fun of the genre tropes and being self aware. Doing that can either be really funny or really cheap and lazy. I'm honestly kinda sick of that so it's refreshing to see a horror comedy that isn't self aware. It's not making fun of ghosts or ghost related movies. It's just a fun horror comedy. What I most loved about it is how seemingly innocent it felt like. Even if there's lots of dirty jokes the movie is free from gore and doesn't have any tits. Weird, I'm saying that's a good thing? Apparently that was one of the reasons why Bates struggled to get funding for the movie. The studios wanted a movie with sex and gore.

Suburban Gothic is clearly very low budget and it's really too bad that after doing Excision Bates actually had to work with even less money on his next movie. Studios should be throwing money at this guy. He works very well with the low budget and I've seen movies with bigger budget that look ten times worse. It's a very good looking movie, Bates already has a style of his own. Even the effects look very good, I was prepared for some really cheap stuff considering the budget.

Anyway, it's Friday night.Why aren't you watching this movie right now? It's a very fun horror comedy that will make you smile and might make you feel like a kid watching Fright Night