Fear Itself: Episode 5 Eater

I'm so happy Stuart Gordon was one of the Masters they were able to keep. The man has a talent for the uncomfortable. I'm not sure if I'd define this as a Lovecraftian story in the way most of his films are. This is a story about supernatural forces being used by humans, and human life is treated as valuable. However, I do see a common trait with Re-Animator: a villain for whom rational motivation seems a lot less important than “because I can.”

Duane Mellor (Stephen Hart), a cannibalistic, voodou-practicing serial killer, is arrested and brought into a local police station. The precinct is already a tense environment, due to resentment of new recruit Danny Bannerman (Elizabeth Moss). Bannerman's status of horror-movie fan, female, highly competent, rookie police officer doesn't exactly endure the her co-workers to her.

The early scenes with her are standard, but fairly well done. I think her horror movie addiction was thrown in, both to make her more relatable to the likely audience (duh), and to add a new element to the tension. Women and rookies being hated in the workplace is pretty common. So, they throw in a geek element, and it makes for a few decent lines of dialogue. Plus, Elizabeth Moss does a good job.

Then, Mellor gets out, and begins eating the still-beating hearts of her co-workers to assume their forms with his vodou powers. This is what I meant when I said that motivation was unimportant: Why was Mellor even caught if he can just shape-shift whenever he wants. He can apparently also copy the voices and memories of his victims perfectly. Given his apparent super-human strength, and off-screen teleportation, you'd expect him to be sunning himself on a beach somewhere, in the form of the most convenient billionaire by now. But, no, apparently torturing police officers is more his style.

Taking the form of Bannerman's colleagues allows Mellor to draw on both her familiarity, and their resentment. Ironically, Mellor seems to have far more respect for her than most of her colleagues, with the exception of her Sergeant (Russell Hornsby). He seems to save her for last precisely because he thinks that terrifying a horror-move fan is fun. The fact that she's substantially smarter than those around her is likely also a factor. He's in this for the sport.

The ending, while I'd question it's biological feasibility, seems like exactly the kind of genre-savvy thing a horror geek would attempt: kill the cannibal by covering your neck with rat poison, and then eating some. I imagine a fairly substantial dose of rat poison would be required to kill a man the size of Mellor, but one bite of Bannerman was all it took.

Still, I don't approach a Stuart Gordon film expecting to be overwhelmed by realism. Re-Animator is character-driven silliness at it's core. By comparison this could be a documentary.

This episode, while less objectively well constructed than In Sickness and In Health, is both scarier, and more entertaining. Moss is a lot of fun to watch, and Hart is downright terrifying. I could complain about the demonization of vodou, but why waste my breath. The episode is fun, and that's all I have to say on the matter.