Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

I don’t know who Lionsgate has doing the box cover art for their After Dark Horror movies but they need to give that department a bonus and a raise. The cover art for movies like ‘The Deaths of Ian Stone’, ‘The Broken’, ‘The Forgotten’ and the cover art for this movie ‘From Within’ and you have, without a doubt in my opinion, the best cover art in the business. Now having watched a crap load of these After Dark Horror movies, the poster art has been the most creative thing about a lot of these flicks, but maybe, just maybe ‘From Within’ is different. Well, not really.

Somewhere in Podunkville USA a young couple are sitting on the Dock of the Bay thinking about doing some sinning when the young man pulls out a gun and blows his head off. Personally I would’ve engaged in the sinful act first and THEN blew my head off, but that’s just me. But now that I think about it, had I engaged in the sinful act first I probably would’ve lost the desire to blow my head off. Upon further thought I think the young man did the right thing in that instance. Anyway, the next time we see the young girl who witnessed this tragedy, she’s covered in blood and racing down the street as if being chased by the devil himself… and as it turns out, in a sense she is. This girl runs into her father’s haberdashery where her buddy Lindsay (Elizabeth Rice) is picking out some church clothes. They calm the girl down for a minute but when she’s left alone for just a second, she tragically kills herself.

This horrible event is soon followed by another suicide and another and then another. What in the hell is going on in Podunkville? Dylan (Kelly Blatz), the pastor’s son, thinks he knows exactly what’s going on. He believes that Aiden (Thomas Dekker), son of a witch who tragically burned to death some years back, has cursed his town and thus must be dealt with… swiftly and justly. Of course Lindsay thinks this is just crazy talk, despite the fact that the suicides and weird deaths keep escalating to damn near biblical proportions.

So what exactly is happening in this sleepy, fundamentalist Christian town? Well that’s for you to discover on your own more or less, but rest assured that your God in Heaven Above, at least in this movie, will be of absolutely no help to you.

‘From Within’ is laudable on a couple of levels. For one it is a horror movie that does attempt to delve a little deeper than your average horror flick usually tries to go. Now where it goes might bother some philosophically, because this movie essentially says that traditional religion is pretty much a wacky fairy tale… but a belief in Wiccan mythology? Oh, that’s real. Then we spend some time with the religious fanatics that populate our little town which consists of drunks, whores, homicidal maniacs and hypocritical closeted homosexuals, and it’s fairly clear that somebody behind this movie has an issue or two with Christianity, or organized religion in general. While it is appreciated that this movie did attempt to do a little more with its story, but as it’s presented it is so lopsided and so slanted and the characters so insanely one-dimensional that it’s more funny than intriguing.

Another thing that works for ‘From Within’ is that it does posses some pretty decent horror imagery. Director Phedon Papamichael has given this sleepy town of Podunkville a very uninviting and foreboding atmosphere… which is expected since these loons believe in God, plus there were some disturbing make-up effects which made the entire vibe around the movie quite unsettling. What the film needed more of this type of imagery in order to be completely effective, but instead it became so wrapped up in its anti-Christian rhetoric that a lot of the horror edge eventually chipped away until it was almost completely lost.

The unfortunate thing is that this wouldn’t have been nearly as pronounced if the filmmakers had put half as much effort in creating some reasonably believable religious characters as they put the effort in creating the wacky Wiccan rituals that were doing our characters in. By making the fanatics so over the top they just weren’t all that believable as real people, which in turn made them inert and ultimately humorous. Very humorous actually. So funny in fact that maybe they were designed to be this way.

Regardless, ‘From Within’ has some great poster art, a solid concept, and some nice horror imagery with it all set in a creepy fanatical town, but loses its way focusing far too much of its time on being anti-Christian instead of being pro-scary.