Exeter Horror Film Review: A Fast Paced, Seemingly Similar Movie

Any cinephile with a passion for horror films can agree that the genre has become repetitive over time. All of the best settings and ideas for horror films often find themselves played out within a few years as more and more movies are released with almost annoyingly similar story structures. It is always refreshing to come across a nice spooky film that takes you by surprise and delivers a fresh storyline. Unfortunately, Exeter was not one of those horror films upon my first time viewing it.
Exeter takes on one of the most classic horror clichés; a group of conceited, obnoxious teens who find themselves trapped in an old abandoned insane asylum somewhere in the woods. Of course, the reason they are at the asylum in the first place was to throw a party and try out some satanic rituals together. The teen’s cocky, careless attitudes quickly turn somber when the youngest of the group becomes possessed and they all begin to be terrorized by him and other ghostly presences in the house. The teenagers realize that all of the windows and doors have somehow been locked and they cannot get out, so they decide to attempt an exorcism.
At this point in the film, the number of clichés about high school teenagers paired with the corny cinematography and uncountable horror stereotypes had me checking how much longer was in the film every 10ten minutes or so. Admittedly, the film was unique in its own way. Each character had an interesting arc and one of the best parts about watching this movie was observing how each character changed/grew throughout it. The dialogue, however, was almost comical how stereotyped the language amongst the teenagers was. It felt like a group of middle-aged writers had gotten together and brainstormed about how teenagers speak without consulting anyone in that actual age group. The film did eventually reel me back in once the crew got split up within the asylum and dialogue was reduced greatly.
As many horror-enthusiasts would agree, a good scary movie should not solely rely on gore or cheap jump-scares to keep us on our toes. While Exeter is somewhat reserved in the jump scare department, I feel they definitely overdid it with the gore at many different points. In horror films, gore tends to feel less gross/off-putting and less realistic when there is an absurdly greater amount of blood/entrails that would ever come out of an actual human being. Most of the deaths in this film involved an extremely detailed close-up of someone having their head smashed to bits or being cut into multiple pieces with blood spraying everywhere like an actual sprinkler. I understand the idea and goal behind utilizing gore in a film, but there is a definitely a line that was crossed and made this film feel cheap and a bit overambitious.
The way gore was utilized in this film made it feel almost predictable. For example, in the second half of the movie, more and more of the teens are becoming possessed and the survivors find that the only way to subdue the demons in their friends is to kill them. Like mentioned earlier, each death involves unnecessary close-ups and unrealistic gore (such as someone’s head being cut into two very clean halves). However after the survivors managed to kill each teen, they would hang around in a somber silence for a minute- perhaps reflecting on what they just did. However, after each death and reflection-moment, the “murdered,”, no longer possessed teen turns out to actually still be alive- and still very much possessed. Almost as if the demon was playing a trick on them by playing dead to catch them by surprise. This would normally be a solid tactic used to make the viewers jump and shriek. Unfortunately, this occurrence happened after every single death. After the first two times it happened, I found myself yelling at these characters on the screen for hanging out directly next to the dead and recently possessed body they just killed.
I think it I important to point out that this film did acknowledge and even poke fun at quite a few of the clichés within the storyline. This is a trend that has picked up some popularity in horror films over the years. The premise of the film is very scary, but they use comedy to poke fun at the genre itself and to provide some relief in the very tense story. While Exeter more than likely falls into this subcategory of horror films, the clichés were still somehow very frustrating and frankly poorly executed. I found myself genuinely confused during many scenes of this film due to the poor execution of dialogue and physical acting by a large majority the actors.
Overall, this film felt overambitious and lazily thrown-together. I consider myself well-educated on the subject of cheap horror films, and I often find much enjoyment in a poorly executed horror flick. Some films are “bad” but still very entertaining. Unfortunately, Exeter did not do an amazing job at keeping my undivided attention. This was disappointing because it felt full of potential at the start of the film but fell short. If you decide to make a horror movie with an extremely cliché and common setting and story structure, you have to find a way that makes it stand out from the others and rise above. Exeter simply did not meet those expectations.