The 8th Night and Things Heard and Seen – Netflix horrors that don’t raise a peep

I’ve never seen that many original horror films on Netflix, but in more recent years, the streaming service has started pumping out a more diverse array of titles to try and draw in more horror fans. I’ve already covered the more schlocky Fear Street, but Netflix is also naturally edging into the more serious game with films like A Classic Horror Story (opening on a giallo torture scene), Things Heard and Seen, and The 8th Night, all diverse and yet rooted in the more serious drama I seek in a horror film.

The latter two were of particular interest to me, as Things Seen and Heard looked like an interesting dramatic film as well as a horror, while The 8th Night’s Korean horror origins made it even more intriguing, as anyone who has read this blog knows I love Korean cinema. Unfortunately, neither of these two were very good, and in the case of Things Seen and Heard, it was absolutely terrible.

Both movies have the same root issue – they’ll completely forget that they’re horror films from time-to-time, creating a bizarre tonal imbalance that feels honestly more like a deleted scene. If you removed the horror elements from both movies, you’d have a competent action-thriller in 8th Night, and a still shitty (but less confusing) Things Seen and Heard. But deviate they do into random noises and spooky imagery that fails to go anywhere.

Let’s start with The 8th Night, focusing on a prophecy that an ancient Sanskrit god will be resurrected and on the 8th night of his arrival, evil will take over the Earth. So a young Buddhist apprentice is given orders by his master to journey to the big city to find a “guardian” and save the world.

The 8th Night’s horror is derived from two things – creepy imagery and descriptions/depictions of brutal violence. The creepy imagery is passable, if waylaid by the low-budget CGI, but 8th Night is way too reliant on ludicrous violence in an attempt to be scary. As a result, the horror elements feel superfluous and overdone, needing to be toned back a bit if the movie wants to achieve good K-thriller potential.

What also undermines the horror is the ludicrous amount of exposition and backstory, my god…this movie starts out with essentially a 5-minute PowerPoint presentation explaining a way overcomplicated backstory, then piles on plot twist after plot twist without realising that the most fundamental twist of the movie can be predicted in 10 minutes, and then you can sort of tune out until then. So you can’t focus on the craziness of what’s happening because you don’t understand why’s happening, and the movie becomes a blurry overflow of information and randomness.

It’s a shame, because the core of this film is actually quite strong. The production value is quite high, with great cinematography and makeup effects (excluding the aforementioned CGI stuff) that complement the action onscreen quite well. And I also quite enjoyed the (very limited) chemistry between the young monk and his cynical guardian, which came as welcome fish-out-of-water levity. It comes off as a sweet, short buddy action film in some ways, like it was made in the 80’s by a director like Tim Burton or Richard Donner.

And that’s why the horror in this movie is poor – it’s counter-intuitive to the actual core and tone of the film. Feeling jammed in instead of naturally part of the DNA, scary scenes become a gross distraction rather than an interesting investment of time. Compare it to a film like The Host, at heart an action movie, but which has horrific moments sidled in nicely alongside it, as the film is consistently grim tonally. The 8th Night does not have that internal gel, and without it, the good core falls apart.

This should be the poster and film idea - it communicates the idea so much better.

But at least it holds together better than Things Heard and Seen – I will not be surprised if this ends up on several “worst-of” lists this year, because I was shocked at how utterly bad it was. Not just from a horror perspective, but from an acting, directing, writing and editing standpoint, this movie is garbage.

Regardless, let’s just focus on the more horrific elements of this movie. So a couple and their daughter move into a new house, and the daughter begins sensing some paranormal stuff going down. So the mother does some investigating, while the husband is off being stupid, and eventually…nothing happens.

I mean it. Absolutely nothing happens in this film.

The Wikipedia for this movie describes it as a “horror-thriller”, but nothing horrifying or thrilling occurs in it. The “ghost” subplot which permeates this film’s scarier underbelly is seemingly forgotten at random, only to pop back up to make sure the audience doesn’t fall asleep. Bizarrely, these fleeting and unsatisfying horror moments are the best parts of the film, because I got a great laugh in a shot of a ghost where it did a Batman meme smile.

Imagine this, but grey.

Perhaps the horror is to be derived from the character tension, as a supposed theme of this movie and book (even though I didn’t get anything like that from the film) is toxic masculinity and how it builds to eventual evil. Unfortunately, the acting and blocking in this movie is so incredibly poor – characters stand around like video game NPCs, refusing to move around and standing awkwardly while spouting dialogue that’s impossible to take at face value.

It reminded me so much of The Devil All The Time – a thriller based on an acclaimed book with grand themes providing the tension and backstory, but the film was full of people standing around and talking the most bland, inane dialogue in incredibly banal ways, until some random sequence came along which made me fall out bed laughing. The reason that I’m not thrilled by this movie was that it was written and directed so poorly that the characters and plot failed to resonate with me meaningfully – hell, Minari from last year was scarier, and that was a movie about hope and love.

What was the point of writing this? I wanted to briefly analyse the horror in both these films to show you why it didn’t work, and encourage you to do the same, but I wanted to also note a trend I see with Netflix horror at this point. Both of these films, as well as earlier in the year Fear Street, Awake and The Woman in the Window, were all at least bad at scaring the audience.

There needs to be a severe overhaul to how Netflix prioritises their horror structures, and perhaps to what kind of source material they give the light of day. Not just vapid thrillers with interesting themes, or movies that have horror awkwardly snapped into them – but good, intense, frightening films, that make good on their promise of terror.