Sometimes, a horror movie isn’t about body counts, jump scares and repulsive monsters. Where fans of slasher films or creature features always seek out the gory payoff, it can be more intriguing to fear the journey more than the destination. In director Philip Gelatt’s new film, They Remain, the slow-cooking sense of revulsion proves to be a hallucinatory deep dive into the depths of madness one might find in a more Lovecraftian setting than your average blood-soaked fright flick. Based on the novella -30-, it’s a very basic setup which features only two actors for about 95% of the film. Two scientists are isolated in a deep-woods site where unspeakable crimes occurred at the hands of a violent cult years earlier. Their purpose is to search for evidence and analyze it, with very little contact to the outside world. A sense of foreboding emanates the film from the get-go, and the audience won’t be surprised to find that two isolated people can start freaking out after some time. The terror begins when some inexplicable experiences start going down. A stalking dog. Swarm insects acting weird. Disembodied voices whispering in the ears of our protagonists. And, most troubling of all, surreal dreams and visions of figures in the woods, apparently leftover spirits of the demonic cult, start making it really hard for the victims to discern between reality and nightmare.

“I am never going to find my contact lens..” (THEY REMAIN)

Now – to be sure – there’s a lot of scary stuff in the film. But anyone expecting plot twists and major happenings can check their expectations at the door. That’s not what this film is about. It’s about our world suddenly looking and sounding very different than what we recognize as “normal” or safe. It’s about seeing things at the peripheries which are more real than you’re ready for them to be. It’s about evil invading your mind instead of running at you with a knife or sharp teeth. And it’s about the film’s brilliant cinematographer, Sean Kirby, who drenches the mis-en-scene with a vibrant color palate, textured imagery, and just enough amorphous and fuzzy focus effects to evoke the sense of disorientation, wonder, and otherworldliness.  More than merely a visual treat, the entire look of They Remain is that of the fairytale forest, the one which is utterly recognizable and wholly arcane at the same time. Common hazards like bears and wolves are replaced by the fanciful apparitions of phantasms and demons. Kirby’s brush strokes across the screen, as it were, capture that dark fable feeling in a way which evokes an earlier time in our consciousness, where scary stories sparked our imagination and convinced us that there really were monsters under the bed, witches in the trees, and ghosts just beyond the shadows.

The point when you start second guessing that instinct to gather up all of the bones you just found. (THEY REMAIN)

William Jackson Harper and Rebecca Henderson play the two scientists with a sort of sterile veneer. It may seem off-putting at first, but the fact is that these are exactly the kind of low-emotion people who would be sent to do the kind of surreptitious study they are sent off to do. Clinical and exacting, they only really start to react to each other in a more “human” way as things get weirder. And in a way, it’s more fitting as just about any “normal” person would have high-tailed it out of those woods far earlier in the film than anybody in it ever considers. Their overt coolness is juxtaposed against composer Tom Keohane’s eerie and disturbing musical score. Combined with Kirby’s imagery, that Lovecraft feel is more than complete – it makes us really, really uncomfortable. They Remain leans heavily on such classic audiovisual tropes which can evoke everything from Universal Monsters to the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, but bent towards that Dunwich Horror sort of ethos. Which is to say – there’s nothing cartoonish or “safe” about the film’s horror. The scares on display are for adults who value their sanity and a sense of order. It’s the grinding erosion of one’s sense of reality, replaced with the physical and psychic tortures of hell. Viewers will not find an epiphany of terror at the end, but will be more than satisfied with the upsetting trek through the woods of ineffable fear which this movie offers up.

THEY REMAIN