“You can let go. You don’t have to keep fighting. Everything’s going to be okay.”
This emotional line of dialogue opens and closes Trey Edward Shultz’s indie horror, It Comes At Night. It also happens to be the last words that Shultz said to his father when he was passing due to cancer. This film comes from a place of deep grief.
It Comes at Night is a horror film in the vein of The Babadook, It Follows, or The Witch. Films like these are less about cheap scares, gore, or terror, and more about the human condition; what we’re afraid of, or maybe what we should be afraid of. This is not to say that It Comes At Night is not scary. Shultz’s debut film in 2015, Krisha, was a movie about a family coming together for Thanksgiving that felt like a horror movie, so you can imagine what he’s able to do with a true horror premise.
The premise is straightforward. A family lives in a large house in the middle of a forest, trying to protect themselves from a sickness outside. A stranger arrives seeking refuge for himself and his family. What follows is less direct, and the film keeps the audience in frightful anticipation. We don’t know what “comes at night.” We don’t know what has happened to the rest of the world, only little bits of dialogue here and there that allude to it, and an early moment shows the severity of the sickness. Like many of these newer-wave horror films, It Comes At Night is not concerned with answering questions or mythologizing – it only asks you to pay attention to the characters and perhaps put yourself in their shoes. You may find yourself identifying with the characters or despising their choices… or perhaps a little of both.
A good horror film forces you to confront the depravities of human behavior in extreme circumstances, to test the limits or expose the gaps in our morality. It Comes At Night asks how far a person or a family would go to protect themselves, and what they lose in the process. It’s a film about fear and paranoia from the perspective of grief. It reminds me of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 16: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?”
Perhaps, then, the words that bookend this film are words not just for the dead and dying, but for those of us who are living in a world full of pain and fear:
“You can let go. You don’t have to keep fighting. Everything’s going to be okay.”
You might also find this review of It Comes At Night helpful:
