Making Monsters (2019)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) It’s amazing how many horror films fail to answer even the one essential question — namely, “why would I care?” As Making Monsters begins, for instance, we’re stuck with a couple of obnoxious social media influencers — him as the star repeatedly pranking his fiancé (and somehow people watch that twice a week?), her as the muse and victim. When they head to a remote church and strange things start happening to them, we are apparently supposed to care… which really doesn’t work. By the time we head from one social-media-age cliché to another (which is to say that they are INFLUENCERS now unwilling subjects of a DARK WEB snuff reality series with subscriptions paid in BITCOIN and filmed via WEBCAMS,) we have lost our interest a long time ago. Truly ugly cinematography playing off the early-spring bleak coldness of a rural area certainly doesn’t help, and neither does limiting the cast to a handful of people — most of them fodder or killers. Even if the film does have to good sense of making the right character (that is, the least-objectionable one, no necessarily the most sympathetic one) the focus of the climax, it’s far too little too late. While Making Monsters does have its moments (you’ll be hard-pressed, I suspect, to find a reviewer that doesn’t mention “the pitchfork moment” because wow-bleurgh), they fail to be put together into something resembling anything other than horror movie fans making a gross movie — which can be guessed from how many of the scares are barely justified later on. From the title onward, it could have been a far more daring thematic examination of (indeed) how social media is making monsters of ourselves, but I don’t think that even occurred to writer-directors Justin Harding and Rob Brunner. There’s little wit or humanity in Making Monsters, and even fewer reasons to care.