Dan Bush

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) Even though there have been many, many horror movies about electronic signals turning people crazy, I still hold out hope that, some day, someone will manage to make a worthwhile movie out of it. Even after watching The Signal, I’m still waiting. A hodgepodge of ideas badly stuck together, it does have some residual interest… but it doesn’t take a long time for the usual horror silliness to undermine the ideas. In true genre fashion, writers-directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry seem more interested in gore and cheap scares than in exploring any of the ideas they may have started with. It doesn’t really help that the film is structured along three shorter films, and that much of the film focuses on TV signals, probably as a visual device. While the result is much narratively tighter than most anthology films, it’s still a disappointment. There is a good case to be made that the filmmakers were interested in showing people being violent to one another, and that the TV thing was just a thin justification on top of what they wanted to do anyway, and I’d go for that… except that stripped of its rationale, The Signal is another one of those cheap horror films that seem to find inherent worth in violence, which is where I disagree. Instead, it feels like so many forgettable films, the madness of its characters poorly motivated and ultimately leading to nothing but more red syrup spilling out. It’s striking that such a great idea, reflective of our ambivalent relationship with technology, hasn’t managed to produce at least one great horror film where the metaphor is made literal. Maybe some day…