Marx’s vampires and specters; the oil crisis, Vietnam War, and industrializing slaughterhouses as the background for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the commodification of the spectacularly traumatic at Jupiter’s Claim and beyond in Nope — horror and capitalism have long been and remain in frequent conversation, to say the least. In the introduction to his 2017 book Splatter Capital, Mark Steven proposes that splatter films in particular explore how “capitalist accumulation is and always has been a nightmare of systematized bloodshed.” Michael Leavy’s Stream is the latest film to ride this line, which it does in quite literal fashion.
After a snuff-livestream company inconspicuously takes over a hotel in Pennsylvania, quickly disposing of its concierge, porters, and custodians, as well as rigging cameras to cover almost every square inch, the stream’s director, Mr. Lockwood (Jeffrey Combs), locks the night’s customers inside, and sets loose four killers upon them. The murderous contestants don grinning black masks and are known only by their numeric “Player” identifiers, 1 through 4, with two of them being a brother-sister team, per Lockwood’s livestream narration. Their apparent goal is to kill every hotel occupant, with an unspoken stipulation that they do so in increasingly creative ways, progressively ramping up the repulsive spectacle for the stream’s viewers, who are in turn gambling — circulating capital — based on which player will be responsible for the final kill, presumably among other wagers. Among the hotel’s many visitors is the Keenan family, stopping for the night en route to a theme park as a bonding experience to counter their boilerplate domestic issues. Roy (Charles Edwin Powell) works too much, teenaged Taylor (Sydney Malakeh) is a troublemaker who steals beer from convenience stores, younger Kevin (Wesley Holloway) is an alienated video game streamer with around 1200 viewers, and Elaine (Danielle Harris, from Halloweens 4 and 5, and also Rob Zombie’s 2007 version) doesn’t know when the kids changed or why the family is drifting apart.
While there’s a certain amount of heavy-handedness there, in the conceit of livestreamed violence for a spectacle-hungry viewership the film thankfully doesn’t aim to be as portentously deep as some of The Purge or Saw franchise entries. In terms of violent delights, its kills aren’t quite as dynamic, elaborate, or upsetting as those committed by Art the Clown in Terrifier or Terrifier 2, which Leavy acted in and produced (with the company he co-founded with his brother Jason and Stream’s cinematographer Steven Della Salla). But there is a lot of fun to be had in some of the cat-and-mouse horror sequences in the mostly one-location setting, especially when the guests catch on to the bit and start to fight back against the Players. Also notable is the level of brutality achieved on a very modest Indiegogo budget, aided by Damien Leone and company’s disgusting effects work.
In one of the film’s most self-consciously ridiculous and gruesome scenes, the brother-sister contestants pin a young man to a door by hammering railroad spikes through his hands, open his shirt, and play a game of Tic-tac-toe by carving with a knife the 3×3 lattice, the Xs, and the Os into his torso, punctuated by a final slash connecting the winner’s three-in-a-row. Moments like this put the film among those whose diegetic motivating factor for the violence seems to be enjoyment itself, whether with the cover of blowing off steam as in The Purge, the nihilistic absurdity of the Terrifier films, or the eerie “just because” of things like Death Game or Funny Games. The twist of interest here is in the systematizing and explicit commodification of this violent enjoyment — subjects are organically grouped by their familial, fraternal, or romantic connections, and then hunted, room by room, according to the blueprint of the hotel. The chaotic and showy violence is in tension with the austere, maze-like sameness of each subsequent room, each long corridor. And it’s not even clear if Players 1-4 themselves are to see the sort of money that’s riding on the contest, or if they are nothing more than murder-influencer puppets working for exposure and cheap affective pleasures — the “value” they generate abstracted into the Wi-Fi ether.
While the film takes some time to get going, with the dramatic setup having an uncanny, almost soapy feel about it, it’s ultimately worth sticking with. Leavy has some solid, scrappy horror chops, resulting in a number of standout sequences. And the cast shines as well, populated by horror legends of various stature, who get plenty of room to play to their strengths. Combs in particular modulates his Mr. Lockwood wonderfully, sometimes exuding the mad scientist camp that he’s so known for, and other times building up a genuinely scary intensity that threatens to burst through his skin. Candyman’s Tony Todd, too, in a role that could easily be phoned in, gives a classically foreboding monologue that, with any luck, could herald a sequel with him at the helm, a development that should be enthusiastically welcomed by the film’s target demo.
DIRECTOR: Michael Leavy; CAST: Danielle Harris, Jeffrey Combs, Phuong Kubacki, Tony Todd, Dee Wallace; DISTRIBUTOR: Iconic Events; IN THEATERS: August 21; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 3 min.
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