There are a lot of horror movies lately that underestimate the emotional intelligence of their viewers, choosing to dwell on their metaphors rather than leave them with unanswered questions. Horror should be a little gray, a little hard to decipher, a little debatable as to its meaning and purpose. When it isn’t and it slips from mood to message, it loses its power. That’s one of several things that happens with Spider-One’s frustrating “Little Bites,” a movie that constantly puts its themes in the mouths of its actors rather than letting them play real characters and trusting us to meet the movie halfway.
Krsy Fox, also at FF with “Terrifier 3,” which I couldn’t stay awake on opening night but will watch before the premiere, plays Mindy Vogel, a widow we meet in a living nightmare. She’s sent her daughter Alice (Elizabeth Phoenix Caro) to live with her grandmother (Bonnie Aarons) as a way to protect her from the demon that lives in a basement room in her house, a creature called Agyar (Jon Sklaroff) that looks a bit like Nosferatu. Seen mostly in shadow, it’s a humanoid monster that feeds on Mindy, marking her with “little bites” rather than devouring her outright. It’s a form of control and a metaphor for addiction (a monster that often feeds on parents in a way that renders them incapable of raising their children), but also for the difficulty of motherhood. The repeated point is that Mindy will answer the bell whenever Agyar rings it if it will keep Alice safe. Motherhood is hard. And this is conveyed in scene after scene as Fox seems increasingly exhausted by her situation while Agyar abuses her physically, mentally and emotionally.
There’s a short film about a demon literally draining the life force from a single mother, but Spider One expands that idea beyond its breaking point with a series of encounters that are basically self-contained. A CPS worker named Sonya (the great Barbara Crampton) shows up at Mindy’s door, wondering where Alice might be. As good as Crampton is in these scenes, they make little narrative sense in the sense that it doesn’t seem particularly illegal to say that a child is living with his grandmother for a few weeks, but they’re poorly crafted in a way that’s designed to produce tension that Mindy’s secret might be revealed. The same goes for a scene where Mindy brings home a guy (Chaz Bono) from the bus stop to try to feed Agyar a more substantial meal. This sequence devolves into an awkward comedy involving poorly mixed ice cream, unsure of what it’s trying to say about its protagonist or her desperation. Every line of dialogue in “Little Bites,” even a one-scene appearance by the great Heather Langenkamp, feels unnatural, either laden with metaphor or uncertain about its characters.
It’s likely this narrative inconsistency and direction of playing with the subject matter rather than reality that leads to some of the clunky, wooden performances. Horror icons like Crampton and Langenkamp come out unscathed – they always do – but almost everyone else seems lost as often as they are scared or empowered. Exchanges like the ones between Mindy and her mother don’t sound remotely genuine, constantly breaking the spell a film like this needs to cast to be effective. Fox is giving it her best shot (I’m pretty sure she’s in almost every scene) and I’d be interested to see her challenged by a role like this again, but it’s very disheartening to see someone give it her all in a film that doesn’t really know what to do with her character or her performance. Motherhood is hard. So is filmmaking.
This review was featured at the world premiere at Fantastic Fest. It premieres on Shudder on October 4.He.