Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t yet watched the recent remake of The Stepfather, but plan to, you may want to avoid this article as I will be spoiling a bit of it.
I don’t see much reason to write up a Blu-ray review of The Stepfather, but there was something that struck me while watching it that’s worth a once over. The film follows a man who bounces from family to family, gaining their confidence, marrying and ultimately killing them. The end result of this is seen in the movie’s opening moments as Dylan Walsh playing the crazed killer cleans himself up, has some breakfast and heads out the door all while the audience lays witness to the dead family around him. What’s curious about this is the fact there are also dead children, a teenager and even what appears to be a son of a bout ten-years-old or so.
I saw this and thought it was sort of gutsy. After all, how often are innocent children killed in horror/thriller movies? By this I am primarily looking at the overtly violent ones where the audience is particularly intended to gain some measure of entertainment from the carnage they are watching. To my knowledge not many, and in all honesty I can’t think of a single one off the top of my head. However, the opening of The Stepfather doesn’t exactly play fair. After all, the kids were already dead when we first see them. We don’t see him actually killing them. Nevertheless, I filed the moment away wondering how dark this film would get all the while knowing it’s a PG-13 feature.
As time passed, tension was built, mirrors scared people and cell phones ran out of battery power. Basically, all the horror cliches held true, even to the point that once it came time to start killing the family, the two youngest were nowhere to be found. Instead Walsh begins hunting his fiancee as well as her son and his girlfriend played by 23-year-olds Penn Badgley and Amber Heard. Young Sean and Beth were with their biological father, safe and sound.
It made me wonder, are there lengths even horror films won’t go to?
Franchises such as Saw and Hostel slaughter adults, and even twenty-somethings are fair game, as are high school students played by twenty-year-olds. However, when it comes to little kids even the most depraved films usher them away. Sure, Poltergeist sucked one into the TV and little Aidan had to deal with Samara in The Ring, but that was simply trouble befalling children, not death. Even Damien doesn’t die at the end of The Omen.
I’m not saying I want to see children slaughtered, because I don’t, I simply found the difference in situations at the beginning of The Stepfather compared to the ending to be interesting.
