Deathwatch

I’ve come to the conclusion that the British understand psychological horror far better than we do in America. Most of the British horrors I have seen have given me chills without resorting to chainsaw murderers and cannibalistic hillbillies in the woods of West Virginia. This movie came on cable one day, the title is pretty stupid but the movie gave me the creeps.

The story is set in the trenches of World War I. In the midst of gun fire and dropping bombs, a small group of British soldiers find themselves walking lost in a mist believed to be gas. Slightly confused about the details of how they got there, they stumble across an expansive, labyrinth-like German trench where they a survivor. Taking the German captive, they begin to secure the trench for the British, and wait for contact.

Knee deep in water and mud, the soldiers find the bodies of the previous German occupants, tortured and entwined in barbed wire. The youngest British soldier is Shakespeare, who is able to communicate with the hostage in French, shows him sympathy, but is told cryptically that something evil is afoot.

As the soldiers wait for contact over the radio, they sit and wait in endless amounts of rain until night falls. The trench begins to reveal to the individual soldiers that it is not the Germans they should fear. An officer is found to have been killed during the night under circumstances similar to the previous occupants and soon the Captain begins to lose his grip on reality. Haunted by noises and hunted by an unseen force, the soldiers numbers begin to dwindle.

I can’t say that I understood every little detail of this movie, in fact I only understood the beginning and the end, it was the middle that was garbled. Fortunately, with horror movies, I don’t really need to understand why something is going on, I only care about what is going on. Trust me, It is easier to watch the crap I watch if you look at it this way. In conclusion, I absolutely enjoyed this movie, it had its share of gore, but it a war movie you need some blood, but there were no monsters which adds a touch of reality to the story which makes it far more frightening in my opinion.