White Noise - DVD Review

The biggest problem with the current spate of lackluster horror films (The Ring Two, The Amityville Horror, Darkness, and so on ad nauseam, literally) is that the writers throw together so many other elements of different, superior horror films that they never find their own identity. Most of the horror chefs of today start with a broth of the recent Asian wave, usually Ringu, throw in a liberal dose of Shyamalan heartstring-pulling, toss it with some cultural twists a la Mr. Williamson (Scream), chop in a few quick cuts to make you jump, overcook, and serve on a plate labeled "based on a true story." Consequently, none of these new scare fests feel relevant in their own regard. They just feel like reheated versions of themselves. Change the ingredients a bit, recast, and change the name.

The recently released DVD of White Noise by Niall Johnson isn't going to stem the tide of sub-par horror. In fact, it's one of the least comprehendible and most egregious offenders of the above recipe in quite a while. Supposedly based on the real-life phenomenon of EVP, where poor, grieving people are convinced that their lost loved ones are speaking to them through static on their radio or TV or just floating in the air (the extras on this DVD detailing these grief sessions are hard to watch), White Noise starts interestingly enough, when a man's recently deceased pregnant wife reaches out to him from the other side. The writing problems surface in the second act, when Johnson (or possibly some nefarious executive) decided that a tale of a man finding solace through his wife's words from beyond the grave wouldn't be enough to make the audience jump. Naturally, we need a bad guy.

More often than not, the bad guy, usually a nameless, evil force is the biggest weakness in the writing for the horror genre. With White Noise, Johnson decided to double his horror clichés and go with both evil forces on the other side with Keaton's wife and a serial killer, simultaneously. At the same time, Johnson throws all the rules about afterlife communication that we think the film has set up out the window and the plot of White Noise starts to combust. Without giving anything away, the transmissions through EVP start to tell our protagonist the future and, supposedly, his wife is trying to guide him to become a crime-stopper, saving lives before they get to the other side. In the meantime, the evil forces from the other side are doing something, well, evil and moving around in shadows meant to make us jump. It all becomes too ridiculous to care about.

The biggest problem with films like White Noise and other films in the recent onslaught of sub-par horror is that stealing from horror films that worked before only reminds you of what you're missing. There aren't a lot of films that can hold up to The Sixth Sense or Ringu, so why bother trying a riff on the same themes? It makes for a script that feels like a sequel more than an original work. And that's truly scary.