Lovecraftian Horror Movie Review: The Void (2016/2017)

The Void (Steven Kostanski & Jeremy Gillespie, Canada. 2016/2017)

Theatrical poster for The Void.

Originally crowd-funded on Indiegogo, this movie is a horror, mystery, sci-fi homage to classic pre-CGI creature features, especially those of John Carpenter. It has loads of allusions to various Lovecraft tropes including strange cultists, reanimated dead, alien evils older than time and weird portals to regions beyond the stars. First shown at the 2016 Fantastic Fest and then later at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, it was given a wider theatrical release in 2017.

James (Evan Stern) flees from an isolated farmhouse and escapes into the woods. A screaming woman tries to follow James, but she is shot and callously set on fire by Vincent (Daniel Fathers) and his mute son Simon (Mik Byskov), both of whom also came out of the farmhouse. A short time later Deputy Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) comes across a bloody and incoherent James crawling down a rural road and delivers him to the nearest medical facility; a half-burned-out, understaffed hospital which is about to close – and also happens to be where the good Deputy’s estranged wife Allison (Kathleen Munroe) works as a nurse. The only other staff at the hospital are Doctor Powell (Kenneth Welsh), Nurse Beverly (Stephanie Belding) and intern Kim (Ellen Wong). In the waiting room is an old man, Ben (James Millington), with his heavily pregnant granddaughter Maggie (Grace Munro) and, in one of the rooms, there is a young patient called Cliff (Matt Kennedy).

The hospital descends rapidly into chaos as Beverly seemingly goes crazy, pealing her own skin off and killing Cliff, forcing Deputy Carter to shoot her dead. A State Trooper (Art Hindle) then arrives, investigating an apparent occult mass murder back at the farmhouse, looking for James. Strange, otherworldly horns then sound ominously and the hospital is surrounded by hooded, knife wielding, cultists seemingly intent on making sure that no one leaves alive – just as Vincent and Simon burst into the hospital, also on the hunt for James.

Cultists from The Void!

Things just get stranger, more weird and more violent from there on in, so prepare yourself for a gruesome roller-coaster ride to a place far worse than hell itself as Deputy Carter tries to make sense of what is happening. All while sorting the good guys from the bad, dealing with in-fighting, more murders, unusual visions, the dead that will not lay and the sanity defying appearances of hideous slithering entities and other cosmic horrors… oh, and don’t forget the cultists.

Content Warning: very violent, with plenty of blood and gore – enough even for the most ardent fan of grotesque body-horror.

Watch the trailer here:

The Void – Taglines: A New Dimension in Evil | There is a Hell. This is worse

Runtime: 90 min – Colour – English.

The Lovecraftian’s Rating: 7.5/10 (Good to Very Good) – a great attempt at a good old-fashioned (80s) style practical-effects driven action packed horror. A bit weak regards characters and dialogue but a very entertaining and bloody slice of creepy and intense Lovecraftian shenanigans none the less.

Buy The Void on DVD or Blu-ray at Amazon.com
Buy The Void on DVD or Blu-ray at Amazon.co.uk

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Please feel free to comment on this review – or, if you’ve seen the movie, add your own review – by replying to this post.

Go HERE for a full list of Lovecraftian film and TV adaptations. We have an expanding section of our website dedicated to The Lovecraftian – purveyor of all the latest news, updates, chatter and trends from the field of Lovecraft lore – the man, his works and his weird worlds of Yog-Sothothery.  Stay up-to-date with the news and join The Lovecraftian’s adventurous expeditions into the world of the Cthulhu Mythos by following him on Twitter where fact and fiction become entwined! The Lovecraftian’s main webpage can be found HERE.

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For the uninitiated:

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an influential and prolific American writer of early twentieth century cosmic horror fiction who saw himself chiefly as a poet – though many believe that it is his immense body of often literary correspondence that is in fact his greatest accomplishment – he wrote over 100,000 letters in his lifetime. He inspired a veritable legion of genre writers then, and to this day, to set their fiction within his strange cultish world.

The Cthulhu Mythos: Lovecraft, somewhat light-heartedly, labelled the “Mythos” that he created in his body of work Yog-Sothothery – and also, on rare occasions, referred to his series of connected stories as the Arkham Cycle. It was his friend August Derleth who coined the term “Cthulhu Mythos” (named after one of the monstrous beings that featured in Lovecraft’s tales) to encapsulate his epic vision of a chaotic and dark universe filled with unspeakable horror.

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