Tenants

NOW ON VOD! In the high rise of the horror genre, it is the anthologies living on the fourth floor that make it the party floor, as you can see in the excellent horror anthology Tenants. The segments are directed by Buz Wallick, Sean Mesler, Jonathan Louis Lewis, and Blake Reigle, with the screenplay by Wallick, Mesler, and star Mary O’Neil. It opens the way so many movies should: inside an empty parking garage with a glistening membrane on the concrete and a body squirming in it. The fleshy sack rips open, and out crawls Joni (Mary O’Neil), slimy and naked with strange markings on her.

“…an empty parking garage with a glistening membrane on the concrete…”

She finds some discarded thrift clothes and starts making her way up to the residential floors of the building. She is disheveled and disoriented and is looking for a woman named Emily (Kathryne Isabelle Easton). Even though she keeps going up, she constantly finds herself on lower floors again. As she wanders floor after floor looking, she runs into the building’s other tenants, like Jude (Myles Cranford), Amber (Christa Collins), Leonard (Douglass Vermeeren), and Belinda (Clarke Wolfe). Whoever Joni encounters, something utterly surreal and sinister happens to them. All this time, a shadow (Rib Hillis) bathed in darkness is pursuing Joni, chasing her down the carpeted halls, black claws reaching out to grab her…

Tenants immediately let you know you have come across a batch of the good stuff with not only that socko membrane opening but also with the opening credits. Wallick uses his editing expertise to put the best foot forward by cutting the opening credits to the beat of the score. Why doesn’t everyone do this? It hits you like a wet finger in a light socket. There is also the clever concept arrangement of having seven separate stories set in the same building which has seven stories. But Wallick, Mesler, and O’Neil have bigger ambitions than just packaging six shorties with a wraparound.