The Dead Ones is a vastly unnerving and innately contentious horror film that underlines the topic of school violence with palpable extremity. Whilst it would’ve been barrenly excessive to portray a school shooting and nothing else, the vindictive spirits and hallucinations exhume layers to the characters, exposing where their anguish stems from and how it blemishes their psyche. While there are many components that can fuel a school shooter’s vile urge, the movie draws from a few cogent possibilities: bullying, domestic abuse, mental illness, and rampant ire.
Solely as a piece of horror, The Dead Ones is genuinely terrifying. The ghostly antics are mainly employed to reinforce the trauma that the teens try to disregard, even though it lingers more memorably than any skulking spirit. The teenagers’ trek through their personalized purgatory is delectably murky, with the ruined school interiors upholding a foreboding climate that keeps the viewers (and characters) on edge.
“…vastly unnerving and innately contentious horror film…”
The flashback sequences of the school shooting are naturally more apprehensive, unsightly, and devastating. Coupled with Christopher Blauvelt’s excellent cinematography (undeviating wide shots and shuddering close-ups) and Maxx Gillman’s fluid editing, the flashbacks are not disruptive; in fact, the flashbacks are imperative to how the film evaluates what goes through a school shooter’s mind by rightly depicting the damage they inflicted.
There is a sense of curiosity behind the identities of the masked gang, though it remains apparent. Even if the gang’s identities are foreseeable, it doesn’t take away from the fact that putting a face to the school violence is still intrinsically gut-wrenching. In all honesty, the graphic violence that coincides with the school shooting is almost too much to handle, but it isn’t complete exploitation. Every school shooting isn’t contained, and the perpetrators in the film are not lauded in any fashion.
The Dead Ones is a markedly unsettling venture through the mind of a school shooter, and one that disinters value in the unspeakable. But, as repellent as that may sound, the movie is as much a tale of vindication as it is an elaborate sentence of damnation and guilt. This 73-minute horror film will turn heads and trigger discourse, whether that be on the matter of school violence or how such aggression is dealt with it. Either way, The Dead Ones will not go quietly.
"…a markedly unsettling venture through the mind of a school shooter..."
