Bounding Into Halloween Night 4: Subterranean Suspense With ‘The Platform’ (2019) & ‘Nightbreed’ (1990)
It’s a Two Below special this Saturday evening for two subterranean screen gems from the past, and relatively present. The first movie takes you to the many levels of a holding facility where at least some of the people within are kept there to keep society safe, and the next feature is where others go to keep themselves safe from society. Grab a flashlight, fill a flask, and charge the vape because we’re heading underground.
El Hoyo aka The Platform (2019)
This underrated glimpse into a bleak dystopia is from the country of Spain, and it centers around a mild-mannered hombre named Goreng (Iván Massagué). In an attempted to better himself and his station in life, he volunteers to serve 6 months in the Vertical Self-Management Center (aka “The Hole”) to earn a diploma from the totalitarians running his part of the world.
The center is a massive concrete tower that goes beneath the earth for an unknown amount of levels, but that’s because nobody living has ever ascended from Level 300.
The inmates are a mixture of volunteers and criminals who most certainly did not choose to be there. It’s two people per cell with a hole in both the ceiling and the floor where food is dispensed only once a day on a platform the size of a large dining room table. It’s mechanically lowered from one level (starting at Level 0) to the next, but the giant slab is usually empty when it gets to Level 200.
Every month, the inmates are knocked unconscious, and then moved to another level, but it’s completely random. A person will be feasting like a king on Level 6 one day, but then wake up to their new roommate trying to cannibalize them on Level 171, or hanging themselves down on Level 202. That’s when Goreng decides to take matters into his own hands, and hop on the platform to regulate the food rations.
This is high-concept horror with dark humor, social commentary, and a satisfying amount of gore. It’s dark and the ending isn’t the happiest, but it shows the great things that come from the right imagination with a shoestring budget ($1,203,235 USD). Not to mention, it’s a foodie’s worst nightmare.
The Platform is burrowed deep in the darkened depths of Netflix, and the trailer is just one level below:
Nightbreed: Director’s Cut (1990)
From the mind of legendary horror master, Clive Barker (Hellraiser, Candyman, Lord Of Illusions), comes the adaptation of his 1988 novella, Cabal. While “The Hole” was built to contain, this netherworld is a sacred sanctuary for monsters, and freaks of this world. It’s a place where one discovers that all things are true. God’s an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live.
Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer) is a man with serious problems. He’s in psychotherapy because he keeps having these reoccurring nightmares about a place called Midian where monsters in impressive makeup frolic, and perform gymnast maneuvers through the cemetery above with music playing that’s obviously by Danny Elfman. Boone goes to his shrink about this, but Dr. Phillip Decker (“King” David Cronenberg) has a little secret. The soft-spoken, Zenlike doctor is a serial killer who targets whole families to slash to ribbons, and he decides to pin all of his murders on Boone.
After an LSD-spiked dose of lithium from Decker, Boone ends up in the hospital where he meets a man who tells him the location of Midian, and then proceeds to flay most of the flesh off of his own skull. Boone gets out of dodge, and heads to the cemetery his new friend told him about where he’s bitten by one of the Midian locals. Then he’s met by the police who’ve come to apprehend the serial killer that their friend, Dr. Decker, told them about. The doc pulls a snake move that gets Boone filled full of buckshot, and he dies, or at least until he wakes up in the morgue.
The story behind this movie has been regaled, repeated, and rehashed since it came out nearly four decades ago. Some of the suits at 20th Century Fox couldn’t comprehend that Barker was creating a world where monsters weren’t trying to kill everyone they cross, and they ran a lawnmower over the story (cutting out 40 minutes of it), and doled out an incoherent pile of dung that everybody hated.
After many years and grueling effort, Barker’s original vision was released in 2013, and it has been universally acknowledged as a superior version. Clive Barker’s Nightbreed is over on TUBI, but watch out for those Berserkers.
Here’s the original trailer:
