There are few things that the horror genre loves more than a creepy doll. It loves them even more when they’re in puppet form; epitomized by Dead Silence, scary movies adore capitalizing on viewers’ love for classic children’s shows like The Muppets and twisting that affection to its most unsettling potential. Many try to use puppetry to make their movies creepy, but few commit to this concept as hard as Evan Marlowe’s Abruptio. Following a man forced to commit heinous crimes at the risk of having his head blown off, the film’s intense gore and shocking violence make it unsettling to watch — and that’s not even factoring in the fact that every single character is a disgusting puppet. Utilizing people’s inherent fear of the uncanny, Abruptio makes the bold choice of having its entire story told through a cast of strange-looking marionettes, ones that somehow manage to be both far too realistic and far too nasty to ever be human. It’s a kind of experimental horror film that few creators would ever even attempt, and by committing not only to this premise but the innately disturbing visuals at its core, Abruptio becomes one of the hardest to watch horror movies ever — literally.
There’s Literally Never Been a Film Like ‘Abruptio’
Even if it wasn’t stuffed with creepy puppets, Abruptio’s graphic story would unnerve anyone. It follows Les (Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s James Marsters), a lonely man who somehow ends up with a bomb strapped to his neck, forced to commit heinous crimes on behalf of an unseen organization. Horror fans will be in immediate awe at the movie’s cast; from Jordan Peele to Robert Englund, it’s stacked with some of the biggest legends this genre has to offer. They all contribute to Abruptio’s effective voice acting, with its numerous scenes of puppet gore — ranging from the brutal shooting of an entire family to a disgusting disembowelment — being backed by an eerie soundtrack of utterly human screaming. This is all disturbing enough, but it’s made even worse by the style of puppets the films chooses to use, which serve perfectly as sickening metaphors for what it looks like when people let cruel selfishness guide their life.
Scary movies that utilize puppets typically oscillate between hyper-realistic or laughably inhuman, with either version rarely trying to offer realistic bloodshed when the dolls themselves are injured. The designs of Abruptio are a terrifying in-between of these concepts; while not hyper-realistic, whoever made these puppets put ample effort into bringing the minuscule wrinkles and blemishes that make all humans hideous on a microscopic level to the forefront of each character design. It makes them unnerving enough to look at on their own, and then the film imbues them with not only disgusting moments of gore but a chilling narrative about what people will do to escape justice. It portrays our central characters as humanistic monsters because that is what they would be, as the plot eventually reveals that more than his bomb going off, it’s Les’ refusal to let a certain secret come out that drives him to commit such atrocities. To see someone prioritize their comfort over others’ lives is eerie enough, but by accompanying these horrid actions with sickening puppet shells, this movie stresses just how uncannily monstrous people become when they let selfishness guide their lives.
You’ll Be Seeing ‘Abruptio’ Long After the Credits Roll
While Abruptio is truly an innovation for horror as a whole, the film’s unique style isn’t perfect. There’s a sadly constant issue of the puppets’ faces not being able to emote properly, meaning that not only does the film have to spell out each characters’ feelings most of the time, but it turns some scenes of pure horror into laughable moments of audience confusion. It’s not seamless, but genuinely innovative horror never is! And the film deserves so much more respect than it has received for not only telling a legitimately unnerving story but doing it in a way no other has accomplished before. It was a huge risk, and it paid off tremendously by creating one of the few scary movies that audiences will be legitimately sickened by — just by opening their eyes.
