At the outset of director/co-writer Deon Taylor’s wonderfully nasty, appropriately grisly and self-aware psychological horror tale “Fear,” we see a video clip of Chicago’s Rick Kogan playing a TV book show host named Rick Kogan, interviewing an author named Rom Jennings, played by Chicago’s own Joseph Sikora (Tommy Egan from “Power”). When Kogan asks Rom about his next book, Rom responds, “I can’t really tell you too much about it, but what I can say is it does squarely focus on the mythos and mythology surrounding fear and the concept of fear.”
A short while later, Rom and his closest circle of friends have gathered at the obligatory Spooky Old Inn Nestled Deep in the Mountains, and they sit around the campfire, sharing their most personal fears in order to let go of those fears. “Fear will not rule us here, not tonight,” says one member of the group, after which we hear the litany of fears, from being unable to catch a breath to getting trapped in a confined space to drowning to the sight of blood — and you gotta love a horror movie that basically tells you from the get-go how most of these characters might meet their ultimate demise.
