Deon Taylor is a fascinating figure, having forged his own path as a Black filmmaker in Hollywood, independently producing, and now distributing, his films, and he seems to be the only person single-handedly keeping the mid-budget adult thriller alive (see: “The Intruder,” “Black and Blue,” “Traffik”). He is rigorously focused on the craft of filmmaking, but he’s also obsessed with serving a multicultural audience that goes largely underserved by certain swaths of the industry. A global pandemic was certainly not going to derail his mission, and in his latest film, the horror flick “Fear,” Taylor takes on the pandemic head-on, utilizing our collective anxieties as the grist for his storytelling mill.
“Fear” is a COVID movie, and a contagion film, and a haunted house story rolled into 100 feverishly stylized minutes. The film would be a tortured metaphor for the ways in which we all allow fear to rule our lives, and how we manifest what we focus on, for better or for worse, but it’s not so much a metaphor as it is plainly and repeatedly stated throughout.
Joseph Sikora stars as horror novelist Rom, who takes his girlfriend Bianca (Annie Ilonzeh) on a weekend getaway in Northern California as a reprieve from the pandemic lockdown. They arrive at the rustic Strawberry Lodge, and as he’s about to propose, he blanches and falters, instead revealing that he’s invited their group of friends to celebrate Bianca’s birthday. They’ve got the historical lodge to themselves for the weekend, and seriously, don’t worry about the incredibly creepy innkeeper who leaves them a terrible bottle of wine, or the detailed stories that Rom tells about the miners who tortured and killed indigenous women thought to be witches. Nope, nothing to worry about at all.
