Movie Review: "Scare Me" Is a Battle of the Sexes to See Who Can Tell the Freakiest Story

Wanna hear a scary story? How about five?

Aya Cash: So good in You’re the Worst, so good in the most recent season of The Boys, and now so, so good in Scare Me, a horror-comedy that leans heavily on her ability to tell stories… but good.

This is a very entertaining and inventive flick now streaming on (*checks notes*) Shudder, about two writers trying to freak each other out with campfire tales in a creepy cabin.

It’s an actors’ showcase, certainly—for Cash and her co-star, writer-director Josh Ruben—but it also demonstrates some of 2020’s finest filmmaking, as Ruben uses the tried and tested visual language of cinema to bring to life the tales without cutaways, dramatisations or, presumably, much money. ‘Show don’t tell’ is the classic maxim for moviemakers. Here, Ruben masters show and tell.

Thing is, it’s just not particularly scary, except maybe for scaredy cats of the jumpiest variety. Usually, I'd say that's the bare minimum for a horror flick. In this one instance, I’m happy to make an exception. Horror movies are theme park attractions printed on celluloid (or digital data). Above all, they should be fun. This one super is.

Ruben stars as Fred (Ruben), a failing screenwriter who has escaped the city—and an ex seeking a restraining order—to get some proper writing done in a mountain cabin. While procrastinating, he goes for a jog and runs into Fanny (Cash), who is being far more productive in an adjacent chalet. Turns out she’s a hugely successful author of a book that’s been acclaimed as the best horror novel ever—a revelation that encourages Fred to reveal his fandom, first, and later, his very male jealousy. When the power goes out that night, Fanny holes up at Fred’s place, where she challenges him to scare her, needling him into acting out his half-baked ‘werewolf’ script. She one-ups him with an improvised fable about a creepy granddad. They go back and forth. A skittish pizza guy named Carlo (a very funny Chris Redd) joins in. They drink, take drugs. And, of course, eventually, the night takes a turn.

None of this works if Cash can’t sell it. She does, just as she sold her complex, depressed firecracker Gretchen in You’re the Worst, and her hip, manipulative Nazi superhero in The Boys. Fanny still very much has the cutting sense of humour of most Cash characters, but Scare Me also allows the actor to play a decrepit old man, a pre-teen girl, a demonically-possessed popstar and a screwball-era heroine compelled into serial murder by a Gollum-esque troll (again, all without changing her outfit: itself an unnervingly amusing sweater comprised of disembodied hands). Ruben, a graduate of College Humour, is similarly effective as an elastic-voiced storyteller. However, it’s Cash who shows off the widest range, including during the final, menacing climax.

Scare Me is just the latest horror flick—following Jim Cummings' The Wolf of Snow Hollow—to suggest toxic masculinity is the real threat in 2020 (more than actual demons), though both are way more successful than last year’s bungled Black Christmas, which went too literal, and too ineptly. It’s heartening to see male filmmakers using their voice to call themselves on their own bulls***—it’s telling that nothing is scarier to Fred here than the fact he’s not as successful or talented as Fanny—but we hope female directors get more opportunities to tell their stories through the lens of their experience. Honestly, an adaptation of Fanny's grabby “Grandpa” story would be a great start.

4/5

Scare Me is available to stream on Shudder. Rating CTC.