Among the Living (2014 film)

Plot

Three young adolescent friends decide that they want to start their summer vacation early, so they decide to skip the last day of school in favor of having a little fun. Their adventures that day get them into a little trouble, which causes them to wander to an abandoned film studio lot on the edge of town called Blackwood Studios. The young boys are horrified when they see a man in a clown mask dragging a chained woman across the lot. They manage to flee and try to get the police involved, only for the police to assume that because the adolescents are only causing more trouble. The adolescents end up going back to their respective homes, unaware that the masked man and his father are planning on taking their revenge on the three friends.

Cast

Production

Bustillo and Maury first announced plans to film Among the Living in 2012 and filming was expected to begin in southwest France in spring 2013. Funding for the film was raised through a successful crowdsourcing campaign. Filming began in June 2013 and a trailer for the film was released in March 2014.

Reception

Critical reception has been mixed, and Twitch Film commented that "The tension in Among The Living is so thick that it spawned collective coping mechanisms, wherein neighboring strangers locked eyes when they couldn't bear to look at the screen any longer." Shock Till You Drop gave Among the Living a positive review, remarking that the movie "isn't too deep on a subtextual level, but it's a solid exercise in pure terror." The Austin Chronicle considered the film to be a "bloody good capstone" for nouveau guignol cinema and stated that it was "by turns sublime, comical, and chilling in the blackest sort of way." AMFM Magazine said the film was "little more than an excuse for the baddie to kill off each character one-by-one in uninteresting and tensionless ways." The review from Bloody Disgusting was more mixed, as they noted that the story was "so-so" but praised the film overall. IndieWire was more negative, as they wrote "This could have been a perfect, meta-textual opportunity for the directors to comment on horror movies in general and their movie in particular. Instead, it's a lot of people coughing up blood and slicing each others faces' off, followed by a coda so sugary sweet that it gave us a toothache. That's probably the movie's biggest surprise: that the guys behind "Inside" finished up a movie this sappily."