In order for a horror movie to keep my attention, especially after all these years, it has to bring something new and exciting to the table. They don’t need to re-write the book with every outing, mind you, but they do need to have ideas, or at the very least, cool new ways to explore an old idea. A spooky old hotel, like the one in Christopher A. Micklos and Jay Sapiro’s The Headmistress, is a tried and true place to start (not to mention a perfectly acceptable one), so long as its setting facilitates something interesting. The Headmistress has the tools to pull off something clever and even shows promise early on, but unfortunately, it doesn’t take long before it finds itself languishing in the muck of done-to-death tropes and weak archetypal characters.
I root for these kinds of low-budget indie movies. I really do. I want them to succeed and show moviegoers and studios alike that small movies that compel, scare, excite, etc. can still be made and find an audience. Sometimes it works, most times it doesn’t, but I almost always appreciate the effort, even if the results are less than stellar.
The Headmistress is one of those movies whose effort I grudgingly appreciate but still can’t bring myself to recommend. The characters all do what they’re supposed to do, and everything goes according to a well-worn formula, but nothing very exciting happens. What’s worse is that, even when directors Micklos and Sapiro do manage a few legitimate scares, they undo their successes by immediately repeating them or showing us far too much, thus negating any sense of mystery. H.P. Lovecraft famously said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” It’s simple: When we see too much, we’re no longer scared. Just ask Speilberg and his malfunctioning shark robot.
Making matters worse is the inclusion of a sexual abuse subplot that not only adds very little to the plot but also makes it an unnecessarily vulgar film in ways that are completely extrinsic to its plot up to that point. I can’t for the life of me understand why the directors would go in such a direction for so little reason. Couple that with predictable mediocrity, and The Headmistress leaves very little to hold onto, even if you had the mind to do so after all its missteps.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.