50 Days 50 Films - #24 "The Signal" (David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry, and Dan Bush)

I experienced an emotionally complicated breakup with horror movies somewhere around 2003. It was like being married to someone for twenty years and waking up one morning, looking at her snoring in the bed next to you, and realizing that you've simply grown apart. There's no infidelity there, no betrayal. You still care for this woman, in a way, but you realize that you just want different things.

You love her, but you're not in love with her, if you know what I mean.

It took me another couple years to really come to terms with this feeling, but by 2006 or so I felt like I had solidly moved on with my life. Horror films were a part of my past, but they no longer defined me. I had essentially stopped writing horror scripts and had moved on to gangster movies, dark dramas, and thrillers. I felt good. I felt comfortable with this new, hot young girlfriend.

Then came the "The Signal."

Suddenly, here was a movie that encompassed everything I felt an indie horror movie with its own unique vision could be — but too often isn't. It's creative, energetic, completely insane, and very very scary.

It was like running into said ex-wife in a grocery store two years after the divorce and realizing she's lost a bunch of weight and has been working out, and you find yourself wondering why you ever left her in the first place.

"The Signal" is the brainchild of three Atlanta-based filmmakers (Bruckner, Gentry and Bush) with about $50K in their pocket and no one looking over their shoulder and telling them what NOT to do. The story of what would happen if a sudden, mysterious signal coming through televisions and cell phones were to push everyone into a murderous frenzy (like Stephen King's "Cell," but a lot better), the movie is divided into three interlocking parts. Each filmmaker switches off writing, directing and cinematographical duties.

The result is a film that feels at once tightly disciplined and wildly out of control in the best way possible. Each section completely stands on its own as its own short film, with its own voice and vision, and yet together they create a whole that is unlike anything I've ever seen before or since.

This is NOT a zombie movie, by the way. It feels like a direct response to the zombie wave. There are no murderous automatons — Each person afflicted by the signal develops his or her own interior logic for why they begin doing the horrible things they find themselves doing. The filmmakers put you inside the experience of insanity and spin you in circles until you simply don't know which way is up anymore. This is is what makes the movie so disturbing (and, indeed, often quite funny).

"Let The Right One In" dropped into a theaters a few months later, and it felt like horror movies were experiencing a much needed resurgence. I was in love all over again. Unfortunately, these films turned out to be anomalies, and I can't say the genre has completely rehabilitated itself. There's still way too much garbage for me to really consider myself the fan I once was.

But if I can get a movie this fresh and alive once every two or three years, I'll count myself lucky.