The most traumatizing sound in a horror movie is not a a broken bone, or a gushing wound. It s the sound of a soul breaking. That s what made the most brilliant and disturbing films of the 1970s – films like
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
I Spit on Your Grave, and
The Last House on the Left – so impactful. It s a keening wail, a silent inhalation, the stomach drop of knowing that the characters who survive will never be whole again. That nightmarish realization is what separates the brilliantly brutal and truly shocking
Hunter Hunter from many of its contemporaries.
The surgical deployment of a needle drop from Danish post-psychedelic gothsters Tales of Murder and Dust is the moment that seals it for Shawn Linden s story of the destruction of a family by outside forces. That s exactly what father Joe Mersault (Sawa, grizzled and gristly) was trying to avoid when he took his family out into the backwoods to become a fur trader. His wife, Anne (Sullivan), knew what she sign