*Before* And After III: YellowBrickRoad

Alright, it's semi-obscure horror film time everyone. My favorite time! The topic of inquiry today is a piece called YellowBrickRoad, a 2010 American horror/thriller set in New England, favorite stalking ground of Stephen King, my eternal sorta-nemesis-if-I-ever-bothered. Whether or not this'll be relevant is as of yet unknown to me, as I, true to format, have not seen the movie yet.

So, the plot is fairly simple on the surface, as a lot of plots tend to be. In 1940, the people of the town of Friar, New Hampshire, go up a mountain trail and never return, pretty much vanishing. 68 years later, a group of ambitious explorers, or something of the sort, try to pick up said trail, but discover that, surprise, surprise, Friar a la 2008 is a creepy town with creepy people, both presumably with dark secrets. The path also appears to be some sort of entity in itself, in a Genius Loci/Event Horizon kind of way, although that could also people being symbolical. I will, however, hope that we're dealing with an enthralling intellect of some sort. This is partially because the alternative is, as this trailer would have me believe, it being your average slasher.

The movie looks sorta low-budget, but not enjoyment-impairingly so, probably on account of the lack of color-correction. I'm not complaining though, the se7en/Saw-inspired grime filter is actually getting sort of old,  well, still nice to look at, but I suspect I'll write more about that at a later date. Anyway, if Paranormal Activity 1 showed us anything, it's that you can, indeed, make a pretty good movie for 15000$, and from what I can see, YBR has a higher budget than that, of course, the higher budget could also be bad news, see I Know Who Killed Me and more high-budget travesties than I care to count, but let's not get into that.

So, the two trailers I've seen of this movie paints it in two distinctly different lights, one as a creepy town/forest-themed Lovecraft-esque mindfuck of a thing, whereas the other one goes for the slasher vibe as mentioned earlier. In cases like this, I prefer to believe the nongeneric one is the most representative. We'll just have to see about that.