Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by John Pata
Hold your breath! Black Mold is gonna get you! When two photographers try and capture the beauty of decaying structures, they get more than they bargained for in an abandoned industrial facility. Strong character studies and lovely cinematography bolster this film, which could have been more decisive about its third act structure.
Photographers Brook (Agnes Albright) and Tanner (Andrew Bailes) are out to capture the decaying beauty of abandoned structures. They have taken to trespassing in old houses, capturing the clutter of lost memories and broken dreams. Brook has found a big abandoned industrial facility, long forgotten, and off the beaten path. It looks to be a treasure trove of good shots. However, there are dangers waiting for them in this decrepit structure.
Hiding in the building is a homeless squatter (Jeremy Holm – House of Cards, Mr. Robot, The Ranger) who has an angry and violent streak. Clearly paranoid, he is furious at the intruding photographers. He accuses them of being part of a conspiracy to capture him and do unspeakable things. Brook and Tanner attempt to flee the scene, but fail to overcome the homeless man. Time to negotiate with the deranged hobo, who now has the advantage on his dank home turf.
Brook and Tanner hold out hope for their backup rescue plan. Their “getaway” driver CJ (Caito Aase) will arrive to pick them up. But, day turns to night, and CJ has not returned. As they await a rescue that seems unlikely to arrive, something about the homeless man triggers Brook’s memories of her late father, who committed suicide in front of her, for which she still blames herself. Under all the heavy costume padding and a thick beard, Jeremy Holm is doing double duty as the homeless man. Through a series of flashbacks, the audience is let into these similarities.
It is not just a crazy vagabond that is a threat to the couple, however. The old facility harbors something much more insidious. A black mold bloom that has psychotropic and hallucinogenic properties. The spores clearly worked their properties on the homeless man, slowly poisoning him over time. And, the longer that Brook and Tanner stay in the building, they begin to suffer from the madness as well, turning on each other, and warping their perspectives on reality.
Black Mold arrived at the Portland Horror Film Festival on a bit of a hot streak. It had recently won the Best Indie Feature Film award at Panic Fest in Kansas City. Lead actress Agnes Albright also won best actress for the films at that festival. So high expectations were set coming into PHFF. In the look, and the performances, the movie held up to my expectations coming in.
Thematically, it also held on to the creepy premise, bringing strong Session 9 vibes to the party, with the slowly building dread and the authentically ruinous warehouse movie set. John Pata, in a pre-screening announcement, lavished praise on his cast and crew for enduring wet and near-freezing conditions in an actual Illinois warehouse for the shooting. The breath you see is real, and the whole ensemble gets merit badges for enduring what must have been a very unpleasant shooting environment. Pata took great advantage of every set, including the dilapidated abandoned farmhouses in the first act, to really ground the feature. The angles and the lighting showed off the peeling finishes and the puddles inside providing an eerie shimmer.
Albright is terrific as a woman who has overcome much but has some real vulnerabilities. The relationship between Brook and Tanner feels authentic, and the interplay between Brook and the hobo is quite compelling. Unfortunately, the third act seemed to be something of a scramble. The titular black mold is merely suggested and could have used more development or intent. For all the careful story building of the first two acts, the third act felt forced. Some of the illusions exaggerated their effects too much for plausibility. But, it’s a horror movie, so we’ll cut some slack.
The mold provides symptoms without any malice, and that also takes some of the edges off of the horror. The mold is a neutral player, and it doesn’t seem to be particularly insidious, even if the madness spirals out of control. The plot establishes the psychological more than the biological. Black Mold taps into the fears of each of the characters, which is admirable. The mold triggers these fears and drugs the characters rather than transform them.
The idea that fungal spores or pollen can drive you mad has been done before (Shrooms, The Happening, In the Earth). More commonly, other horror movies opt to make the spores a body horror transformative event (Gaia, Splinter, Superdeep, The Last of Us, The Girl With All the Gifts, Alien Covenant, The Spore… and of course Matango). So, deadly spores aren’t particularly new. I appreciate some of the grotesque opportunities for body horror in fungus horror. This movie could have used some body horror for sure. Fortunately, this incarnation takes the added effort of strong character-building. It also utilizes its great set location to spin a superior brooding story that has some resonance and it is certainly worth a watch.
As a cautionary tale, I think this movie adds another reason why you shouldn’t sneak into decaying abandoned buildings.
Black Mold is still in its festival run and does not have a streaming or wide release date. This movie is not rated, and would probably straddle the line of PG-13 and R for violence, intensity, language, and a little bit of gore.
No Trailer yet, but here is a producer-provided clip from the film: