Directed by Frank Sabatella
Starring Jay Jay Warren, Cody Kostro and Sofia Happonen
Running time: 1 hour and 38 minutes

OR
Why The Shed Belongs in Horror Movie Jail
by Matthew Crump

Have you ever woken up early on a Saturday morning over a bowl of Cheerios, turned on a TV left on the Syfy channel from the night before, and gotten sucked into a b-horror movie just interesting enough to keep your attention but not bad enough to justify turning it off? That’s the Shudder exclusive movie The Shed.

The Shed follows an angsty teen named Stanley living in a nondescript time period in rural America under the watchful eye of his abusive grandpa. Stanley has an even angsiter best friend, a massive crush on a softcore goth girl aptly named Roxy, and several cokehead bullies. He also has recently acquired a vampire taking shelter from the sunlight in a shed in his backyard. While Stanley sees this as a pest in desperate need of extermination, his bullied BFF sees it as a gift for exterminating all their problems. You can imagine where it goes from there.

Here’s the deal. I’ve seen a lot of horror movies. I’m not saying I’m an expert but along the way I have picked up a few rules of the genre. Anyone who has seen any film in the Scream franchise could probably name at least a few of the rules. Knowing that the producers of this film also produced the Saw movies, I know they know the rules. So what I’m wondering is why the rules were disregarded here.

The first, and perhaps most sacred rule, was broken in the opening chase sequence. A local hunter is running through the woods, shotgun in hand, fleeing from a mysterious, shadowy figure. He trips (of course) right after we see a tall figure in a cloak materialize in the morning fog. The hunter scrambles up and hides behind a tree only to be met by yellow eyes and sharp fangs of his captor right before he—pause. 

Did you catch what’s wrong with this scene? If you’re new to this, I’ll lay it out for you. The first rule to any good monster movie: don’t show the monster. At least not at first, and definitely not in the first two minutes. The monster reveal is the classic formula for keeping an audience invested while you spin plotlines and develop characters that covertly create deeper investment. If you show The Big Bad in the opening scene, there’s pretty much no reason to keep watching. Knowing this truth, I still trudged forward, against my better judgement.

The next hour and a half violated a slew of other sections of the rulebook: splitting up to investigate, relying too heavily on dream sequences (I stopped counting after the 5th one) and, perhaps worst of all, killing the dog. Almost everyone knows that there is an unspoken agreement in the horror genre that dogs and babies get a free pass from whatever lethal beast is being unleashed on the screen. If this particular clause is broken, you should be less scared of the film and more scared of the filmmakers.

But there is one rule that was broken, extremely egregious in nature but also so integral to the premise of the movie that I almost missed it. It’s in the fine print of the vampire subsection, but after seeing 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a good handful of Vincent Price flicks I know that one of the most common constraints of vampires is that they have to be invited into the house. Not only did these vamps break and enter into Stanley’s farmhouse all over the third act of the movie, but the very genesis of this plot and title is born out of an unwanted intrusion of a vampire in a shed. 

If strictly following the universal vampire guidelines, this movie literally could not have happened. But listen, I know not every vampire is created equally. Still, if you take a moment to consider why that rule exists in the first place, it’s to create the added challenge for bloodsuckers caught outdoors in the morning sunrise, requiring vampires to live up to the cunning nature that they are revered for. Many franchises have come up with creative ways to get around this rule, but in order to do that you have to at least acknowledge it—something The Shed probably never even considered to do. Hell, even Stephanie Meyers put in enough effort to explain away that plot hole.

Considering how littered this movie was with tired cliches and gaping plot holes, I can’t say this final violation of horror movie law surprised me. I’m just disappointed that it took me until the third act to realize that I would have to put more effort into writing this review than the writer did in cooking up such a lazy, haphazard story. If The Shed happens to crop up on your TV one Saturday morning, don’t waste your Cheerios.

The Shed premieres Thursday, August 27 on Shudder.