Be afraid: ‘Southbound’ takes audiences on a road to horror

Three women (Fabianne Therese, left, Hannah Marks and Nathalie Love) hitch a ride with a couple harboring sinister motives in “Southbound.”

Interlocking tales of highway terror revolve around malevolent spirits at a truck stop, a mysterious traveler, a car accident and a home invasion.
Initial release: February 5, 2016 (USA)
Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath, Tyler Gillett, Chad Villella, Roxanne Benjamin, Justin Martinez
Running time: 1h 29m
Music director: The Gifted
Screenplay: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath,Roxanne Benjamin, Susan Burke, Dallas Richard Hallam

A pervasive atmosphere of no-one-can-hear-you-scream is extreme in “Southbound.” The picture, a low-budget anthology of five minihorror stories, packs a punch. Rating: 3 stars out of 4.

The Talking Heads sang of a “Road To Nowhere.” The characters in “Southbound” all find themselves on a road to … nowhere good.

In the five loosely connected stories that make up this horror anthology, that road is a ribbon of two-lane blacktop snaking through an ugly hunk of anonymous desert (the Mojave plays it). A character rightly describes it as “the middle of nowhere.”

Cellphone coverage is spotty, settlements are few, far between and desiccated, and the “people,” so-called, who one meets along the way are not necessarily human.

Guilty consciences and blood-spattered visages are behind the wheel in the opening segment. And hovering off in the distance, indistinct through the windshield like a shimmering heat mirage, is horror.

That’s an impressive opening for a low-budget exercise in creeping terror where, in succeeding segments, a flat tire lands three young women in the clutches of a smiling couple with unholy intentions, and a highway accident puts a put-upon driver in an eerily empty hospital where a twitching victim bleeds her life away as he frantically pleads for help in dark, deserted corridors.

A bar patronized by demonic patrons and a motel where masked figures menace a terrified family are a little farther down that selfsame road.

The segments, though short, are nastily effective. The cast of unknowns and the little-known writers and directors (several of whom were involved with the making of 2012’s “V/H/S,” also a low-budget horror anthology) are more than up to the task of making an audience shiver.

Above all, the picture’s pervasive atmosphere of no-one-can-hear-you-scream is extreme.

“Southbound” packs a punch.

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Horror takes a left turn in this indie-film anthology of scary stories on the open road

Two low-rent criminals, covered in blood and frantic with regret, speed down a purgatorial stretch of desert highway. The gravel-voiced DJ on the radio dedicates the next song directly to them: "This one is for all you lost souls racing down to redemption, and all you sinners running from your past by heading straight into that pit of darkness up ahead." Here's hoping the fugitives enjoy the tune, because their demons (represented here by floating skeleton monsters) are about to catch up with them.

Welcome to Southbound, a gnarly anthology from some of the same twisted minds who brought you the V/H/S trilogy. But where the segments in those films were linked by a flimsy framing device and a shared nostalgia for Eighties horror kitsch, this new omnibus is unified by unflinchingly focusing on a single theme: guilt. Each of the movie's four interconnected shorts is directed by a different lo-fi horror filmmaker; each of their heroes is haunted by their transgressions and desperate for a way to make things right.

In Roxanne Benjamin's fun and unnerving "Siren," a rock trio hitches a ride from some Leave it to Beaver-looking Satanists who force the band's lead singer to reckon with her role in a tragedy. Her story bleeds directly into David Bruckner's "The Accident," a brilliantly sick detour that follows a distracted motorist (Mather Zickel) as he plows into a pedestrian — and then tries to sow her body back together at an abandoned hospital. Like episodes of The Twilight Zone that a baked Rod Serling might have written after watching Carnival of Souls, these chapters are eerie to the extreme, and seedy enough to make you feel like you're watching something you were never meant to see.

Of course, every omnibus has its ups and downs: Patrick Horvath's "Jailbreak" introduces a bedraggled road warrior as he searches for his long-lost sister, but some egregiously undercooked supernatural elements keep his story stuck in neutral. Fortunately, V/H/S alumni Radio Silence almost get things back up to speed with a wraparound piece that curls the movie into an unholy Möbius strip — it builds to a clever anticlimax that ditches us in the same tortured limbo that the film's characters have been trying to escape.

Despite its occasional slack, Southbound is still tightly knotted where so many other films of its type are frayed at the seams. It gets under your skin because it knows there's nothing scarier than realizing that — no matter how far you drive — the evil in your rearview mirror is always closer than it appears.