Movie Review: THE HANGMAN

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: May 31st, 2024 / 01:31 AM

THE HANGMAN movie poster | ©2024 Epic Pictures Dread

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: LeJon Woods, Marcellus, Scott Callenberger, Kaitlyn Lundardi, Rob Cardazone, Jefferson Cox, Lindsey Dresbach, Daniel Martin Berkey, William Shuman, Laura Loftus, Richard Lunello, Ameerah Briggs
Writers: LeJon Woods & Bruce Wemple
Director: Bruce Wemple
Distributor: Epic Pictures Dread
Release Date: May 31, 2024 (theatrical); June 4, 2024 (VOD)

THE HANGMAN opens with the following supertitle: “There are at least seven known gateways to Hell across the world. One of the sits in the mountains of West Virginia. The region has no name.”

This is intriguing, but it’s not the set-up to the type of horror movie we might reasonably anticipate from that introduction.

Following this, we see small gallows with a rope and a lot of hooded figures gathered around a fire. One of these figures opens a door within the mountainside. A humanoid monster (Scott Callenberger) rises from within.

The monster is a demon known as the Hangman, and he does figure heavily in what is to come.

Father Leon (LeJon Woods, who also cowrote the screenplay) and seventeen-year-old son Jesse (Marcellus) are out here in the wilds of Appalachia on what’s supposed to be a bonding trip.

Jesse would rather be at a music festival, but Leon is determined. On the other hand, Jesse also wants Leon to open up about exactly what happened to Maya (Ameerah Briggs), Leon’s wife and Jesse’s mom, five years ago. Leon’s continued reticence infuriates Jesse.

In the morning, somebody has sabotaged Leon’s car engine and Jesse is missing.

While Nate Vandeusen has composed a first-rate straight-on horror score, the screenplay by Woods & director Bruce Wemple, along with Woods’s performance, adds a fair amount of humor to the situation. THE HANGMAN is not a comedy, and a father in a panic over the fate of his child is perfectly serious. However, Woods and the writing give Leon enough understandable incredulity at various developments to prompt a few intentional smiles.

As a director, Wemple wrings some unease from ropes that supernaturally snake along underfoot. He’s also good with one-on-one tension. It may well be part of the point here that racist backwoods drug dealers are just as, if not more, frightening than actual demons. Where THE HANGMAN runs into trouble is that the supernatural threat comes after the human one, so that while we intellectually grasp that the danger is increasing, we feel that it has lessened.

THE HANGMAN might be termed “folk horror-adjacent.” We get the full mythology, which makes sense, but there’s no sense of lore or community history. The discussion of how things work socially in the middle of nowhere is interesting enough for us to wish it got more screen time. The proximity to Hell, while it factors into the plot, also doesn’t add the kind of ambience we would might associate with this kind of thing.

Marcellus is good as the troubled but loving Jesse, and Lindsey Dresbach is persuasive as a local who has had about as much as she can take.

THE HANGMAN has its pitfalls, but it’s entertaining a lot of the time.

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