The Western Front was already the closest thing the twentieth century produced to a literal hell: gas, rats, mud deep enough to drown a horse and a life expectancy best measured in afternoons. Indie horror Worm has looked at all that and decided what it really needed was something with teeth coming up from underneath.
Written and directed by Ryan Staples Scott and produced by Octane Multimedia, the film follows three American soldiers left stranded in their trench after a devastating gas attack in the latter stages of the First World War. Out in the dark, there are screams. The natural assumption is wounded men waiting to be dragged back to safety. The less natural, and considerably less survivable, explanation is that something enormous has been fattening itself on the battlefield and has acquired a taste for doughboys. Sean Frenzel, Carter Brown, Jonah Lewis and Devin Montgomery are among the men discovering that the regulation entrenching tool was not designed for this sort of thing.
The promotional art leaves little to the imagination: a vast, glistening maw ringed with fangs, a burning trench, and a mud-plastered soldier clamping a hand over his own mouth in the universal gesture for “please don’t let it hear me breathe”. It is Tremors in a tin hat, essentially, and none the worse for that. Burrowing monsters have a long and honourable lineage, from Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm (and Ken Russell’s gloriously deranged film of it) to the shrieking Graboids of Perfection, Nevada, and the giant sandworms that Frank Herbert insisted were a metaphor for ecology rather than an excuse for spectacle.
The trenches themselves have also proved fertile ground for horror, which is less surprising than it sounds. Deathwatch, Trench 11 and assorted Great War ghost stories have all understood that a narrow ditch with no escape, no daylight and no idea what is on the other side of the parapet is about as good a haunted house as you can build. Add a gas attack, which blinds, isolates and keeps the cavalry well away, and you have a siege movie that writes its own excuses for why nobody comes to help.
The real test for a film like this is restraint. A monster the size of a London bus is a lot less frightening once you have had a good look at it, and the best creature features know to keep their beast in the dark, below the duckboards, for as long as possible. If Worm remembers that the screams in the night are scarier than the thing doing the screaming, it could be a nasty little treat.
No firm date has been confirmed yet, but the film is headed for digital release soon. Here at SFcrowsnest we will be keeping our heads below the parapet until then. After all, the old Western Front wisdom was never to stick your head up. Nobody mentioned what to do when the danger comes from below.
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