The Hole 3D

Directed by: Joe Dante
Written by: Mark L. Smith
Full credits at IMDb

Joe Dante’s The Hole is a throwback to the 1980s, the heyday of Spielburgian, scary-fun horror, when kids played the heroes and men like Dante owned the genre. One of the earliest images in this movie is of a station wagon pulling into Anytown, U.S.A.—after the camera has been spit out of the tail pipe—and, really, when’s the last time you actually saw anyone driving one of those? In the car are Chris Massoglia (teenager) and Nathan Gamble (pre-teen), playing brothers; behind the steering wheel is their single mom. They’ve fled Brooklyn for Bensonville, moving into a new house with a padlocked-shut hatch in the basement. The kids pry off the locks, of course, and find a mysterious abyss, a hole without a bottom that’s home to fear itself: it (somehow) discovers what gives you the creeps and unleashes it upon you.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2010 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer: