“Hand guns are made for killin’, They ain’t no good for nothin’ else

And if you like to drink your whiskey, You might even shoot yourself”

– Lynyrd Skynyrd “Saturday Night Special”

I think about getting shot a lot. It’s not like a crippling fear, or anything, but I do have numerous escape routes mapped out in my head just in case someone shoots up my work. I’m not going to lay out the exact details of these plans, but I have one for when I am sitting at my desk, another for when I am in a meeting room, and one for the bathroom which involves me shimmying up the stall and kicking out a ceiling tile. That bathroom one is going to be tough, and might require more agility than I possess.

I know this is a real bummer, but I seriously think about it a ton. Sometimes, during my drive to work, I wonder if someone is going to lose it due to some sort of road rage incident–or just lose it in general–and open fire. Or, I’m afraid that I might roll by some routine traffic stop on the side of the road, and the dude (or lady, but let’s be honest here, it’s probably going to be a dude) is going to start some sort of shootout that leads to me taking a stray bullet. I think about getting shot while I’m at the movies. I think about getting shot while I am at home in front of my living room window. I think about it everywhere. It’s a real bummer, and it’s a probably a common American fear in 2018.

I remember a few years back–around the time I first moved to metro Detroit– there was a series of shootings on one of the major highways in the area; I-94. Someone with a sniper rifle was camped out on the side of the road and firing at cars– seemingly at random– as the vehicles travelled down a stretch of the highway. This freaked me the hell out. During that time, I was hosting beer pong events for a company (I was a DJ, basically), and I had to travel down that same stretch of highway to get to the bar where the events would take place. The first couple of times I went out there, I avoided the highway as much as I could, taking off from home at least a half-hour earlier than normal just to avoid the stretch where it seemed the sniper had set-up shop.

Life gets busy though, and eventually I had to jump on I-94 to get to work on time. During that first trip down the highway after the shootings had started, my head was on a swivel the entire time. A strange feeling came over me on that drive, because it hit me just how little control I had over the situation, as I was at the mercy of some unseen man behind a sniper rifle somewhere in the distance. I was able to get to and from my destination without getting shot that night, and from that point on, I would take the highway more often, becoming less nervous with each successful trip. Sure, the man with the sniper rifle would sometimes creep into my thoughts as I drove, but after a few weeks it became normal.

That sense of normality is a part of American life in 2018. The specter of gun violence just kind of hangs over this country, so while these thoughts pop into my head occasionally, in the moment I just shrug my shoulders and say, “eh, I hope that doesn’t happen”. Guns are everywhere in America, and they are something that modern horror hasn’t really dealt with head-on. Slashers, for the most part, don’t use guns. Ghosts don’t use them (although that would be amazing), and I think a lot of filmmakers believe that guns are “too easy” of a weapon to use in horror movies. It can be hard to use guns in a suspenseful way, and I also believe that the recent horrific real-life events revolving around gun violence have given people pause on how to incorporate them, or if it’s something fitting for a horror story at all. That’s been changing a little bit recently. Joe Hill’s recent novella collection STRANGE WEATHER, features a disturbing story called “Loaded”, and If you haven’t read it yet, you should, or maybe don’t. Well, read it, but prepare yourself, as it’s an incredibly bleak work that doesn’t beat around the bush as it uses the fear of guns to tell a modern tale of horror. I addition to “Loaded”, I think we can add Ryuhei DOWNRANGE to the list of modern gun-related horror works, as well.

The difference between something like Hill’s “Loaded” and Kitamura’s DOWNRANGE, is that while Hill seems to make more of statement with his novella– to the point of being confrontational at times– DOWNRANGE doesn’t really carry any sort of message related to guns other than, “guns surround us, and maniacs can use them to kill you”. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that DOWNRANGE is an anti-gun movie on its surface–at least no more than TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is an anti-chainsaw movie– but if horror movies reflect the times in which they are produced, DOWNRANGE might be one of the more accurate mirrors held up to our current American society. Much like the characters in DOWNRANGE, there are times when it feels like all Americans are at the mercy of an unknown madman behind a gun.

DOWNRANGE opens with an SUV full of carpooling college students as it barrels down a quiet highway when one if it’s tires blows out, forcing the vehicle to stop. Of course, there is no cell service, and the closest town isn’t for miles, so they are stranded until someone else comes along. Nobody does. Or at least nobody does before a shooter opens fire on the group with the help of a long-range rifle. The students panic, do the best they can to find shelter, and try to survive the bullets now flying toward them. That’s pretty much it for the setup. DOWNRANGE is not a narratively complex film, as it takes place primarily in a single location, and feels much more interested on seeing what it can get away with on a technical level for most its 90-minute runtime.

Playful is the word that I keep coming back to when thinking about DOWNRANGE; a strange, and probably troubling word to describe a movie that features a sniper picking off a bunch of people stranded on a deserted highway. Ryuhei Kitamura brings his hyperkinetic style to the story, never missing the opportunity to use the camera as his own weapon, spinning it and moving it wildly to create chaos. DOWNRANGE feels like Kitamura read one of those “you can’t create tension with guns” comments and took it as a personal challenge to do just that, as everything in DOWNRANGE is cranked up to 11 or 12, especially the gore. DOWNRANGE is a gooey, wet film, and the camera lingers on the ripped flesh for absurdly long periods of time, almost daring the audience not to look away. And then there is the acting. Oh boy, is the acting cranked up as well.

The actors in DOWNRANGE are not necessarily giving what I would describe as great performances. The acting in the film is mostly bad, but it worked for me, as DOWNRANGE plays like a satire. With everything heightened to such a fever pitch, the endless screaming and quivering exhibited by its stars fits in well with the film’s excessive gore, and it also provides some distance from the horrific events unfolding within the film. I’m going to be honest, I’m not sure how well I would have been able to handle a straight-forward version of this story at this moment in time. The frenetic camera, over-the-top gore, and shoddy acting serve to remind the audience that this is only a movie, something that provides a helpful distance.

In addition to being playful on a technical level, DOWNRANGE is also playfully nihilistic. It’s SUPER mean, which really isn’t anything new for Kitamura, as his films tend to have a fatalist quality. There is no escape from the barrage of bullets raining down upon the characters of DOWNRANGE. The sniper is like a cruel god, deciding who gets to live, and who gets to die, seemingly at random, while the film takes a perverse joy in it is well. DOWNRANGE feels like a comment on the bloodthirsty audience that attends a film like this. What are we really cheering for in these films? Do we really want to see the characters escape scot-free and unscathed? Or do we want the blood and gore that we have been promised? DOWNRANGE is like a slasher movie in the way the villain picks off the characters one-by-one, but it feels much grimmer at times. In a typical slasher film, part of the fun is thinking about the ways we would be able to overcome the villain with our own nimbleness—both physical and mental. The violence in DOWNRANGE feels inescapable, and the bad guy firing away from afar with a long-range rifle is much less fun– and much more disturbing– especially when the blood begins to fly.

One of the reasons we watch horror movies is to be entertained, or even to be provided some sort of release from the everyday horrors that surround us. Gun violence is one of the predominant real-life American horrors in 2018. There seems to be no escape from it, as it feels like we are constantly being bludgeoned by news of the latest horrible mass shooting. Much like the characters in DOWNRANGE, Americans from different backgrounds and walks of life, thrown together by circumstance, must do our best to survive the unknown man behind the gun. It’s a depressing thought, but it’s one that might be necessary to accept, and DOWNRANGE plays with it throughout. Sometimes there is no way to find the man behind the rifle, and sometimes there is no way to defeat him, the best we might be able to do is survive. DOWNRANGE is a hopeless film, and one that doesn’t have a ton of faith in the characters that inhabit it, but I like to think that there is more hope to the situation than what DOWNRANGE shows. Unfortunately, every so often, when I’m at work, or in my car, or at the movies, the thought that there might be no escape begins to creep in.