Review of Dread (2009) by Adam B — 22 Sep 2011

The best Clive Barker Adaptation since Hellraiser. Dread is a great psychological horror thriller based on Clive Barker's short story and the plot is about a younger student Steve Grace he gets accompanied by an older student Quaid who he started talking with and Steve needs a project for school and they started doing interviews with a couple of people.

Over the next few days Quaid gets bored with the interviews. Soon Quaid takes " Fear To The Next Level" and he started acting crazy and he also starts to cause so much trouble with Cheryl and Steve and soon the two found out that they are working with a psychopath who is beginning to make everyone's fear come to life as an experiment and Cheryl and Steve are the next experiments of Quaid.

I really enjoyed this Clive Barker adaptation so far. I personally read the short story first before I watched the film and the movie is just as good as the short story by Clive Barker. The pacing of the film is basically slow but it is never boring for some reason.

I personally like the film and the movie has a dark cinematography and the atmosphere is incredible at the same time. What I did like about this film is that the film is full of unsettling suspense and tension even some great and effective scares that will keep you up for days.

While the movie has lots of scares the gore was really good. All the gore effects aren't CGI at all that is also the reason why I said that this is the best Clive Barker adaptation since Hellraiser because unlike the previous Clive Barker adaptations like The Midnight Meat Train and Book of Blood those two adaptations used the CGI too much and it was badly executed so far.

Although Book of Blood doesn't have too much CGI unlike The Midnight Meat Train the CGI in The Midnight Meat Train was badly executed because all of the effects are completely 100% CGI the blood in The Midnight Meat Train is seriously fake at least Book of Blood has less CGI effects on every scene and it wasn't really full of CGI effects at all on every scene because the CGI effects in Book Of Blood is 71% for some reason.

Dread didn't have any CGI effects at all it's just practical and special effects just like the special effects in Hellraiser. While the movie has great effects the acting is also good. Jackson Rathbone did a good job with his performance as Steve.

Hanna Steen was also good with her performance as Cheryl and Shaun Evans was really good and scary with his performance as Quaid the antagonist in the film. But we still have one question for those of you who read the short story.

Is this movie better than the short story? To say the least it's a no. The movie has a couple of details from the short story which is the characters backstory about their fears and their information like Steve's backstory about his brother and other things as well they were all in the film but Steve's fear was changed.

Because if you read the short story Steve's fear is all about deafness here in the film his fear is about dying in a car accident just like his brother who died from a car accident and his fear of deafness has been transferred to Joshua.

Cheryl's fear of meat was different from the movie to the book. The movie basically falls short in various ways not only with the character details that were changed but the movie also falls short because in the short story by Clive Barker there are two characters who were never shown in the short story and that is Abby and Joshua.

The movie also has a couple of changes and everything was completely different from start to finish. And the film is quite good but it's not as good as the short story so far because most book to movie adaptations falls short in many ways because they reduce certain parts from the book and this movie still did the same although the film is faithful to the short story because there are various scenes in the film that was in the short story like when Quaid shows Steve on what he did with Cheryl even more scenes as well.

The ending of the film though was pretty good, sick and twisted at the same time but the ending is still different from the short story because in the short story Quaid faced his demise and comeuppance when Steve started terrorizing him in the house where he lives and he sees him as a clown holding an axe and he started breaking the door in the last part of the short story and Quaid screams in terror.

But here in the film Quaid overcomes his Dread because he killed Joshua and Steve and he kept Cheryl as a prisoner in the film because in the short story Cheryl was free after Quaid tortured and tormented him.

Overall Dread is a great Clive Barker adaptation and this movie gets an 8/10 because the film has lots of unsettling scares and tension. The cinematography is dark. The atmosphere is the same to the cinematography.

The gore is not CGI at all. The acting from the casts was great. And the movie followed every detail from the short story but it falls short because of the changes from the book to the movie. So Overall Dread is a nice Clive Barker adaptation and Director Anthony DiBlasi did a good job with his directing so far with the movie I heard that he is also directing an adaptation of Clive Barker's Pig Blood Blues so I hope that he does a great job with his directing again.