31 Days of Horror- Day 26: Flatliners (1990)

(dir. Joel Schumacher)

Columbia Pictures

On Halloween night, five medical students undergo an experiment to find out what lies beyond death, but they bring manifestations of their sins back with them.

Despite coming in immediately after the tail-end of 80s horror, Flatliners set a precedent for 90s horror. While other early 90s films still felt distinctly stuck in 80s mentality, Flatliners shrugs off those trappings, opting for a moody high-concept, slightly cerebral-minded film that straddles the line between genres. Schumacher, and screenwriter Peter Filardi, who also wrote defining 90s horror flick, The Craft, do an admirable job of venturing into new territory and creating a new mythology that doesn’t feel like a reworking or copycat of other films. Flatliners also looks like it has money (and a shit ton of fog machines) behind it, and whether you love or hate Schumacher, the guy has always delivered top notch set pieces and productions. While 90s horror isn’t held in quite the same nostalgic regard as those from the 80s, it’s hard not to admit that the properties that came from major studios had quality production values even when the narratives missed the mark. Flatliners is also noteworthy for its charismatic cast of big name stars, (Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Julia Roberts, William Baldwin, and Oliver Platt), stepping away from the novice newcomers and C-listers that defined much of the previous decade. While it’s by no means a great film, and I personally prefer Schumacher’s other venture into the horror genre, The Lost Boys, Flatliners feels like a significant step in the evolution of horror.

The central question of what exists after death is always a fascinating concept to start with, and Flatliners creates a feasible pseudo-scientific method to answer this question. But the question and resulting foray into horror doesn’t work without an interesting group of characters behind it. While an emotional connection between the viewer and the characters is never quite struck, this group of college students are at least interesting reflections of their neo-grunge world, and are individually defined by their own desires, longings, and torments. If there’s one major flaw to Flatliners, it’s that none of the characters are morally compromised enough. Sutherland’s Nelson, haunted by a boy who he and his classmates accidently made fall to his death as children, and Baldwin’s Joe, a sex addict who repeatedly cheats on his wife, come the closest to moral failure. But they are also too situated as charming leads for the film to entirely allow for their ruination.  Robert’s Rachel, haunted by the death of her father, and Bacon’s David, tormented by a girl he’d bullied as a child, seem less at fault for their sins, or are at least placed within more normalized positions of guilt. The characters are forced to face their guilt after flatlining and bringing physical manifestations of their sins back with them into the physical world. But the film never pushes that concept all the way, and the terrors unleashed by these characters seem like timid toe-dipping into tepid horror, when the narrative calls for something more soul shattering.

Scare Factor: 1/5 Flatliners is entertaining, conceptually interesting, and well-performed by some of our finest actors, but it’s hard not wish that the film was harder on these characters, and didn’t offer so clean a resolution. Flatliners is built on the idea of forgiveness, but sometimes actions can’t be forgiven and that’s a far more frightening territory to venture into.