The Horror Film Where Everyone Does the Obvious Thing

You know the moment. The door at the end of the corridor. The floorboard that just creaked. The friend who went to check what that sound was and hasn’t come back. And the character on screen—some 19-year-old with a flashlight and no survival instinct—walks toward it. You’re sitting in the cinema thinking: call the police. Call the army. Drive away. Burn the house down from a safe distance. Do literally anything except walk toward the door.

Hell No is the horror film that makes those decisions correctly. Every time the situation calls for someone to do something monumentally stupid, the characters instead do the obvious rational thing: they leave, they call for help, they don’t go into the basement. The result is a perfectly constructed comedy that also functions as a genuine critique of a genre that has been running on manufactured idiocy for decades.

The problem—and the film is honest about this—is that once you remove the idiocy there’s no story. No victims means no horror means no film. Logic is, it turns out, the enemy of narrative tension. The characters survive, the monster is inconvenienced, everyone goes home. It’s the best possible outcome and also the least interesting one, which is a feeling I recognize from real life more often than I’d like.