David Bruckner
A horror anthology segment gives a director about a quarter of an hour to build a world, frighten someone and get out, and David Bruckner has used that constraint like a training regime. He co-wrote and co-directed The Signal in 2007 with Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush, one feature split three ways. He directed the "Amateur Night" segment of V/H/S, contributed to Southbound, and came back years later for V/H/S/85.
What he is good at is the slow reveal of a space. His features trap one person, or a very small group, inside a location whose geometry stops being trustworthy: the forest in The Ritual, the lake house in The Night House. Scares are staged wide and held longer than is comfortable, and when the monsters finally arrive they are photographed as though they had architecture rather than anatomy.
That patience is also his limitation. Taking on Hellraiser in 2022 put him in charge of a franchise built on hard, immediate imagery, and the measured approach produced a handsome film noticeably more interested in ritual than in dread. He now occupies a specific industry slot: the reliable hire for serious-minded horror, making original films when he can get them financed and taking custody of somebody else's monsters when he cannot.
Movies (8)
Where to start with David Bruckner
Watch The Night House first. It is the purest version of what he does, one performance and one building and an hour of unease assembled out of angles and negative space rather than jump scares, and it asks no franchise homework of you. The Ritual is the better choice if you would rather be frightened outdoors, and it has the sharpest creature design of anything he has shot.
Then go backwards. V/H/S contains the fifteen minutes that made his name, though the anthology around it is uneven, and Southbound and V/H/S/85 are for people who like the format itself. Leave Hellraiser until last: seriously mounted, competently made, and far more comfortable with pageantry than with pain. The Signal is a curiosity, a three-director experiment more interesting to discuss than to sit through.