YellowBrickRoad

YellowBrickRoad
Theatrical Poster
Directed by	Jesse Holland Andy Mitton
Produced by	Eric Hungerford
Written by	Jesse Holland Andy Mitton
Starring	Cassidy Freeman Anessa Ramsey Laura Heisler
Music by	Jonathan McHugh
Cinematography	Michael Hardwick
Edited by	Judd Resnick Jesse Holland Andy Mitton
Production company	Points North
Release dates	January 23, 2010 (2010-01-23) (Slamdance Film Festival)[1] June 1, 2011 (2011-06-01) (United States)
Running time	98 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$380,000

YellowBrickRoad is a 2010 horror film by Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton that stars Cassidy Freeman, Anessa Ramsey and Laura Heisler. It is about an expedition that seeks to find out the fate of an entire town that disappeared into the wilderness 70 years ago. Although critical reception was mixed, it won best film at the New York City Horror Film Festival.

Plot

One morning in New England, 1940, the entire population of Friar, New Hampshire – 572 people – walked together up a winding mountain trail and into the wilderness. They left behind their clothes, their money, all of their essentials. Even their dogs were abandoned, tied to posts and left to starve. No one knows why. A search party dispatched by the U.S. Army eventually discovered the remains of nearly 300 of Friar's evacuees. Many had frozen to death. Others were cruelly and mysteriously slaughtered. The bodies of the remaining citizens are still unaccounted for. Over the years, a quiet cover-up operation managed to weave the story of Friar into the stuff of legends and backwoods fairy tales. The town has slowly repopulated, but the vast wilderness is mostly untracked, with the northern-most stretches off limits to local hunters and loggers. In 2008, the coordinates for the "YELLOWBRICKROAD" trail head were declassified. The first official expedition into a dark and twisted wilderness will attempt to solve the mystery of the lost citizens of Friar and reach the end of the trail.

The researchers hope to turn a legend into an item of recorded history. But all their expertise and their equipment fail to prepare them for the trail they follow. They themselves change while following their trail, and the darker sides of their personalities soon emerge.^[2]

Cast

• Cassidy Freeman as Erin Luger
• Anessa Ramsey as Melissa Barnes
• Laura Heisler as Liv McCann
• Clark Freeman as Daryl Luger
• Lee Wilkof as Clerk / Usher
• Alex Draper as Walter Myrick
• Tara Giordano as Jill
• Michael Laurino as Teddy Barnes
• Sam Elmore as Cy Banbridge

Analysis

Bernice M. Murphy finds similarities between this film and The Blair Witch Project (1999). On both films the horror lies in the "desperate fear of losing oneself in the wilderness". In both films the characters stray from "civilization" and go in search of something intangible, something lurking within the forests of the United States. In both, the characters also stray away from their own rationality.^[3]

Murphy asserts that both films belong to a tradition of "Rural Gothic" horror fiction that can be traced back to Young Goodman Brown (1835) by Nathaniel Hawthorne. She points that American narratives of horror fiction and Gothic fiction often take place in the forests, the same forests confronted by the settlers and explorers of the Colonial history of the United States. She argues that "Rural Gothic" is an important subgenre of the wider American Gothic tradition.^[3]

Murphy further places the film within a type of "Rural Gothic" narratives, where bad things happen to those who willingly venture into the wilderness. Stories which tend to feature the loss of a civilized way of life. She cites as other examples Edgar Huntly (1799), Young Goodman Brown (1835), The Shining (1977) and its film adaptation (1980), and The Blair Witch Project (1999). She also cites the historical Donner Party (1846–1847) as fitting well with this trope.^[4]

Reception

Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 44% of 16 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating was 5 out of 10.^[5] In a negative review, G. Allen Johnson of San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "Yellowbrickroad is without personality. It's competently made, but the cast and direction are just bland."^[6] Horror review site Life After Undeath gave the film a largely negative review and stated that the ending "reeks of an overzealous attempt at providing a clever twist to something that may as well have remained unexplained."^[7] Meet in the Lobby offered more praise, calling it "a psychologically haunting film that leaves a rather disquieting feeling that is slow to fade even days after seeing the movie."^[8] Dennis Harvey of Variety called it "a well-crafted horror-mystery" that may frustrate audiences that look for explanations.^[9]

Awards

In 2010, YellowBrickRoad won best film at the New York City Horror Film Festival.^[10]

Sources

• Murphy, Bernice M. (2013), "Introduction:We're Not Out of the Woods Yet", The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness, Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-1137353726 

References

External links

• YellowBrickRoad at the Internet Movie Database
• Yellowbrickroad at Rotten Tomatoes