Are more traditional scares becoming passé? After 2025 delivered a veritable smorgasbord of mold breaking horror cinema that took in music loving vampires, lethal bewitched children and a ghost film that featured a dog as the protagonist, anyone who dares to create a disposable frightener that isn’t wildly experimental, or stunningly original runs the risk of audiences turning their nose up at their throwback efforts.
This brings us neatly to a stop right alongside Passenger, the latest film from André Øvredal, a director who is himself used to mixing things up thanks to movies like the wonderful Troll Hunter and the intriguing The Autopsy Of Jane Doe. However, in the wake of such distinctive directors as Zach Creggler, Curry Barker and Damian McCarthy, is the notion of a horror film that isn’t one big allegory fest a little too old fashioned for today’s crowds? Or to put it another way, have simpler films like Passenger simply run out of gas?
Meet Maddie and Tyler, a young loving couple that’s planning to live the latter’s dream of ditching their apartment in the choked up city and live a much freer life on the roads of America as they live out of their state of the art van. At first, this life genuinely starts out as being idyllic as the two lovebirds celebrate their new existence by getting engaged, but after encountering an extremely suspicious car crash on an empty back road one night, their dream soon changes lanes into becoming a waking nightmare.
At first, Maddie only notices little things such as an ominous shadow here, or three portentous scratches in the side of their vehicle that keep returning now matter how many times they buff it out. Matters get even more tense when a woman at a van meet gives them stern advice about the hidden rules of the road; strongly maintaining that “people don’t take trips, trips take people” and insisting that they never drive at night, or stop their vehicle if they do. Of course, Maddie and Tyler have already done all of that and for their innocent road diligence, they’ve paid for it by picking up a particularly malignant hitchhiker in the form of a demonic entity.
As standard for any film made after any version of The Ring, the creature loves to toy with its victims before finishing the miserable bastards off and spends the days preceeding a gruesome, violent death messing with their heads and freaking them out with scares and paranoia. Realising that they’ve been marked by a pitiless force that takes the form of an eyeless, ghosty priest, the plucky couple race to figure out how they can dispell this unwanted passenger before it finally decides to finish them off. But how exactly do you purge a demon from the vehicle you’re living in – I mean, I haven’t driven in a while, but I don’t think breakdown services come with an auto-exorcist as standard…
Listen, as a director, Øvredal has proved in the past that he knows what he’s doing and there’s nothing actually wrong with Passenger technically speaking. It has a hook that’s fairly original (think of a Conjuring movie on wheels), plucky leads and some good examples of the filmmaker putting some novel spins on some of the usual jumpscares we’ve all become accustomed to – but the issue is that with films that seek to invoke the kind of frights we’d get in the 90s, Passenger ends up feeling fairly basic. Compared to, say, Curry Barker’s arguably more derivative, yet utterly more vital Obsession, simply waiting for the pallid-faced ghoul to jump out once more feels like it’s just not cutting it any more. With Passenger it feels like you don’t know where the next scare is coming from – which is fine – but with movies like Obsession and Weapons, it truly feels like the rulebook has been completely torn up which leads to the creeping, butt-puckering dread that anything could happen at any time. How’s a creepy van riding ghost-priest supposed to contend with that?
Again, I feel like I must stress that Passenger is a perfectly acceptable horror flick that confidently plays to its Wan-ian strengths. Those scares, as expected as they may be, are expertly delivered and make great use of dashcams, surveillance cameras and slow pans of the camera to really draw out that anticipation. In fact, a sequence set in a darkened car park that sees Maddie’s van literally get further away every time she takes her eyes off it, is actually masterfully realised, but soon the whole enterprise starts to bump its way through the same, familiar pot holes that bothered Corin Hardy’s Whistle as modern fans may find some of the old school plotting a little too twee and neat.
While I grew up with (and loved) horror movies that helpfully explained the rules that governed a demonic antagonist and even supplied a convenient how-to guide to defeat them, in this time of filmmakers truly embracing the unknown in order to drive eldritch dread into your heart, that sort of thing ends up feeling a little quaint and even a bit safe. If Øvredal wanted to invoke a more “traditional” feel with his frightener, he genuinely succeeded, but I seemingly comes at the cost of some of the innovation he once displayed with her earlier, offbeat movies. Still, not to be too much on a downer on a film that just wants to enjoy the basics, the filmmaker needs to be congratulated on not populating the film with bargin basement shocks. A section that sees a private, forest screening of Roman Holiday suddenly going bad has Lou Llobell’s Maddie scan the area with the projector which casts bizarre images of Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck against the ominous woods and later still, Øvredal gets good milage out of timing jumps with the flashing, staccato hazard lights of a crippled vehicle. But again, there’s the sense that even with the brief bursts of gore and the fact that the director has noticably taken a lot of care crafting his scary setpieces, Passenger has inadvertently become it’s own in-joke by becoming unavoidably middle of the road. In fact, I heard some noticable scoffs coming from the audience once our plucky heroes manage to form a gameplan to challenge and hopefully dispel their attacker by ways of an unlocatable church they just happen to find. Yes, it’s a movie and this is the sort of coincidences that movies need us to accept in order to complete the story, but in a time where a lot of conventional horror rules are being routinely bypassed by a new guard, it seems strangely outmoded.
While neither sloppily constructed or lacking a good jump or two, Passenger nevertheless lacks the verve, innovation, or smarts of other recent horror releases. If you fancy an old school frightener that keeps things simple, it should be quite a satisfactory ride, but if you want something that changes and challenges the rules, you might want to find alternate transport.
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