The American horror movie has a tradition of not crossing certain boundaries. There’s a reason that the most disturbing horror movies in the world are often born outside the borders of the United States, imported from counties like Serbia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Japan, France, and Italy. Places with brutal histories (a commonality across all countries, unfortunately) wherein their countrymen acknowledge and grapple with their homeland’s wrongdoings through the medium of film. Something the American filmmaker, and the studio systems backing them, are oftentimes less comfortable with. The American appetite is just not as well-versed in particular extremities, like accepting the horrors of its own bloody past and desperate present.

With the exception of a few, the most visually grotesque and psychologically disturbing horror movies in America had their heyday in the 1970s. I Spit on Your Grave, The Last House on the Left, The Exorcist. Even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre broke boundaries of its time and created a new subgenre of shock and awe barbarity unto itself. Those imported filmmakers that do cross that certain line in the sand – often times with films that are not even awarded a rating from the MPAA – come with their own foreign sensibilities. Think Lars von Trier, Tom Six, Michael Haneke. Storytellers who not only want to exploit audiences, plumbing the depths of our discomfort, but actually rub our nose in it for daring to check it out in the first place. The shock and awe is the point.

Of course there are talents like Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Jeremy Saulnier, and Robert Eggers who do just that. But they temper the exploit with art. They peer into the American consciousness, mining trauma for terror. And for how dark some of those films can get, none come quite close to the prevailing doom and despair of Antlers.

If American horror is fundamentally uncomfortable with reflecting upon our dark and blood-stained history, Scott Cooper – director of the incredibly bleak Christian Bale/Casey Affleck Appalachia crime drama Out of the Furnace and the “Cowboys and Indians” western misfire Hostiles – has taken that task head on with Antlers, an unyieldingly disturbing and visceral gut punch of a horror movie. While Indigenous mythology informs the bulk of Antler’s more surface-level horrors, a throughline of generational trauma runs deep through this story of a concerned teacher and her troubled young student who come to face an ancestral evil.

Nightmare fuel in its purest form, Cooper’s picture of a decaying Oregon mountain town is loaded with distressing subject matter including instances of physical and sexual child abuse, cycles of addiction and substance abuse, generational trauma, bullying, poverty, suicide, and abandonment. It’s bleak as hell and never for a moment postures to be anything other than pure misery. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel, just more tunnel.

Keri Russell is Julia, a recently relocated elementary school teacher returning to the town where she grew up. While a kid, she sustained physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father. She shacks up with her kid brother Paul (Jesse Plemmons), the exasperated sheriff of this small Oregonian town with mounting problems and a waning vacancy at the morgue. The victims, gored to death by something more bestial than a man but bearing our unique markings. Both sibling tried to exert some sense of agency over the abuse they experienced, Julia by becoming a teacher and helping the next generation, Paul by upholding the laws that failed to protect them as children. Trying to fit in and avoid the bottle, Julia takes a shine to her student Jacob (Jeremy T. Collins) by virtue of seeing herself and her own abuse reflected through his tired eyes, weary soul, and haunted drawings.

The young Collins plays Jacob with the convincing physicality of a victim, hunched and huddled and closed off from the world. He’s a case study in the physical manifestation of trauma and abuse. Emaciated of nourishment and affection both. Unbeknownst to his teachers and the bullies at school who wait each day to harass him, Jacob returns home to a father (Scott Haze) and younger brother (Sawyer Jones) who have been “changed” after an encounter with an antlered cryptic, the deer-like Wendigo, transforming them into feral beings, animalistic and starving for raw meat.

Antlers can be read as a chilling metaphor for the destruction that substance abuse brings down upon a family, the physical torment of withdrawal, and as an environmental cautionary tale. As Jacob is forced to “feed the monster” that is his father, locking him away in the attic, he becomes complicit in this elemental evil. Cooper cuts into indigenous mythology to explore humankind’s twisted relationship with nature, giving vindictive motivation to the elemental beast that lurks at the center of the story, justifying the malevolent entities who are pissed off with how their lands have been ravaged and treated with no regard.

Produced by Guillermo del Toro, Antlers adapts Nick Antosca’s short story “The Quiet Boy” to both dig into the tragedy of abused children and deliver an absolutely bone-chattering horror movie with outstanding and terrifying creature design that bring the legend of the Wendigo to life in horrifying fashion.

A masterpiece of doom and gloom, Antlers is a handsomely mounted piece of transgressive art. Even from a visual standpoint, the movie is bleak as hell, with Florian Hoffmeister’s cinematography revealing scenes of sprawling darkness interrupted only by the pulsing red and blue lights of a cop car. Add in Javiar Navarrete’s wholly unsettling soundscape and you have a tension-wracked film that plays with its audience like a cat with an already-injured mouse.

Just when you think it can’t get any more dark, Antlers turns a corner and does just that, thrusting viewers into an unwavering hole of darkness punctuated by incredibly effective jump scares – the best of which are always those that you know are coming but manage to make you fly out of your seat regardless – and visually repulsive sequences of grizzly gore. The most chilling tableaus here can only be described as “Kafka on bath salts”; explosions of unblinking elemental horror, thorny and demented pops of body horror, new forms emerging from the spent carcasses of used-up humans. Jaws will drop.

Ranking up there with the most disturbing horror movies to be found across the globe – Martyrs, A Serbian Film and Inside – Antlers pushes the envelope to the edge, proving Cooper a dedicated student of the French New Extremity movement and eliciting in this viewer some of the most visceral reactions I’ve had during a horror movie throughout my long tenure watching exactly these kinds of films. I often found my mouth quite literally agape at the horrors Cooper has put on display on multiple occasions.

Sufficed to say, casual horror movie fans need not apply here. This is only for those willing to scrape the depths of the genre and the darkness that resides there. Many will find it simply too much to bear. Most will struggle to “enjoy” it and those that do will do so precisely for how gloomy and bleak it is. And though it may leave a sour taste, you have to respect how uncompromisingly dark it. It is truly a rare beast. And yet, nothing is depraved so much as eternally depressing. The question remains, can you handle the bleakest American horror movie of the century?

CONCLUSION: This traumatic horror movie from Scott Cooper and Guillermo del Toro digs into the Indigenous legend of the Wendigo to tell a sobering human-level story of abuse while delivering top-shelf genre thrills. The production is as handsome and as bleak as any American horror movie dares to be, making for a horrifying and thoroughly scary experience that’s sure to linger in your nightmares long after.