Frailty Is So Underrated

Frailty remains one of the most underrated horror movies of the 2000s.

Frailty, a horror film you will probably rarely see mentioned when people are talking about horror, at least no-where near as much as it should be, even though it has Bill Paxton directing, a great cast and a genuinely uncomfortable idea at its centre, but it still seemingly gets overlooked.

While it is not some completely unknown film that nobody has heard of, but mention underrated movies from the 2000s and you will probably get the same handful of films coming up again and again, while Frailty tends to be somewhere further down the list, if it gets mentioned at all of course.

This is a Bill Paxton horror film, with Paxton directing as well as starring, and it has Matthew McConaughey and Powers Boothe in the cast, and yet it still feels like the sort of film you can recommend to somebody who thinks they have already seen everything worth watching from that period.

It also has something I always want from horror but do not always get - an idea that is actually worth thinking about, and part of the reason I think Frailty has slipped through the cracks a bit is that it is difficult to describe without making it sound more straightforward than it actually is.

You can call it a psychological horror film, you can call it a supernatural horror film., or you can call it a thriller with horror elements - all of those descriptions make sense, but none of them really give the film the meaningful credit it deserves.

I think Bill Paxton deserves more credit for Frailty in general.

People obviously know him as an actor, but this was also his directorial debut, and it is also not the sort of first film where a director is desperately trying to show off, because Paxton keeps things fairly simple, to its credit.

That might sound like a small compliment, but it isn’t, because horror in particular can become a bit ridiculous when the director seems determined to make every shot throw something at you.

I am deliberately not getting into the plot here because that is a separate article for me, but the basic idea behind Frailty is the part that makes it more interesting than a lot of horror films - it is dealing with belief, and not in the way, as it gets into the question of what happens when somebody genuinely believes they are doing the right thing.

There is also a huge difference between an obvious flilm villain and somebody who thinks they are completely justified, and it ends up being a film that makes you think a lot, constantly having to consider whether the people involved actually understand what they are doing, or whether their beliefs can be trusted and where that leaves everybody around them etc.

Films that make you really think = good, amirite?

It Is Actually Quite A Brave Film, Too

I also think Frailty deserves a lot of credit for not making everything completely obvious, as Paxton has done a film here where he does not tell you what he wants you to think, as it is more happy to leave you with your own thoughts, which is always better in horror, unless I just want a cheap popcorn type horror to turn my brain off to.

McConaughey is also particularly interesting to watch now because of where his career eventually went, as this performance was long before the period where he became a bit more typcast I would say,.

It Has A Real Sense Of Unease

You won’t get any big jump scares galore here, but I really don’t think Frailty gets enough credit for just how uncomfortable it is, without even trying particularly hard to be shocking.

You have films that are technically much more violent than this and do absolutely nothing - they show you everything and then there is nowhere left for your imagination to go, but Frailty gets in your head by simply holding things back.

It knows that sometimes the thought of something happening is worse than seeing every detail of it, and it also understands that watching somebody completely convinced that they are doing the right thing can be much more disturbing than watching an obvious psychopath do something terrible.

It is not trying to win some competition for the most extreme horror film - it is just putting you in an uncomfortable position and leaving you there.

Why Has It Been Overlooked?

I think some of it is simply down to the way horror history works.

Some films become franchises, some become cult films immediately, some get rediscovered every few years and suddenly everyone is talking about them again, whereas Frailty seems to have ended up somewhere in the middle of the pile.

It has a fanbase, it has always had people recommending it and it has been called underrated plenty of times, but it never became one of those films that everybody seems to have on their list of essential 2000s horror, and I think it should be.

Maybe it is because it does not fit neatly into one particular horror category but it feels like a film somebody wanted to make rather than another horror product that needed to fit into a particular box - Frailty might not be forgotten, but it is certainly not talked about nearly enough.

If you have never seen it, go in knowing as little as possible.

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