The Transfiguration, Wer and "realistic" horror

The Transfiguration, which recently dropped on Shudder, is part of a wave of movies exploring what "realistic" horror could look like.

Milo, the teenage anti-hero of 2016 indie horror The Transfiguration, judges his impressive collection of vampire VHS via an unusual criteria – is it "realistic"? Martin and Let the Right One In pass; Twilight not so much.

Of course, The Transfiguration itself is trying to be a "realistic" vampire movie. Milo is a borderline sociopath who's taken vampire-roleplay to the next level. At regular intervals, he stalks his native Queens and drinks the blood of unfortunate passersby.

Milo, then, is not an immortal, undead bloodsucker, just a messed-up teenage mass murderer. Except the film is constantly toying with our expectations, slyly suggesting that Milo's killing spree may have endowed him with supernatural powers. There's that title too, implying Milo is being "transfigured" into something else.

The final ambiguous shot looks ready to settle the matter once and for all – before we cut to black.

In most horror movies, there tends to be a moment where, after suffering through a gruesome supernatural ordeal for some time, the surviving characters all collectively realise that it must be vampires/ghosts/witches/demons/werewolves. It's often a jarring scene, as it's essentially the characters realising they're in a horror movie.

The Transfiguration flips this entirely. Instead Milo is trapped in a grimly realistic world, complete with brutal gang violence and a miserable flat-share with his switched-off brother. To escape from the real world, Milo wishes himself into a horror film.

Wer, also on Shudder, is another "realistic" take on a classic horror movie idea. It follows the case against Talan Gwyneck, who stands accused of a grisly triple murder.

Towering above the other characters and sporting copious body hair and claw-like nails, Gwyneck looks very much like a werewolf – especially significant since the film is at pains to point out the attack took place during a full moon.

However, we soon learn Gwyneck suffers from porphyria, a real condition which affects the nervous system and leads to abnormal body hair growth and epileptic-like fits. As the case against him falls apart, is it possible Gwyneck could be innocent?

It's an intriguing premise, ideally matched to a blend of faux news footage and shaky camerawork which have led many to incorrectly label the film as found footage.

Yet while The Transfiguration sticks to its guns and maintains its ambiguity until the final frame, Wer is inevitably heading towards a bloody finale. Promising exposition is swamped in pseudo-science, before being binned entirely.

Wer is still a gripping watch, but it feels in a way like the worst of both worlds. We want either full-blown, Howling-style lycanthropes or an entirely realistic take on the sub-genre – we get neither.

More than that, do we really want "realistic" werewolves in the first place? Werewolf movies live or die on their creature design. Being served up a slightly-hairier-than-normal man as the primary antagonist is interesting, but it can't help but feel like a bit of a disappointment.

I'm more interested in the path The Transfiguration takes, which allows it to mix straight drama with the tropes we know and love.

And where else could the idea of horror fans disturbingly role-playing their favourite movie monsters take us? A Romero disciple who spontaneously goes on a brain-eating rampage? A Carpenter obssessive who's convinced they're a shape-shifting alien on an Antarctic base? I'm certainly game.

As well as getting more realistic, there's also a trend in recent horror movies towards more empathetic, morally grey monsters. Read our essay on the subject here.

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