Scare Me

The best thing about Scare Me is that, for all of its entertaining qualities and acute cuts at white male fragility, this is one excellent guide to writing and filming good horror.

Scare Me plays some thoughtful games with the idea of horror-comedy, and eventually, Ruben uses the self-aware humor to sharpen the shocks.

There are reasons we enjoy the adrenaline blast horror movies give us. Scare Me, which should be essential viewing as the Halloween season dawns, understands those reasons well and celebrates them with enough laughs and gasps to leave viewers choking.

Bolstered by a creative storytelling set-up, Ruben and his very game co-star Aya Cash skewr horror tropes as well as cultural obsessions ranging from TV talent shows to the Bechdel Test. The result is a winking horror comedy with a lot on its mind — perhaps too much.

It works for the most part because of Ruben and Cash and the spiky chemistry they share.

The idea that movies can easily lose 10 or 15 minutes of running time to curry favor with impatient audiences is often patently absurd, yet nearly every single scene in Scare Me feels some degree of overlong.

Scare Me would work even better onstage. On screen, it feels like an experiment in minimalism. The film is heavy-handed only in Fred’s fear of emasculation and Fanny’s digs at “desperate white dudes,” troweled on for socially relevant heft.

Given "Scare Me" takes place mostly in a small winter cabin, the movie rests squarely on the shoulders of a very small cast. Aya Cash, a recent standout of Amazon's "The Boys" season 2, is excellent in this tight, compact thriller about two authors (one successful, one struggling) trying to scare each other with impromptu stories. The pizza delivery guy Chris Redd injects welcome humor and energy as he gets roped into the "rap battle" (with scary stories instead of rap). Decently entertaining but would make a better play on Broadway.

I liked the concept but Scare Me has one major flaw that makes it become tedious and repetitive after a while, and that's the fact that its structure and style resemble that of a TV episode of some sort of anthology, and that means that with a running time of 100 minutes, Scare Me abuses its stay for at least 50 of them.