The poster for the French release leaves you in no doubt which 'collective' is repsonsible for the terror in Eden Lake.
Andrea Hubert on why young Brits are now the stars of the teen slasher movie - The Guardian
The secret of success is simple. We're so convinced in the utter bleakness of the teenage condition, we make our teenage movie monsters as evil as the tabloids would have us believe - and utterly, utterly believable. It's why the tortured middle class heroine of Eden Lake never makes it back from the hell that is her death-by-hoodie.
When Brits want to be scared, we grab hold of a Daily Mail idea that actually terrifies us, which, as it turns out, isn't things that go bump in the night but relentless bullying, kids with knives, and drug-fuelled promiscuity on cheap package holidays.
Libby Brooks: If horror films help us confront our worst fears, working-class kids have become the stuff of middle-class nightmare, - The Guardian.co.ukOf course, the horror genre has a strong tradition of using children as ciphers - although at least in The Omen series, young Damien had the excuse of being Satan's spawn. This year we have watched dead-eyed happy-stabbers similarly terrorise the innocent middle classes in The Strangers and Michael Haneke's update of Funny Games. It's not for nothing that the Daily Mail reviewed Eden Lake as though it were a documentary, or the Sun's film critic angrily contested the "nasty suggestion that all working-class people are thugs".
If horror's main function is to confront our worst nightmares and allow us to think the unthinkable, then this film does so with bells on. It's genuinely terrifying, and meanly pitched, and I'd recommend it to anyone who loves horror films. But it leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. Because Eden Lake suggests that what we most fear today is not the supernatural or the alien, but children - specifically working-class children - and their boozy, indiscriminately shagging, incompetent parents. And the reason for that lingering aftertaste is that it's true.
Eden Lake frightens because feral youth (or knife crime, however you want to identify it) exist as much as a truism as a trope. The media - and I and the Guardian are no different - have come to use those terms often without understanding what they really mean, or whom they include.
Eden Lake, The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw
Quite recently, I saw a gutwrenching short film called Soft, by Simon Ellis, which evokes similar ideas to Eden Lake; then, as now, I was reminded of something that the late Alexander Walker, film critic of the London Evening Standard, once wrote about Kubrick's Clockwork Orange: we hate and fear our children - because they are going to kill us. Eden Lake has the same idea. The confrontation here isn't about race and not even exclusively about class; it's not about townies and hillbillies, or blacks and whites, or yuppies and chavs. At bottom, it's about older people and the young: a gang of feral children who are as powerful as adults. They instinctively exploit the indulgences and prerogatives extended to them as children, having semi-comprehendingly imbibed a sense of resentment and entitlement from their own elders.
Eden Lake may be the best British horror in years but it could be exploiting our fear of stranger danger | Film | guardian.co.uk
It's the credibility of all this that makes Eden Lake one of the few great British horror films. Because the events it portrays are so firmly rooted in reality, you may find that the alarm they evoke fails to evaporate when the credits start to roll. It could follow you into the street and stay with you thereafter.
But is that wholly to be welcomed? This is a film that exploits our fear of our fellow citizens in a way which can only deepen our dread. Watkins thinks Eden Lake is about that topic so favoured by anxious columnists, our new-found terror of our children. He's wrong. In his film, the Lord-of-the-Flies-style disinhibition of the as yet insufficiently socialised young acts as the mere accelerant of something more disturbing.
The youths we see aren't feral. They have homes to go to and parents who value them. These, however, are the kind of parents who nip round to the classroom to punch the teacher who's told off one of their kids. They're the people who might come at you with a tyre wrench during a road-rage spat. And it's these people, not their children, who cause most trouble for Eden Lake's lovely heroine.
Eden Lake Review – Daily Mail.co.uk
At last! Here's a first-rate British horror film that taps into our deepest fears and offers a thought-provoking insight into such topical subjects as knife crime and gang culture.
It's a thoroughly credible set-up and the process of escalation whereby Jenny and Steve alienate, then anger these feral youths until they're ready to stab, torture and even burn them to death is worryingly authentic.
Unlike most horror films, in which the heroes steer themselves into danger by their own stupidity, Jenny and Steve behave with complete plausibility and a tragically unrequited sense of kindness and social responsibility.
Eden Lake delivers plenty of tension and vicarious excitement. But it's also willing to say what other films have been too scared or politically correct to mention: the true horrors we fear day to day are not supernatural bogeymen or monsters created by scientists. They're our own youth.
This film will doubtless be accused of class hatred and demonising chavs, especially by those who accuse newspapers such as the Daily Mail of whipping up public concern over innocent victims of street gangs.
The obvious point never seems to occur to these people that we are right to feel concerned about the stabbing of headmaster Philip Lawrence outside his own school gates in 1995 or the way the murderers of Stephen Lawrence are walking free. We wouldn't be fully human if we weren't. And it's made abundantly clear within the film that the guilty youths are often the offspring of parents who have jobs and might be called middle class, but who have lost their moral compass and any feelings of responsibility towards their children.
Far from demonising the gangmembers, there's an underlying compassion towards them, along with a sad realism about mankind's potential for barbarism. It's the same feeling that made a classic of William Golding's Lord Of The Flies.
The film is remarkably strong on the dynamics of the gang, with its psychotic leader (played by Jack O'Connell as a variation on Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange) bullying, manipulating and incriminating his less daring colleagues until they become as vicious as he is.
You can see from his attachment to his dog that she is the only love he has in his life - and wait until you meet his parents.
Uncaring or absentee parents are the true villains, mostly unseen until the unpleasant end, but an implied presence throughout.
SPOILER: END OF FILM
