Hallowatch 2026 No. 25: Frailty (2001)

This was a pivot — Takashi Miike's Visitor Q was a bit much.

Wikipedia for synopsis

After the slog that has been the stretch since Evil Bong to here, this was a breath of fresh air. I went in blind on what this movie was, beyond "Bill Paxton directed".

What I got was a movie about the horrors of watching a texan with religious psychosis wreck everything around you, released in November of 2001, which made it hard to not read this as a tirade against George W Bush. I'm not sure if the "I'm the decider" moment had happened yet but the movie certainly feels in conversation with what was happening at that time, the moment you realize you weren't talking to the brother who didn't have divine visions.

This feels fairly unique among horror movies of its time — not a franchise, designed plot-first, no slasher-monster/weird hillbilly family/element of escape. It has a sense of being frozen in place watching this all happen due to the flashback structure, which isn't a great modality for a horror movie to operate in — flashback means the person telling the story gets out ok — but the sense of being unable to stop what's about to happen is quite effective at building tension and spookiness.

That said, it's not without flaws — the child actors were doing their best, I'm sure; the pacing is a bit of a slog on the front half; some of the scenes that really lingered on Paxton probably wouldn't have been that way had he not directed; the twist felt like it was trying to do an M Night Shyamalan/Sixth Sense thing (although maybe that's not the worst sin a movie could commit.)

Solid movie. Will likely watch again and recommend to friends. I don't think a sequel could work — like the movie's ending sort of lives in the ambiguity of him getting away with it. I think a remake with McConaughey in the Paxton or Boothe role could be a lot of fun, and I think with this being a mostly forgotten movie, that could be very plausibly done.

Hallowatch 2026 • Blog