Venom Would Have Been Better As a Horror Movie

WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Sony's Venom , in theaters Oct. 5.

At its core, the Venom symbiote is a scary concept. That’s where a lot of the initial appeal of the character came from, after all; its this alien goop that can control your body, shake your sanity, and turn anyone into a literal monster. The problem is that the creators behind the character have never been able decide if they want to embrace that aspect of the concept, or if they want him around as a grim and gritty anti-hero with a dark past.

The sad thing about Sony's Venom film is that it has flashes of being a genuinely scary film. There are sequences that set themselves up to be frightening, where the movie could really excel in the darkness if it would commit to the tone -- and then, it pulls back. Venom had the chance to be a genuinely scary horror film, and it probably should have committed to that.

Bump In The Night

The thing is, there are moments where Venom does want to be a horror film, which makes perfect sense, when you consider the source material. As in the comics, the Venom symbiote isn’t portrayed as just some weird power upgrade. It’s a frightening and alien thing, somethat can do stuff no one would wish on their worst enemies.

When possessed by the symbiote, Eddie Brock is unwittingly breaking bones. He tries apologizing, but his body moves on its own. He’s moves fast and hits hard, and it’s notable that many of his targets don’t get up. There are grisly injuries all around the movie, with the symbiotes either causing them or healing from them. And all of this is happening against Eddie’s will, which is scary! Hardy’s goofy surprise is great in its own way, but it makes Venom a completely different movie.

There’s a simple savagery to the violence that makes it more shocking than Spider-Man kicking someone in the head. People lose their heads, on-screen. With that level of brutality, Venom should be more like Jason Vorhees than Spider-Man.

But Venom can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be, meaning a moment where a police officer almost gets his head bitten clean off by is immediately followed about a gag where Eddie has to explain the Venom symbiote to Annie. It undercuts the impact of the scares.

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There is one particular scene that best exemplifies this problem. At this point in the film, director Ruben Fleischer seems to be trying to build up a genuinely tense moment, and he does a good job of setting it up.

For context, a SWAT team has arrived to try and capture a seemingly out of control Brock after he’s broken into his old place of employment. Brock transforms into Venom and quickly proves to be too much for the cops. Panicked, they fire smoke grenades in an attempt to confuse/gas the creature, but to no effect. Smoke fills the room. The SWAT team moves through the mist, looking for the creature. At this point, the only lights in the massive room are the laser sights on their guns. Flashlights turn on, and the film cuts to the bodycam footage from the cops POV.

They catch a glimpse of something dark moving through the smoke. And suddenly, they turn and there it is, flashing sharp teeth and swatting them through multiple planes of glass. The sequence speaks to what makes Venom so scary. For all his size and strength, he’s shockingly nimble. He’s a nightmare made real, seemingly unstoppable to the cops he’s picking off one by one.

That’s a good horror scene! That introduces tension in a confined space, plays with the light to allow the almost all black Venom to surprise the audience, and just generally feels like a well-constructed beginning to a terrifying display of Venom in action.

But then Venom grabs a cop by the leg and starts using him to wail on all his buddies in an exaggerated take on the Hulk’s beatdown of Loki. At one point he’s just spinning in a circle, hitting a bunch of guys with another guy. That is an actual scene in Venom that is played 100% seriously, and while the sheer absurdity of it is almost worth commending it destroys the frightening vibes it was aiming for just seconds earlier.

Be Scary

The overarching problem with Venom is that it has no idea what it really wants to be. While Tom Hardy brings a manic and strangely likable energy to the film, and the script tries to force itself into overarching superhero film template, the direction at times really wants to explore the scarier aspects of the character.

And that could have made for a very compelling superhero take on a horror film, if he’d been able to commit and actually make a superhero horror film.

Venom is directed by Ruben Fleischer and stars Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Scott Haze, Reid Scott, Jenny Slate, Woody Harrelson, Sope Aluko, Scott Deckert, Marcella Bragio, and Michelle Lee.