Entertainment
Shocking, Unrated Horror Flick No One Saw Will Destroy Your Suburban Dreams
By Robert Scucci
| Published
I was having a really good day before I fired up 2009’s Morris County, a three-part horror anthology written and directed by Matthew Garrett about the darkness hiding just beneath the idyllic sheen of modern suburbia. I didn’t know what to expect going into this low-budget romp through the neighborhood, but I figured it would carry the same “everybody has skeletons in their closet” messaging that most films like this do. American Beauty, The Burbs, Happiness, and countless other films have played with this motif with wildly different results, so I went into Morris County with an open mind.
For a film that looks like it was shot for less than $500 (budget information is not publicly available), Morris County still manages to get under your skin and make you want to take a long shower when it’s over. I live in a pretty modern apartment, but still found that I couldn’t get the water hot enough to shock the final sequence out of my brain.
While I can’t say this is the most groundbreaking film of all time, it works with what it has and proves genuinely upsetting on more than one occasion.
Three Stories From The Same Neighborhood
Morris County has a structure that feels deliberate, though it may be coincidental. The first story focuses on a teenage girl named Ellie (Darcy Miller) who has clearly lost her way. She’s shut out her parents and taken to drinking and drugging. It’s implied that she regularly trades sexual favors with the liquor store employees so she can buy booze as a minor. Ellie meets her friends in the woods, and they party like teens do.
She’s not yet fully aware of how her behavior will catch up with her, but she soon finds out and has to make peace with herself when she realizes how far gone she actually is.
Chapter two moves away from teenage chaos and into adult misery. This section focuses on Noah (Albie Selznick), a Jewish man struggling to reconcile his latent homosexuality with his faith. Making matters worse is his wife’s affair, which she thinks she’s successfully concealing even though he’s fully aware of it.
He takes solo trips to the adult video store and attempts to hook up with male suitors, which lands him in more trouble than he anticipated. Broken, miserable, and convinced he’s stepping further away from God’s light, Noah finds himself staring down his family, the bottom of a bottle, and the barrel of a gun. It plays out exactly how you’d expect.
Now that Morris County has progressed through middle age, the final story moves into the golden years through the eyes of Iris (Alice Cannon). Forced into early retirement because of her age, Iris suddenly feels lost without the routine she followed for her entire adult life.
On her first day of retirement, her husband Elmer (Erik Frandsen) dies while watching TV on the couch. In her profound state of grief, Iris decides to live with Elmer’s rotting corpse and go about her daily routine as if nothing has changed. The first few days are manageable, but as Elmer continues to decompose, it becomes painfully clear that the romance and sense of fulfillment Iris is chasing is just as dead as her husband.
A Horrifying Glimpse At Humanity
While its production values leave quite a bit to be desired, Morris County ultimately does everything it sets out to accomplish. It moves through three phases of life, each one more disturbing than the last, highlighting the uncomfortable truth that growing up, growing old, and dying are rarely graceful experiences.
Everybody is fighting a silent battle, and every so often those battles boil over in the ugliest ways imaginable. From an isolated and angsty teenager barreling through life on hard mode to an elderly woman who refuses to let go of her past and plan her next steps, the film has no trouble getting its point across.
Behind the picket fences and locked front doors, silent suffering hides in the most unassuming places. When people build walls around themselves and let their demons consume them from the inside out, you get exactly what Morris County is showing you.
As of this writing, Morris County is streaming for free on Tubi.