NEW YORK - I don’t watch scary movies, because they are scary, and I don’t like to be scared. But, the nice people that made Malevolence were nice enough to invite a reporter from The Epoch Times to go see the Manhattan premier of this $200,000 budget, independent film so I decided to go.

Throughout the whole film I noticed some differences between Malevolence and most horror films. A typical horror film is outrageous in its display of violence and completely unrealistic. Malevolence was different, the whole time I was thinking “Oh gosh, is this really happening!”

I got the chance to talk with writer/director Stevan Mena after the show. I started asking him about some of the choices he had made for the characters because I was intrigued at how deep and real they seemed. It turns out that he has created enough back histories for his characters to create a prequel and a sequel to the film. For me, the movie itself was so scary that I kind of don’t want to know what events led up to creating the killer or how he goes about killing more people, but I guess they already started working on them so we are in for even more terror.

About the slaughtering, in most horror films the killer uses fantastical means to kill people so much so that it’s not believable. It can make it pointless because it becomes an unreal, violent mess. Malevolence is different. I kept saying “Man! that is creepy because you actually hear about people doing that to each other,” or “Gosh, maybe that’s happening right now to someone!” That makes it even more gross.

Sure there were times when I said, “Lady, don’t go up the stairs!” or “Man, don’t go in that room, get the police!” Mena was so good at setting up the suspense and back histories that even those cockamamie moments were believable. Most of the characters’ choices were even believable, so you didn’t have to stop and think, you just stayed scarred the whole time.

Mena said the film was set up to be a discussion of the idea of conditioning versus innate good or evil, nature versus nurture. This theme was prevalent throughout the movie, and plays out well in the plot.

Unlike most horror films, Malevolence didn’t seem to be supporting the idea that we should be desensitized to violence. Rather, it showed that these things occur daily to real people. While it didn’t really offer a solution, it did have the effect of showing some horrible things that result when we stop looking at each other as human beings. When we are blinded by our own self-interest we loose sight of the ultimate consequences and our actions become Malevolent.