With each new societal innovation, horror movies must follow. Such has been the case this decade with “vacation rental horror.” With the rise of Airbnb and other services where people rent out their homes for a week or weekend, often owning the home specifically for that purpose, horror has followed.
A particularly strong example is 2020’s “The Rental,” an effective blend of vacay-rental paranoia with tried-and-true slasher tropes. Director Dave Franco, better known as an actor, teams on the screenplay with Joe Swanberg, a horror veteran. Simply put, they know how to do this stuff.
They make use of a real, lavish rental cabin on the foggy and chilly Oregon coast. A viewer can feel the hot tub warming up the vacationers as Franco saves the action for the end. Don’t worry, though, the build-up is good – a mix of cozy and chilly as he explores the dynamics of two couples.
“The Rental” (2020)
Director: Dave Franco
Writers: Dave Franco, Joe Swanberg (screenplay, story); Mike Demski (story)
Stars: Dan Stevens, Alison Brie, Sheila Vand
The cast is not your typical slasher fodder, especially now: Dan Stevens (“Abigail”), “Community” cutie Alison Brie, Shiela Vand (“24: Legacy”) and Jeremy Allen White (“The Bear”). The romantic pairings are Charlie and Michelle (Stevens and Brie) and Mina and Josh (Vand and White).
“The Rental” smartly keeps us on our toes from the opening scene where Charlie looks up rentals online with Mina over his shoulder. But then Josh, Charlie’s brother, comes into the office and kisses Mina – it’s actually they who are the couple. Charlie and Mina are successful business partners with mutual admiration that might not know proper limits.
Stranger danger?
One of the core tropes of vacay rental horror is interaction with strangers. Of course, while renting places from individuals (rather than staying in resorts or hotels) is fairly new to the mainstream, the idea of dodging human interactions is also on the rise.
More than 99 percent of the time, the biggest problem with a rental is logging all your devices onto the internet. But the chances that the landlord is a homicidal maniac who peppers the house with hidden cameras are never zero, these films remind us.
Our quartet is shown the house by owner’s-brother Toby (Taylor Huss, who does maybe-menace, maybe-just-awkwardness very well). He seems a little racist toward Mina, of Middle Eastern descent. But “The Rental” is steeped in POV bias, and we’re always aware of it. From Toby’s perspective, four renters come along and ignore the rule about no dogs, break the hot tub and do drugs. And here he was being helpful by lending them his telescope.
The four strong actors enhance “What would you do?” scenarios we’re familiar with, including a brief “I Know What You Did Last Summer” riff. Scares in this film are legitimate, never for the sake of giggly fake-outs. Franco is rightly confident in building a mood the old-fashioned way, with the slight tensions of the relationships, the isolation of the setting, the awkward interactions with the caretaker, and a viewers’ built-in mild paranoia about staying in a stranger’s home.
The best of this young subgenre is still “Barbarian” (my top horror movie of 2022), stacked with a wonderful narrative shift and a commentary on dying urban areas. “The Rental” is more of a classical take as it blends backwoods slasher horror with vacay-rental horror, and it could’ve benefited from one more layer of story depth. It’s not a total injustice that it got lost in the shuffle, but hopefully it will get more rentals and streams as White and Stevens gain fans.