Dead Within, released this year, is the zombie movie that wasn’t.  Despite the fact that a zombie invasion is killing off the world’s population, you’ll only catch one small glimpse of one.  Nevertheless, you will see plenty of craziness – and it’s well done craziness that proves you don’t need a lot of action to make a good horror movie.

Directed by Ben Wagner, the movie starts off on a happy note, with Mike, Kim, and their baby daughter visiting friends at a remote cabin out in the country.  As the opening credits roll, the couples eat dinner, laugh, and have a good time.

It’s the only real happiness to be seen in the entire film though, which immediately jumps forward six months in time, to the same cabin shrouded in darkness, with Mike (Dean Chekvala) and Kim (Amy Cale Peterson) keeping guns and knives close at hand.  The couple’s friends – and their baby – are mysteriously nowhere to be seen.  As the story unfolds, viewers learn that a virus has struck, leaving victims with black eyes, black blood – and a savage desire to kill.  Mike and Kim aren’t sure how the infection takes hold, but are determined to try and ride it out, somehow.

However, the quality of life in the cabin seems so poor that you have to wonder if survival is really worth it.  Mike seems to be wondering the same thing in one scene as he empties a bottle of pills into his hand and stares at them.  But as he later tells Kim, it’s their “responsibility” to stay alive.

Every morning, an armed Mike leaves the cabin, leaving Kim to her own anxious routine of chores until he returns with food, supplies, and sometimes dresses for Kim’s growing dress collection.  Despite the bleak circumstances, there are some light-hearted moments.  The two laugh crazily after smoking a joint on one occasion and joke that maybe they’re on The Truman Show, and pretend their soda is champagne on another.  But there is also a lot of petty snapping at each other, reflecting the extreme cabin fever the two must feel.  As the movie progresses, flashbacks show the killing of their friends and, heartbreakingly, their baby as well, after all three become infected.

Despite Mike having to travel further to find food and the discussion of hunting for it instead, the couple’s daily routine could possibly go on for a while, but then the worst happens – water stops running out of their faucet.  Mike, frustrated and desperate, has to find a Plan B.

Plan B, it turns out, involves Mike driving off to find a better stocked house somewhere, complete with a water source, and then returning for Kim.  After he drives off, leaving her with the bottle of pills in case he doesn’t return, Kim is alone for the first time overnight, and that’s when things get really trippy.  The murals she has painted on the wall start to move, someone named Ranger Mark cruelly taunts her over the couple’s walkie talkie, and infected zombies try to break into the cabin.  At one point she even imagines Mike, with him eerily telling her that he won’t be coming back.  How much is actually real and how much is imagined though is unclear.  Is she infected??

Despite her hallucinations, Mike does return – except he can’t remember the secret knock that lets Kim know it is truly him on the other side of the door, a scene which might leave viewers wondering if he is infected.  As he begs her to let him inside, things only go downhill, for both of them.  Do either of them manage to survive?  I’ll leave that to viewers to find out.

The zombies roaming around outside, however, aren’t the real threat in Dead Within.  In many ways, this movie is really about the mental unraveling of a woman cooped up in a small dark cabin for six months.  And you have to sympathize.  Anyone could go crazy living like that – no zombies needed.

While both Chekvala and Peterson are great in this film and very convincing as a couple, I was really impressed with Peterson’s portrayal of a woman losing her mind.  I was also really impressed with the film, overall. 

I watch a lot of horror movies with a frequent complaint being that there isn’t enough context – sometimes there is no context – and in some ways, you could say the same about Dead Within.  There’s next to nothing revealed about the virus or what is going on in the larger world, but the film works just as it is.

While viewers might wonder if it’s really as bad outside the cabin as Mike claims it is, I’m not really sure what showing his forages for supplies and or any consequential encounters with the zombies would have added.  The cabin itself seems like hell on earth, but that seems to be largely the point of the film.

Chekvala and Peterson aren’t only the actors in this steady-paced psychological thriller, they are also the writers, along with Wagner and Matthew Bradford, and I would like to see more from them because they seem to have gotten it right.