My friends went to punk shows at Café Metro in nearby Wilkes-Barre and worked retail at KB Toys and struggled with how to survive in a city missing its industry.
My friends listened to Weezer and spent Friday nights playing Chrono Cross on PlayStation. My friends obviously weren’t those 40-something heavy drinkers in Carhartts and Wolverine shit kickers, complaining over Yuengling about the Steelers and the mayor and taxes. But now, I understand that’s not really true. If you asked me at 20 why I liked these writers, I probably would have mumbled something about how I saw myself in their fiction, how their milieu of dive bars and abandoned mines and rundown city squares reminded me of Scranton and the way I grew up. In college, I devoured the working class realism of literary writers like Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Bobbie Ann Mason and Breece “D’J” Pancake. Night in the Woods attempts to answer these questions, and in so many ways it’s everything I’ve been waiting for. What happens to a city after the boom, when unions, mines and factories are replaced by retail, fast food and Walmart? What happens to people when the bedrock principle of their parents-work hard and you’ll be able to provide for your family-is ripped from their fingers a little more each year? Folks like my parents, blue collar workers fighting to make ends meet like in so many other damaged communities, and people like my high school friends who either abandoned Scranton long ago or have stuck around, reliving their parents’ lives and experiences. What I don’t have to imagine, however, are the people there now. I’m two generations removed from Scranton’s heyday and can barely even imagine it from grade school trips to the anthracite museum. Over the last 90 years, the population’s decreased from 143,433 at its height to 75,281. In 1959, the year my parents were born, the Susquehanna River flooded the mines in a disaster that toppled the mining industry, and the rest of the industrial jobs soon followed. At the turn of the 20th century, Scranton was an industrial boom town, thriving on multiple industries-coal, steel, phonograph records, even the country’s first electric trolley system-but by the time I was born, all of that had pretty much ended. The drama detracted from that, but because it was done well and they didn't make it too sappy and over-the-top I was able to satisfyingly watch it.I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I, for one, was looking for a pure, unadulterated scary movie. For those looking for a horror with little to no drama, they were somewhat disappointed. For those looking for a scary drama, they got what they wanted.
#Night in the woods characters town movie#
One could say it made the movie better and one could say it made it worse.
In essence they were able to maintain the mysterious and ominous entity that was upsetting the town because it was almost secondary to Paul and his issues. What did that mean? It meant witnessing Sheriff Paul (Kevin Durand) deal with the loss of his son and the painful conversations he would have with his estranged wife-then a blur of a creature. The movie is more of a drama with a horror story as the occasional distraction. The town is unnerved and it's up to one stoic sheriff to keep everyone calm. Animals are coming up missing, strange footprints and claw marks are everywhere. A creature is terrorizing the small town of Maiden Woods.