'It Comes at Night' takes less is more approach to horror

Effective but slightly misleading trailers make Trey Edward Shults' tight, visceral psychological dramatic thriller "It Comes at Night" look scarier than "Night of the Living Dead," "The Blair Witch Project" and "28 Days" combined.

Schults prominently references those horror standards, but backs off on the sensational, tried-and-true eek! devices from traditional scary movies. No screeching cat gets tossed into the frame for a cheap jolt here.

Following up on his first feature "Krisha" - a critically lauded family reunion drama given a horror tale treatment - Shults opts for a less-is-more approach in "It Comes at Night," an exploitative title that promises something more lurid than the movie intends to deliver.

"It Comes at Night" begins with a close-up of a sad, zombielike figure being shot in the head and his body quickly burned by Paul ("Loving" star Joel Edgerton), a husband and father determined to protect his wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and their 17-year-old son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) from the sickness. Sarah's infected father turns out to be the man Paul killed.

The family lives with a dog named Stanley in a large cabin in the woods where Paul's rigid rules mandate they wear masks outside, and they only use one door in and out, and it's locked all the time.

We never know exactly what caused a massive contagion that turns people into oozing masses of blood and distended polyps.

There are no news broadcasts to tell us and the isolated rural characters about the unfolding global threat as there were in "Signs" and "Night of the Living Dead."

(This movie never alludes to Paul and Sarah being a mixed race couple, no doubt a nod to George Romero's zombie classic that never commented on its 1968 hero being black.)

Paul panics when somebody breaks into his house.

But the home invader turns out of be another father and husband, Will (Christopher Abbott), just scavenging for food for his wife Kim (Riley Keough) and toddler (Griffin Robert Faulkner).

Paul and Sarah do the right thing and let Will's family move in with them.

For a while, they live in harmony, but the pressure-cooker atmosphere and Paul's underlying belief that he can trust no one but family turn the cabin into a caldron of slow-simmering conflict.

"It Comes at Night" intends to be a cautionary tale about the corrosive, terrible power of fear, but its isolationist bent and thinly disguised xenophobic message also feel creepily and politically prescient.

Viewers expecting the gorier and more extreme elements of horror will likely be disappointed here, yet Schults delivers what he promises: a less-is-more, realistic look at how our human family functions under fear, suspicion and blind self-preservation.

For a brief time, we suspect that young Travis' sexual infatuation with Kim (Keough, a quietly explosive revelation last seen as the nasty cult leader in "American Honey") will factor into the growing chasm between the families. But the promising subplot simply disappears.

Sometimes, a little less is just less.

More or less.

“It Comes at Night”

★ ★ ★

Starring: Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, Christopher Abbott, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Riley Keough

Directed by: Trey Edward Shults

Other: An A24 release. Rated R for language, violence. 97 minutes