21 Days of Spooky: The Accident (Southbound segment, 2015)

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21 Days of Spooky is not about pop culture that sets out to fright you with brain-eating, viscerae-hanging, slash-killing scenes, but with thoughts that linger and persist on your life long after you've watched them. Or are just downright creepy. Tonight's spooky: Southbound's "The Accident". Some spoilers ahead.

What's it about?: A man accidentally runs over a woman on the highway. In a rush to save her, he calls 911 for help, but the voices over the phone may not necessarily be hospitable ones.

Before we begin, I'd like to clarify Southbound is an anthology horror/thriller film made by various contemporary directors of the genre (such as Radio Silence, or Roxanne Benjamin). "The Accident", written and directed by David Bruckner, happens to be the segment right in the middle of the feature, and possibly one of the least interconnected ones as well. It's usually brought up as a positive in the film's reviews, and has a tense, non-stop atmosphere that's not for the faint of heart.

Lucas (Mather Zickel) is talking to his wife over the phone when a frantic Sadie (Fabianne Therese) crosses right into the car's path and gets run over. Sadie comes from the previous segment, in where she has already been ghost-haunted, nearly poisoned, and caught her leg on a bear trap, so she's not very well (medically speaking) already. Poor Lucas stops and calls 911 for help, where the various "dispatchers" over the phone give him one shady instruction over the other, and the shaken, confused man decides to follow them to the letter, as one would also when faced with such terrible situation.

What would you do if you hit someone in the middle of a deserted road somewhere you don't know? It all depends on how shitty of a person you are, as you might as well notice there are no witnesses and keep driving, straight up ignoring the suffering victim left behind. Lucas does the right thing, but is he rewarded? The dispatchers seem professional at first, asking him where he is, even though he obviously doesn't know, as he's literally in the middle of nowhere, so off the dispatchers send him to a nearby town, leading to an emergency room.

Fun fact? The emergency room is empty, its surroundings nearly as desolate as the road he hit Sadie on. Once again, what would you do? Just dump the woman there and wish her good fortune with the tumbleweed doctors? Lucas panics, as Sadie is already super unconscious and is probably going to die any time now. There's literally no one else to talk to other than the dispatchers, who are sounding increasingly sinister as the conversation goes by.

The segment runs close to real time, so we are experiencing the chaos as it unfolds, the guilt and rush of having run over an innocent woman and not being able to do anything to save her. Could Lucas hang up and call someone else? Yes, but who? He might have some doctor friend ready to assist over the line, but when on the phone with 911, you're not gonna think you're in the middle of a horror movie and the voices coming in from the speaker have any sort of bad intention behind them. He's all alone, Sadie is irresponsive; he has to do whatever it takes to save her and, if having to face the consequences, he will.

When the final act strikes, Lucas is determined to save the woman by all means, and that's when he receives the order: he must perform the life-saving surgery by himself. Not even having seen all the episodes of Grey's Anatomy and E.R. can prepare the average non-medical-field-related human for an impromptu surgery, but when the alternative is letting a person die right there, might as well wing it and save both a person and your conscience.

"The Accident" sets us with all these really troubling questions in a very brief period of time, without the need for gore (but boy does the final act has it) or trope-y plots, just a desperate man involved in a very real situation who desperately needs someone to guide him and whom he could trust. And that's the scariest part... can we trust anyone nowadays?

Tomorrow: Point your phone camera straight towards Black Mirror's "White Bear".