High Tension is a very odd little movie. In a 30-second pitch it would best be described as Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Dean Koontz’s Intensity.
The movie is flawed, but works on some level and is a very scary, and blood ride that ends with a twist ending that sort of works but leaves a number of plot holes
A friend and I went to see this movie because I thought it was based on Koontz’s book and the first two-thirds of the movie follow the book very faithfully, but if Koontz did have anything to do with it he’s keeping silent about it.
An extensive web search has turned up nothing from Koontz’s end. No comment on his website, no interview, no on the record comment of any kind.
High Tension was made in France by Alexandre Aja who released the film two years ago before dubbing, badly I might add, into English and finding an American distributor. It’s noticeably a foreign film because of the gore, which is rather heavy. Aja said it originally had an NC-17 rating but after a few “small” cuts it was paired down to an R level.
Just to give an impression of the gore a older couple sat down in the row next to us for like three minutes and then got up and left after the first gore shot. Also I was quiet stunned to see two parents bring an eight-year-old boy to this movie and allowed him to stay for the whole thing. My friend and I were considering calling DFACS.
He lists a number of 1970s slasher movies but oddly missing is Intensity. It seems like several scenes, the killer and the premise comes directly from the book. Most of the interviews with Aja, some done by supposed horror gurus, haven’t mentioned this.
The one quote I could find was on Video Junky.
Caught off guard by this line of questioning, director Alexandre Aja was now the one doing the squirming. He owned up to reading the Koontz novel. "The beginning is quite similar," he conceded, "but it's a classic story: two girls in a house with a killer ... It's a tribute to all slasher films.”
To an extent Aja is right, it takes a horror movie down to it’s basics and makes a scary movie work without a lot of crap. The downside is most horror movies are derivitative this one borders on copyright infrignment.
Article comments
1 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
I gotta say, i found Haute Tension to be insufferably awful, except for the delightful stairway-head-dresser interface. Utter toss, is what i made of it, and i'm totally shocked by how well it's been recieved. Mind you, the fella from I Stand Alone makes a fine slasher type. Interesting to read of the Koontz thing, since i never read said novel and you seem to think there's a hint that maybe there's been a bit of copy-and-paste. hmmm.
if you're at all interested, I Reviewed It Here, Back In The Day
2 - Wendy
I haven't seen the movie yet, but the previews alone had me thinking it was Dean Koontz Intensity.
I have searched and searched, and this is the only site I've found that see's what I see.
Its just weird!
3 - Sherry Larkin
I just got finished watching the movie High Tension. From the second the killer walked through the door of the family's house, I felt like I was watching a movie based on Dean Koontz's Intensity. There aren't just some slight plot similarities. Entire sequences are straight from the book. Anyone who has read the book can plainly see that. In fact, the only reason I have come to this site at all is my curiosity. I did a search to see what others were saying about the blatant similarity between the two stories. Everything that happened in the movie up to the girl leaving the gas station also happened in the book. How can that be legal?
4 - Sherry Larkin
Actually, it looks like this film was an adaptation of the Dean Koontz novel. It is listed in his bibliography as such.
Here's a link I found:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Koontz
So that wraps up the mystery. I just think it's weird that there was no official mention of this.
5 - Juaus
I read the book and its amazing how similar they are. Like 2/3 of it are page by page I couldn't believe it. Whatever the case is the movie was very well done.
6 - Tony
I just saw part of the movie high tension and was convinced that i'd seen it before. It dawned on me that I hadn't actually seen the movie but i knew what was going to happen before it did. I realized then that it was based on a book that i'd read years prior. I spoke with a friend who saw the movie in its entirity and told them that i remembered reading the book. when I described the way the book ended he said that we must be talking about different books/movies because that isn't how high intensity ended. we argued back and forth until i did a GOOGLE search and found that the book I read was titled "Intensity". Well i was shocked that this would be allowed to happen unless there was an agreement made between the author and the people responsible for the movie because it was blatant theft of someone else's work.