Setting off to find the Gates of Hell and transcendence through drugs, a young girl disappears and leaves her boyfriend as the only suspect

One of the most harrowing interrogation scenes in all of horror cinema isn’t an Edgar Allan Poe thumbscrew fantasy but simply a disheveled, crying young man sitting across the table from a cop who thinks he’s responsible for the disappearance of his girlfriend. He knows he looks guilty, and he knows all the choices he made in his life have led to him looking guilty. He has no idea what happened between when he and his girlfriend took acid on Toad Road and when he woke up months later and she was gone. The owl-eyed old man sitting across from him certainly doesn’t know they’re in a horror movie. Poor James (James Davidson), choked by tears, can only get a few strangled words out. Later that night, he will get blackout drunk, go downtown, and encourage people to knock him out.

Jason Banker’s Toad Road (2012) remains a blip on the radar of horror movie history. Some might argue it’s not much of a horror movie at all, despite the logic of the film’s central events being clearly supernatural. At least the first half of the film concerns itself with a group of young adults in York, Pennsylvania, all involved in drugs to varying degrees, and the city girl Sara (Sara Anne Jones) who joins their ranks as an innocent and eventually outpaces all her friends in her pursuit of oblivion. The most disturbing thing in the movie isn’t the possibility of an entrance to Hell but the tragedy of this young girl, at one of the most crucial junctions in her life, choosing to turn away from her promising future as a straight-A student to chase transcendence through drugs. Even James, whose habits are extreme even among his friends, is scared; “there’s no other side to drugs,” he says.

Toad Road is based on a real urban legend from the York area where Banker grew up, positing that seven gates to Hell exist on the rural Toad Road. Some variations of the legend say that only one gate is visible during the day and that the rest only appear at night. Sara begs James to take her to Toad Road, where she drops acid, passes it to James with a kiss, and then apparently sloughs off from reality. The movie hammers the connection between the seven gates and the varying stages of drug addiction over and over again; from a critical standpoint, it’s way too obvious, but the way-too-obviousness at least gives us a great monologue, apparently delivered from beyond the grave by Sara, that reveals itself in bits and pieces throughout the film’s harrowing final half hour.

It’s an anti-drug movie that clearly sees the druggy group-house basement-show milieu of its era. The film was shot in 2008. I was about the same age as the characters in 2012 and moved in a similar world, where you could find a glass bong on every table. It gets everything right: the cheap coffee tables crammed with cigarette packs and bottles, the soggy couches on outdoor porches, the way that house venues would always be called “The ___ House.” The only thing it’s missing is someone telling you that Immortal Technique’s “Dance With The Devil” is the deepest and most fucked-up song you’ll have ever heard before proceeding to play it and bring the vibe down to zero kelvins.

Toad Road is not a found footage film, but it feels like one. The scenes with James’ therapist and with the police interrogator are shot like scenes from a documentary. When the characters stumble around and make out and pour beer all over themselves and play “gay chicken,” the camera wobbles with them from room to room, as if a friend is filming the action. More disturbingly, the scene where James allows himself to be knocked out by a group of drunk frat boys actually seems to be footage from someone’s camera. Sara’s spiral into drugs is depicted in a montage of YouTube videos showing pseudo-academic psychonauts expounding on the possibilities of LSD and mushrooms. 

Meanwhile, the journey in and out of Toad Road is told in long, sumptuous shots that bring to mind Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (filmed a four-hour drive away in upstate New York). The first and last scenes show James trudging through a field of snow as trees cut cruel, jagged shapes against a purple dawn. The journey to Toad Road, during which James talks about wanting to clean up his life, is so idyllic it’s comical. He and Sara bicycle down a country road, surrounded by endless blue skies and green fields, and the sheer sappy melodrama of it all makes it painfully clear the fantasy won’t last.

The scenes when James returns from Toad Road are the hardest to watch. He’s apparently been gone for months. His friends have moved out and moved on. “Everything fell apart after you left,” a remaining friend tells him. He can’t get into his apartment. He’s a person of interest in Sara’s disappearance, and the police can’t believe he doesn’t know where she went. It’s much easier to believe a drug addict killed his girlfriend or allowed her to die than to believe seven gates to Hell lie on Toad Road.

There are no parents in the film. None of the kids have any job to speak of. We learn early on that James has agreed to see a therapist so his father will continue to pay his rent, and Barker contrasts that revelation with a shot of James dancing shirtless, king of his unsupervised world. They live in a sealed-off universe, and maybe that’s the only thing that keeps the film from being unbearable. Can you imagine scenes with Sara’s distressed parents haranguing James, of James’ own father blowing up in his face?

There’s a version of Toad Road that follows James to these inevitable ends, but that might be almost impossible to watch. Instead we meet a punk uncle who’s curiously nonchalant about letting a possible murderer stay in his back shed. The final scenes, with James and his only remaining friend shooting off guns and discussing horses to avoid bringing up the elephant in the room, should strike a chord with anyone who’s been faced with the choice of whether to forgive a friend who’s done something awful. 

No discussion of this film is complete without mentioning that Sara Anne Jones, who plays the character of the same name in the film, died of a drug overdose months after filming wrapped. How vérité is the film? Banker found his actors online, the drug use in many of the scenes is real, and the characters all have the same names as the actors. There’s a curious scene between Sara and her friend Whiteley, who essentially asks her to stop seeing James out of jealousy, followed by a kiss between the two. This scene can be explained by the fact that Sara and co-star Whiteley Higuera were dating, though it stands outside the narrative and seems more or less like a favor to the actors.

I don’t have sufficient background information to take a stance on the ethics of filming the very real drug use that would lead to the actress’ death for the sake of making a horror film, but I find the mythology around the deaths of actors who die on set distasteful — the idea that the film is somehow “haunted” by Jones’ death or that the fact that she died somehow improves the film by making it more real or more poignant. If anything, her death just drives the film’s point home. There’s a temptation to contrast her character’s pursuit of transcendence with her friends’ hedonism and argue that the film is less anti-drug than a warning not to be dumb about drugs. The truth is that all these people are fucked-up, and the events of the film might be the wake-up call they needed.

Toad Road is not an easy film to stomach, especially the desperation and confusion of its final half hour. An anti-drug film, even a good one, will be a dealbreaker to viewers who still define themselves in terms of countercultural rebellion against their parents’ values. Yet with the right stroke of luck, Toad Road could reemerge as a cult film the way other atmospheric, slow-burn, vérité horror films like Noroi: the Curse and Lake Mungo have in recent years. It’s a great time capsule of the era, and I imagine most millennials who’ve fallen asleep on someone else’s couch next to a coffee table strewn with bottles will find plenty they recognize — even if they were lucky enough to avoid ending up like poor James and Sara, stuck on the other side of the seventh gate to Hell.

Toad Road is available to stream on Tubi

Toad Road from Artsploitation on Vimeo.

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