The Witch (2016) ****/*****

Usually, even when you’re dealing with a really talented young writer/director, their debut feature film only serves as an indication of their potential—a promise of what they might achieve once they get a little more seasoning and the support of the film industry. Then there’s Robert Eggers’ first feature film, The Witch, which arrives on the scene fully-formed, fully-realized, and completely confident about what it is and what it’s trying to do. This movie is well-made, authentic to the period in which it’s set, and dark and creepy as hell.

The Witch is about a family from 1600s New England who get ejected from their community because their father questions the local church’s authority and won’t back down when he’s brought in front of the townsfolk. Given their banishment, they set up a small farm on the edge of the woods—a perfect place to live if you want to draw the attention of the devil-worshipping witch who lives in the wilderness just beyond. First their baby gets abducted and sacrificed, and then, once they all start pointing fingers at each other over that, an escalating series of creepy events take place that eventually culminate in the members of the family being at each other’s throats to the degree of murderous insanity. To make matters worse, the younger siblings have started talking to the family’s goat, Black Phillip, who may or may not be the Earthly form of Satan.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) ***/*****

The idea behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, that of rewriting Jane Austen’s classic novel of social repression so that it takes place in a world full of flesh-eating zombies, is one that should have been clever and amusing for about a minute or two. It’s the sort of thing you hear about, chuckle at the notion of, and then dismiss. It shouldn’t have been enough to actually support an entire book, let alone a film adaptation of said book. And yet, here we are, watching a Burr Steers-directed (Igby Goes Down) film adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s bastardization of Austen’s novel, and the results are pretty dang entertaining.

Nine times out of ten a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies film would have ended up being some kind of bottom of the barrel exploitation farce—something that looks cheap, lacks weight, and fails to connect with the audience in any substantial way, like Grahame-Smith’s other foray into this sort of cinematic myth corruption, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. This one isn’t just a one-note joke though. Not only does it maintain the bulk of what makes Austen’s story entertaining and resonant to modern audiences, and not only does it handle the horror of its zombie elements pretty well, but it’s also surprisingly well-crafted.

The Boy (2016) ***/*****

There’s nothing in the world better than a horror movie that starts out simple by establishing a setting and a mood and that then spends the rest of its time slowly and deliberately building the threat of whatever’s stalking its protagonist. Horror beasties are best left lurking in the shadows, where our imaginations make them more terrifying than any bit of creature design or special effect ever could, until the tension and pressure of their increasingly overt behavior becomes so great that you have to finally release it by having them do something terrible. A satisfying build to a satisfying freak-out is the recipe that good horror is made from. It’s not so easy a thing to achieve though. There’s a razor’s edge that needs to be walked, a needle to be threaded, in order to build at the right pace and then go off the rails at the exact right moment. 

The Boy is the sort of horror movie that does almost everything right, but because it builds at slightly too slow a pace and for slightly too long, its impact isn’t felt as much as it should be when it finally makes things go nuts. Somewhere in the middle of this movie you start to get a little bored, a little restless, which makes the climax feel like it comes just a little bit too late. If you think of a horror movie as being the sort of prank where you pop a balloon next to a person’s head in order to startle them, you want to pop the balloon when it’s as full of air as possible in order to get maximum effect. What The Boy does is slowly and deliberately blow up the balloon until it reaches the point where it looks like it’s going to burst at any second, and then it just kind of lets the air out of it for a while, finally popping the thing when it’s only about half full. Sure, it’s still enough to get a jump from the victim, but if they’d only popped the balloon back when it was at its breaking point, it could have resulted in so much more pants-pooping.

It Follows (2015) ****/*****

Modern horror movies have often relied on out-there concepts as a means of garnering interest and getting people into theater seats. Whether it’s vaginas with teeth, or people getting their mouths sewn to butts, or what have you, a new horror sub-genre that’s all about being as twisted and weird as possible seems to now exist. These days, a killer stalking some kids out in the woods almost feels passé. So, seeing as David Robert Mitchell’s (The Myth of the American Sleepover) new film, It Follows, is about a young girl who contracts a Sexually Transmitted Demon, it would make sense to assume that it’s the latest entry in this new category of contemporary films that are primarily concerned with being salacious. You’d be wrong to assume as much though, because, despite the outlandish setup, It Follows is actually one of the best throwbacks to the golden age of slow-burn, tension-building horror that we’ve seen in a while. 

A big reason for that is how effective the big scary thing we’re introduced to is at making you bite your nails. After our heroine, a nineteen-year-old girl named Jay (Maika Monroe), awakens from a sexual encounter with a new boyfriend unexpectedly tied to a chair, he explains that he’s passed to her an affliction in which a deadly specter will follow her everywhere she goes. It moves slowly and deliberately, but it never stops coming, it can appear as anyone (it usually chooses to appear as someone methy-looking), and if it ever touches her it will cause her a grizzly death. The only way she can get rid of this creeping terror is to sleep with someone else and to pass it on to them, but if it manages to kill the person she passes it to before they also pass it along, then it doubles back and starts working the other way down the line again. Death, it seems, can only be put off, never overcome.

Short Round: The Lazarus Effect (2015) **/*****

Director David Gelb has done great work in the world of documentaries before (Jiro Dreams of Sushi), so while it seemed a little curious that his latest project, The Lazarus Effect, was a dramatic film that fits in the horror genre, it was at least encouraging to know that the man had talent. Even more encouraging was the cast of actors he put together. Mark Duplass, Olivia Wilde, Donald Glover—they’re all fan favorites who have done great work in interesting things before, so who wouldn’t want to see what they have to offer the latest entry in the dead-come-back-to-life horror sub-genre? Well, it turns out you wouldn’t, because despite the fact that this film was made by a talented director and features a talented cast, it’s still one of the more boring things that’s hit theaters in a while.

Even though all of the principals here are charismatic people, the script they’re working with is so inept when it comes to giving them interesting things to say or do that the talent and presence they bring to the film becomes a non-factor. You could have cast amateurs in this derivative snoozer and gotten largely the same results. The story here starts off with a group of doctors and researchers working to bring the dead back to life, which makes it firmly a descendant of the Frankenstein story, and then it takes a turn where it becomes a Carrie-esque story about a troubled girl getting brain powers, the combination of which basically makes it a take on The Dark Phoenix Saga from Marvel’s X-Men mythos; but it isn’t able to be half as interesting as any of its influences. If X-Men: The Last Stand didn’t combine a script as bad as this one with even worse execution while adapting the Dark Phoenix story, this would certainly be the worst version of it made. The people behind this thing should probably send Fox and Brett Ratner a thank you note for that.

The problem with the film, aside from the fact that its characters are anonymous blank faces, is that none of the scary stuff that follows their decision to mess with mother nature is remotely original or even presented with a new twist. This movie exists as basically a pastiche of clichéd, overused horror moments that we’ve all seen a thousand times before, and in lieu of building atmosphere, tension, or mood, it relies entirely on jump scares to get any rise out of its audience whatsoever. Seriously, entirely. Half of this movie’s run time is taken up of people either being startled by loud noises or looking for something scary one place and then having it suddenly appear behind them. If it wasn’t for the amazing canine actor who played Rocky the Sad Zombie Dog, The Lazarus Effect would have been a total dud.

Short Round: The Babadook (2014) ***/*****

For a first time writer/director of a feature, Jennifer Kent did an amazing job making The Babadook. Seeing as the film doesn’t seem to be getting praised as a strong effort from a first time director though, I fear that it could generate something of a backlash. Currently there are a number of respected voices praising the movie as being an instant classic and an immediate member of the horror canon, and it seems to me that such a large amount of hype could cause audiences to come out of it feeling disappointed when they eventually get a chance to see it (currently it’s not playing on too many screens, but is available on VOD if you know to search for it). I guess what I’m saying is that the best way to watch The Babadook would be to go into it expecting to see a typical, overdone haunted house movie, and then come out of it pleasantly surprised that it’s actually got a couple of assets that help to raise it a step above the rabble.

The main thing that the film has going for it is the lead performance of Essie Davis, who’s playing a single mother whose house is plagued with supernatural happenings after she reads her son a children’s book about an insidious figure named Mr. Babadook that seems to invite demonic energy into their lives. Her character goes from sad, to terrified, to manic, to menacing over the course of the film, and she’s able to sell absolutely everything that’s asked of her. Perhaps more impressively though, even though she’s put through a traumatic amount of stressful and annoying situations, she’s able to make you identify and sympathize so much with her character that you never want the camera to cut away from her, no matter how much her ordeal is making you squirm in your seat. The other main character, her son, isn’t realized quite as well. He’s played by newcomer Noah Wiseman, a youngster who the script simply asks too much of. He has scenes where he needs to go big and broad and sell rage, panic, and screaming insanity to the audience, and it’s just more than he can muster—and perhaps more than any actor his age could muster. The scenes where he’s freaking out are supposed to have real weight to them, but when you watch them you can’t help but feel like you’re just watching a little kid being silly.

That they go so far with the kid losing control is part of the other big reason this movie is better than your typical evil spirit movie, however. The horror of this film comes not only from the usual malevolent presence, but also from the crushing responsibilities of being a parent. The typical trials and tribulations of parenthood, and how they’re able to sometimes make even the best parents resent their children, get amplified so thoroughly here that the stress they cause skyrockets off the charts, to the point where you begin to believe that the misbehaving/uncompromising child could have been the only antagonist in the film, and it still would have been just as scary. The way that being haunted by an evil spirit would interrupt your life gets woven in with the way that having a child does interrupt your life, and presenting the two situations next to each other provides the film with quite a bit of meaty thematics for the audience to chew on—which is a pretty unusual thing to say about a movie in this genre, and is probably the big reason that it’s earning so much praise.

Short Round: Willow Creek (2014) **/*****

Willow Creek is a found footage horror movie about a Bigfoot enthusiast (Bryce Johnson) and his non-believer girlfriend (Alexie Gilmore) going deep out into the woods to film their attempt at recreating the journey Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin took when they captured their infamously grainy footage of a creature that may or may not have been a female Bigfoot back in 1967. Probably your immediate reaction to this premise is to sigh in defeat. You already know how this story is going to end, you already know every beat it’s going to hit while getting to that ending, and you already know how terrible the camera work is going to be thanks to the found footage gimmick, so what’s the point? Well, once you hear that this is also the latest movie from director Bobcat Goldthwait (World’s Greatest Dad, God Bless America), who’s basically a master of pitch black satire, your opinion probably changes. Clearly the only reason a filmmaker like this would want to take on a project like this is because he has a bunch of tricks up his sleeve regarding the skewering of all the conventions of this recent glut of found footage horror movies, right? Unfortunately, no. Turns out that’s not the case at all.

Never in a million years would I have imagined that Goldthwait would spend his time and energy making a movie like this, that’s made up entirely of cliché after cliché ran through without a single twist on the formula, but here it is nonetheless. From the threatening warnings from the locals to stay away, to the mysterious noises heard in the dark, to the sequence where the protagonists argue about whether or not they’ve already been past that tree before, you’ve already seen every scene Willow Creek offers up, and you have nothing to gain from seeing them again. At one point in the film, Gilmore’s character explains to her partner, “I’m trying to film and walk in a treacherous area at the same time. Bear with me,” and that’s pretty indicative of the experience as a whole. No, we will not bear with you. We’ve paid to watch this movie, and for it to just be a bunch of shaky footage shot by people stumbling over rocks and sticks for a good deal of its run time is completely unacceptable. 

Perhaps sticking to the usual formula would have been reasonable if the protagonists were entertaining, or at least likable in any way, but these two dull drips going out into dense, remote wilderness that’s full of bears and mountain lions and whatnot, without a gun or any survival equipment of any kind, completely fails to inspire even a shred of affection or empathy. If anything, you can’t wait for something scary to tear these idiots apart and put the whole story to bed. The urge to shout, “Why don’t you hipsters have jobs?” at the screen is a real one—and constant. There are a couple of segments early in the film where Gilmore interviews Bigfoot-enthusiasts who are clearly non-actors and who likely weren’t reading from a script that are slightly interesting because of weirdness, and the whole thing only runs 80 minutes, so it doesn’t get too much of a chance to wear out its welcome, but other than that there’s not much to be said in the favor of Willow Creek. Hopefully Goldthwait’s next project will get him back to the subversiveness that he excels at.

Short Round: The Sacrament (2014) ***/*****

The latest film from recent horror sensation Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers), The Sacrament, is thrilling and intense, to say the least, but it’s hard to say whether or not it would actually qualify as being horrific. Traditionally, the horror genre gets the bulk of its chills from the fear of the unknown, from putting a danger in the shadows and building tension as its threat grows. This film so closely resembles a very real and very publicized event in modern history, however, that it ends up feeling a lot more like a historical drama than it does a horror movie—or even a thriller—and I can’t help but think that it robs itself of some intensity by tying itself so closely to an event that society has already had decades to digest. A historical drama would be fine, of course. Nobody is saying that West has to make one type of movie. But once the third act proves to so thoroughly stick to the Ti West format in content and execution, one can’t help but think that throwing the audience a bit of a curveball would have been a welcome choice.

The historical event that West builds his story off of is the Jonestown Massacre. Instead of just making a movie set in Jonestown, however, West sets his film in a modern day lookalike of Jim Jones’ would-be utopia, and we watch the events that unfold there through the lenses of real-life media outlet Vice’s cameras. This is a strange choice, because the charismatic cult leader that works as the black heart of Wests’ film, Father (Gene Jones), sticks pretty closely to Jones’ MO, the overseas community that he’s built, Eden Parish, looks pretty much exactly like Jonestown, and the events that take place over the course of the film almost exactly mirror those that occurred over the last couple days of Jonestown. Ultimately, West’s film plays like a slightly sanitized recreation of the footage shot there, because the body count this film amasses cuts the body count of the real tragedy at least in half. Just image search pictures of the real thing. Horrible.

With a little bit more of a twist on the Jonestown story, a left turn or two into material that didn’t so closely recreate the real life event, West could have probably added a lot more mystery and dread to the build of his story, which would have helped keep the film from feeling like time-filler until an insane, inevitable finale. Then again, perhaps my problems with the film will seem overstated to others less hung up on the source material, and those who haven’t seen footage of Jonestown might not share them at all. There is a lot to like here, after all. Jones is absolutely captivating as the cult figure who sits in the shadows of the film. The scene where he completely takes over an interview where the Vice reporters (AJ Bowen and Joe Swanberg) meant to corner him is great. And that last act, where everything goes bad—I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen anything so pointedly difficult to watch. West is able to get under your skin and make you deeply feel the horrors of fundamentalism taken to its extreme. It’s just strange that he didn’t do it by either telling more of an original story, or by flat-out making a Jonestown movie and removing the layer of emotional separation that this fictionalization provides.

Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013) ****/*****

Horror movie sequels are a tricky thing to pull off. A lot of what horror movies do is utilize our fear of the unknown in order to give us a visceral moviegoing experience. They introduce a shadowy threat, establish its menace, and then slowly reveal more and more about it, building the tension of the danger that it brings to the table, until they finally reveal everything about it in a big, showy conclusion. Once the threat gets its big reveal, the bloom kind of comes off the rose though. You can’t stick it back in the shadows and try to slowly reveal it again. That would be stupid. So what you generally get in a horror movie sequel is a story that tries to keep your interest by going bigger, being more ridiculous, and ultimately getting more laughable.

James Wan seems to realize this, so with Insidious: Chapter 2 he has made a horror movie sequel that’s gleefully, unapologetically corny, funny, and grand. We pick up pretty much exactly where the first film left off, with Josh and Renai Lambert’s (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) miraculously revived from his supernatural coma, but with Josh now acting spookily possessed and murderous. This time around we combat an even more dangerous presence, explore even spookier haunted locations, confront even larger legions of terrorized apparitions, and all with added slapstick humor and self-referential silliness. If you go into the film expecting another moody, self-contained horror piece, you’re likely to be disappointed. But if, like Wan, you’re ready to have some fun with the loud, messy cracking open of the Insidious universe, then you’ll probably walk away feeling like you’ve been adequately entertained.

You’re Next (2013) ****/*****

Most everyone has seen their fair share of home invasion movies. As a matter of fact, one called The Purge came out earlier this summer, made a lot of money, and was awful. What director Adam Wingard is hoping is that you’ve never seen one quite like his newest film, You’re Next, which starts off with a setup typical of slashers like The Purge, but pretty quickly spins off in a different direction entirely. A lot of people are going to watch You’re Next because of its marketing, anticipating a scary movie about a group of victims who get terrorized by people in creepy animal masks. Those people are likely going to walk away from this one disappointed. This isn’t the scary movie with the demented killers and the terrified victims that many are expecting. It’s tense, and it has moments that resemble horror, but actually it ends up being much more of an action film.

You’re Next works simultaneously as a commentary on slasher movies as well as a complete subversion of them. As soon as the matriarch of the reunited family who make up the protagonists immediately demands to evacuate the house the second she hears a strange noise, it becomes clear that this isn’t going to be the standard horror story that leads the usual cattle characters to slaughter. The obvious holes in logic you futilely yell at the screen about aren’t going to go unaddressed this time. As a matter of fact, You’re Next finally gives us a home invasion movie protagonist (Sharni Vinson’s Erin) who doesn’t at all act stupid in service of the plot and its need to constantly create new perilous situations. Instead, it gives us a capable, intelligent protagonist, and consequently becomes a completely different type of movie—one with a darwinian plot where the least capable characters die first and the ones who keep cool heads last until the end, no matter what their status as hero or villain is. Essentially, what Wingard and company are doing here is answering the question of what a horror movie would look like if the characters actually listened to the suggestions louder audiences are always yelling at them.

The Conjuring (2013) ****/*****

After he made the first Saw movie, which became one of the biggest and most influential hits of the last decade, James Wan could have probably kept directing Saw movies and coasting on past accomplishments until the end of time. Instead he decided to hand the franchise off to other filmmakers and keep doing original stuff though, which is pretty cool, because all the movies he makes seem to get better as he goes along. His latest, The Conjuring, is a nice mixture of the demon possession and haunted house movies that were prevalent in the 70s and 80s. Think of it as a mixture of, say, The Exorcist and Poltergeist—both in content and tone. Because if there’s one thing Wan has made clear over the course of his film career so far, it’s that he appreciates the old school way of making movies, and isn’t so interested in making things that look like everything else his contemporaries are doing.

The basic story here is inspired by a real-life pair of paranormal researchers, married couple Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), who investigated paranormal activity over the course of a few decades starting in the 1950s, and whose exploits have inspired numerous movies, including The Amityville Horror, The Haunting of Connecticut, and probably a whole heap of others. This time around we’re told that the story we’re seeing is one that’s so outrageous, so frightening, it’s been buried up until this point. Scary, right? The particulars are that a husband and wife (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) and their five daughters have just moved into a country house that they bought from a bank auction, and the bad news is that this particular house is the subject of not only a witch’s curse, but also hauntings being perpetrated on it by a whole host of restless spirits. Needless to say, things get violent, and things get scary. What else would you expect from demons and ghosts?

V/H/S/2 (2013) ***/*****

Last year Magnet Releasing put together a compilation of horror shorts called V/H/S. The basic premise was that it got a group of horror movie directors together and had them all make a found footage short, which then got loosely pieced together with a framework narration that explained away why someone would be sitting around watching a bunch of VHS tapes. V/H/S/2 is much of the same, only with a different explanation as to why someone would watch a bunch of VHS tapes, and with a different set of horror movie directors making the shorts. This time around we’ve got four shorts, two of which are are pretty good, and two of which are pretty forgettable, so in general one could call this a middle of the road movie.

The first short we get is called ‘Phase I Clinical Trials,’ and it comes from You’re Next director Adam Wingard. It’s what seems to be a fairly prescient story about a man with vision problems who gets high definition ocular implants (prescient because Google Glass is clearly the first step toward making this sort of technology not only realistic, but ubiquitous). I say seems to be though, because instead of actually exploring the reality of what horrific things everyone having recording devices attached to their faces might eventually lead to, ‘Clinical Trials’ turns into a fairly generic ghost story wherein the implant gives our protagonist the ability to see spirits. Technology and ghosts don’t really go together, so the short doesn’t resonate much, but it does manage to give us our second pair of boobs of the film, so it can’t be considered a complete loss.

Warm Bodies (2013) ****/*****

Over the past decade or so zombie movies have gone from being gross gorefests that were the acquired taste of horror movie nerds to being one of the most popular sub-genres of entertainment out there. Now, in addition to zombie movies, we have zombie books, zombie TV shows, zombie video games, zombie-themed public events, and who knows how many different examples of zombie merchandising. The problem with this is, despite all of the zombie material out there, we still haven’t gotten too many unique twists on the traditional zombie story. Generally, some sort of plague has caused the dead to rise and mindlessly eat the living, the last few human survivors ban together and fortify some sort of building, and then there’s a big action climax when the zombie hoards get so strong that they begin breaking through the barricades and a last stand becomes necessary. Rinse, repeat.

Jonathan Levine’s (50/50, The Wackness) new zombie film, Warm Bodies, actually tries to mix things up a bit. Instead of telling its story from the perspective of the survivors, Warm Bodies tells its story from the perspective of a zombie. Instead of being a tale of survival and horror, it’s one of romance and comedy. Our protagonist is an undead cannibal (Nicholas Hoult) who doesn’t remember his name, but knows that it began with an R (so we refer to him as such). He spends his days mindlessly wandering around a zombie-overrun airport, having the vague sense that he’s missing some sort of spark and connection in his (non) life, but not really understanding completely what that means. The only breaks in his routine come when he occasionally meets another zombie (Rob Corddry) at an airport bar to exchange confused grunts, or when he and a rotting hoard head out to the city looking for human flesh to consume. This all changes when one of his flesh-seeking adventures brings him into contact with a group of young people scavenging for medical supplies though. The pretty blonde girl in their ranks, Julie (Teresa Palmer), catches his eye and awakens something inside of him that’s been long dead, and he curiously finds himself trying to rescue her from his zombie buddies instead of helping them eat her. After this development, his (non) life suddenly gets significantly more complicated.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012) ****/***** (Spoilers? You decide.)

Lots of people in the movie blogging world have been talking about spoilers during the lead up to The Cabin in the Woods’ release. The film, whose plot is not quite what it seems, has been a flashpoint for debate about what is fair game to give away when talking about a film and what you should keep close to your vest so as to not ruin the experience of discovery that comes from going into a movie blind. It’s an interesting question, with no inarguable answers, but I’m not quite sure why The Cabin in the Woods is the movie that got everyone so stuck on the issue. Sure, there’s a twist here: while Cabin looks on its surface like your typical, college kids get killed out in the country by hillbillies slasher movie, it’s actually a more complex tale than that. The cabin they’re staying in isn’t just your standard, dusty old shack. It’s a fenced in and monitored area that’s under the control of a shadowy cabal of puppeteers. And the kids aren’t just heading out into the woods at random. They’re there for a very specific reason. Still, none of that is really much of a secret.

Despite the fact that the movie’s advertising gives everything I just “revealed” away, and despite the fact that it’s essential to bring up these elements in order to get those on the fence interested in giving Cabin a chance, there are a segment of movie buffs out there who would see you drawn and quartered for being upfront about the fact that this is anything other than the same old slasher tale. Sure, there’s more that shouldn’t be given away. I’m not going to talk about who, exactly, the shadowy puppeteers are, and I won’t discuss the specifics of what their mysterious goal is or whether or not they succeed in the end; but I don’t see how that’s any different from how I approach the reviewing of every other film. It’s clear to anyone with a brain that you shouldn’t go through a movie’s plot, beat by beat, and give away everything that happens right up to the end credits. The fallacy here seems to be the belief that The Cabin in the Woods is some sort of labyrinthian story, with constant twists and turns, and huge reveals all throughout. It’s not. That’s grossly overstating things. 

Silent House (2012) ***/*****

I would always prefer that a movie fail because it contained too many ideas, rather than fail because it had none at all. Silent House isn’t exactly a failure, but it isn’t a success either, and that’s mostly because the filmmakers overplayed their hand as far as big ideas go. The directors, Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, are no strangers to experimental horror, so probably this should come as no surprise. Their first film, Open Water, was basically just two people stranded out in the ocean without a boat for its entire runtime, and Silent House maintains and amplifies that experimentation in minimalism. This movie presents its story to us in real time, and it’s made to look like one continuous shot that follows around the protagonist without cutting away. What they give us doesn’t work completely, and I walked out of the theater feeling a little disappointed, but seeing as I had been shown something ambitious rather than mundane, I found it a little difficult to be all that mad.

That’s not to say that Silent House is breaking new ground all over the place. In many ways it’s prototypical of the horror genre, and I actually found myself appreciating that aspect of the film more than any other. Step by step, the horror tone gets established with a precision that could only come from someone who’s a student of what’s come before. The action takes place in a dilapidated lake house that our main character Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), her father (Adam Trese), and her uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens) are rehabilitating and selling. All of the windows have been smashed out by vandals, so the house is boarded up and completely dark on the inside. The whole place is falling apart and rotten; wet, dripping, and covered in mold. The only way we can see any of it is through the moody lighting of flashlights and lanterns. Basically, this is the perfect place for something scary to happen.

The Woman in Black (2012) ***/*****

Some might say that if you’ve seen one haunted house story you’ve seen them all. There’s not really many different directions we’ve seen these movies go. Generally a person gets locked in a spooky house, they start to see shadows out of the corner of their eyes and hear mysterious thumps in the distance, and eventually the disturbances get so intense that they develop an air of danger, even likely causing someone physical harm. Then, when the danger reaches a fever pitch, we get the big finale, which is generally a full body apparition of a ghost doing something crazy. Does it have to be that way though? Isn’t there plenty of room for somebody to make a different interpretation of what a spirit haunting a house would be like? If there is, The Woman in Black isn’t the movie that’s going to show it to us. In crafting and conception this is a traditional ghost story in every sense of the word. And while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s also not very memorable.

Daniel Radcliffe is our star here, and he’s playing a down on his luck lawyer tasked with the job of traveling to an abandoned old house that is going up for sale soon, going through all of the legal documents that are stored there, and doing something lawyery with them. This task isn’t as easy as it sounds, because the townsfolk are pretty adamant about not letting anybody get to the remote estate, and if you’re somehow able to find a ride out to the house, you then have to deal with all of the ghosts that live there; including the woman in black, who has a penchant for causing the death of children. Given such impossible odds, a lot of people might just quit, but Radcliffe’s character has bills to pay, a son to support, and this is his last chance at making good on a duty and not losing his job. The stakes are huge.

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011) ***/*****

The experience of going to see a Paranormal Activity movie is radically different from nearly every other movie going experience there is. What you have here is a movie that doesn’t concern itself at all with storytelling. No calories are burnt trying to develop characters. Everything comes down to the scare. There almost doesn’t need to be any narrative at all, arguably these movies could work just as well if they were unconnected vignettes of people having supernatural experiences. Going to see a Paranormal Activity movie doesn’t even feel like the usual trip to the cinema, it feels more like standing in line for a haunted house.

Often, watching these movies can even start to feel like work. They’re mostly security cam footage of empty rooms and people sleeping. The images on screen are largely still and you have to strain your eyes to pick out any little thing moving in the corner of the frame, any hint of supernatural activity that might be kicking the movie into high gear. It’s a lot like looking through a “Where’s Waldo?” book. Every once in a while it hits you that you’re essentially just watching fake recreations of people’s tossed aside, cutting room floor home video footage, and you feel ridiculous. In what other context would you agree to sit through footage like this?

The Thing (2011) ***/*****

The story about an alien creature that can replicate and flawlessly impersonate people has been around for a long time. There was a book about this story originally, then there was a film back in the 50s; but when you talk about a movie where an alien crash lands in Antartica and terrorizes an outpost of scientists by mimicking and murdering them, most people think of John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing. And with good reason, that film had memorable characters, a nail-biting, don’t trust anyone story, and some of the most ridiculously awesome horror movie effects of all time. It’s a classic of the genre, and what we have here with director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s 2011 The Thing is a prequel that ties directly into that film’s opening moments.

If you recall, that film opens on some Norwegians in a helicopter chasing and shooting at a dog that turns out to be a shape shifting ghoul. We later learn that they were coming from another Antarctic outpost, where a group of scientists discovered a crashed UFO and were subsequently wiped out by what was inside. This movie is the story of that original outpost, of the scientists who first discovered The Thing frozen in the ice. Our protagonist is Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) a Paleontologist who gets recruited to help dig out and study the find. Also along for the ride is Carter (Joel Edgerton), a helicopter pilot whose main purpose in the film is to give us another American character (we can’t be surrounded by just Norwegians, Middle America wouldn’t go see that!), and to physically resemble a young, bearded Kurt Russell. Winstead and Edgerton do fine in their roles, as do the other, more Scandinavian actors; but that’s not really important here. What matters in a movie like this is how they did with the scares and the creature effects.

Apollo 18 (2011) */*****

Found footage films that tell their story exclusively through shaky, grainy footage that has supposedly been recovered from some sort of disaster and then edited together so the public can know the truth about what happened are awful. The gimmick is only cute for about a couple minutes, and then all of the herky-jerky camera work, the constraints the gimmick puts on the way the story can be told, and the contrivances that give the gimmick away as being inauthentic overwhelm the film and sink what might have been a decent story if it had just been written, shot, and presented in a traditional way. Apollo 18 is one of these found footage movies, and it’s maybe the most insufferable one I’ve ever seen.

Everyone knows that Apollo 17 was the last manned mission to the moon, but what this movie presupposes is that; maybe it wasn’t? What we’re watching is supposedly declassified footage from the top secret Apollo 18 mission. A trip to the moon that ended with disastrous results; results not revealed to the public until now, in the form of a late-summer movie theater release. Sure. Let’s cut to the chase: the first ten minutes of Apollo 18 are maybe the most boring ten minutes of any film I’ve ever watched. Things get moderately more interesting once we get into space, but moderately more interesting than the most boring thing I’ve ever watched is still extremely boring. Luckily for me, there was a couple sitting behind me during the screening, surrounded by a smorgasbord of snacks, who were committed to doing running commentary to each other all the way through the film. Their over the top lack of theater etiquette gave me something to focus on other than this miserable movie. Eventually I stopped taking my own notes about the picture and just started writing down everything that they were saying instead. So, in lieu of a proper plot synopsis, I will present to you with this insightful stream of thought:

Shark Night 3D (2011) **/*****

After Jaws came out in 1975 a laundry list of imitators followed; movies where people get eaten by killer piranhas, barracudas, alligators, and, of course, more sharks. Nearly all of these killer critter movies are trashy exploitation fare, but some of them are trashy fun, while others are just trash. Shark Night 3D is certainly as trashy as its name implies, but it could have stood to be a lot more fun. In my experience there are two different approaches you can take to making shark movies fun to watch, you can either go full on over the top with the kills and the exploitation, creating the filmic equivalent of junk food, or you can milk the peril you put your characters in of all potential suspense, create a real nail biter that keeps people on the edge of their seats. Shark Night 3D doesn’t go far enough in either direction and ends up being too bland to be a good time.

It’s not fair to compare a movie as obviously cheap and throwaway as this to the king of the genre, Jaws, but I’m going to anyways. Despite the fact that Jaws is mostly a film about a town and the people who live in it, with horror elements that creep in, and Shark Night 3D is a pretty straight horror movie that’s going for little other than chills and gore, Jaws creates scares so much better than this movie it’s kind of pathetic. Just compare the opening scenes of each, where a young woman is alone out in the water and gets taken by an unseen predator. One is moody and tense, with music that keeps us alert and full of dread. The other seems more concerned with blood, screaming, and blaring rock guitars. Jaws goes for that nail biting strategy of making a shark movie work, and it nails it. Shark Night goes for the junk food approach, but its PG-13 rating handcuffs it from showing us anything that could effectively shock and appall in the way good junk does.