haunted house
Let’s Scare Julie is technically ambitious and impressive, but never utilises its format to the fullest.
Despite a satisfying ending, Amulet’s messy timeline and uneven pacing prevent it from reaching the greater heights that could have been.
A conspicuously suspense-free story, Haunt feels like a missed opportunity by refusing to take its own ideas to the extreme.
The Amityville Murders is a film that should be avoided at all costs. It doesn’t succeed as a horror film, nor as a supernatural thriller.
The Changeling has built up a devoted club of admirers and its influence on films such as The Ring and Annabelle have seen it reclaimed by many as the grandfather of the Conjuring Universe.
Followed, with its contrived shaky ghosts and shoddy script, is the millennial’s answer to The Shining and 1408, without the compelling stories.
Demon House has a crawling sense of escalating paranoia, with witness accounts and medical testimonials, Zak Bagans presents a documentary that will have you believing this just might have happened.
The Spierig Brothers’ latest “based on a true story” horror movie Winchester is a cinematic checklist of every dreadful ‘haunted house’ cliche, every formulaic competent that’s been implemented by other, better genre entries.
Predictable, overbearing, and generic, Ghost House is a film that is lacking in all the essential ingredients that make up a great horror.
With poor direction, effects and performances across the board, The Black Room is unbearably difficult to sit and watch.
After a brief hiatus with Fast and Furious 7, mainstream horror’s prodigal son James Wan has returned to the Devil’s Church of Jump Scares with a sequel to his paranormal blockbuster, The Conjuring. The main lesson he seems to have learned on his franchise-hopping action excursion is how to make things feel absolutely massive, and in following the golden rule of sequels, he’s applied that bigger-is-better ethos to The Conjuring 2. The ghostbusting duo of the first film – Ed and Lorraine Warren – are called to London to flush out some more housebound demons, but in an effort to raise the stakes over the first film, Lorraine is also faced with her own adversaries:
In Matthew Solomon’s Chatter, Agent Martin Takagi (Tohoru Masamune) comes across the intimate video chats of married couple while monitoring Internet traffic for the Department of Homeland Security. The married couple, played by Brady Smith and Sarena Khan, begin to discover that their new home is haunted. In the same vein of horror films such as Paranormal Activity and the more recent Unfriended, the mechanics within this film felt familiar.
While most genre filmmakers have a hard time choosing between style and substance, Guillermo Del Toro has become the best filmmaker in the fantasy genre by giving equal weight to the visual design and emotional weight of the narrative; both complement each other in the best of his work. Even in a simple blockbuster movie like Pacific Rim, the substance is always there to be seen due to the clear love for the old-school Kaiju movies that inspired it – to date it is the only major studio tentpole blockbuster that feels like the personal passion project it was devised as. Crimson Peak is Del Toro’s return to gothic fantasy, his first film in the English language that could be comparable to his two Spanish Civil War fairy tales, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth.
Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), the new governess for two orphaned children in Victorian England, arrives at their idyllic country estate in the beginning of the psychological horror film, The Innocents (1961). The naive young woman, who has a lived a solidly middle class existence as a vicar’s daughter, marvels at the stately home and spacious grounds. Everything, including her two young charges, seems innocent and perfect.
