Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)

Any basic kid of my generation remembers the craze of Japanese ghost women haunting their dreams in the early 2000s. I distinctly remember getting rather pissed one time off at two friends who slept over, and kept wailing into the night about Samara coming to get them. Ju-On: The Grudge and Ringu were two Japanese horror movies that soon got American remakes and exploded onto the Western mainstream, and both spawned an obscene number of sequels et al. I enjoyed all such movies back in the day, and after more than ten years, I decided to revisit Ju-On: The Grudge.

The throaty croaking, the creaking woman with long black hair and cat screeches are so widely known of The Grudge, but what only fans will recognise it for is the episodic framing, eerie use of sweeping camera and minimal musical score, and overall excellence in creating suspense. For all the Scary Movie-style parody and social recognition that the franchise has attracted, Ju-On: The Grudge remains a quietly scary film that horror rookies will be scared by, and horror experts will be impressed by.

"Bubblegum!"

The story of Ju-On: The Grudge is centred on a particular house in suburban Japan. A typical Japanese family home with paper doors and minimal decoration, its boxy interiors capture the majority of the movie's action and fear. A catatonic old woman lives in the house, and very quickly, the family and acquaintances who set foot in the place are hunted down by a ghostly woman and disappear. What is essentially a basic setup is made more mysterious in its non-linear presentation, jumping around on the story's timeline to ultimately give us a complete jigsaw puzzle.

Get those nuts away from my face!

I've experienced a moderate body of Asian horror movies over the years, and would never claim to be an expert, or even an enthusiast, despite how highly I would recommend the movies I have seen and the genre they represent. I find Ju-On: The Grudge to be an easily watchable movie. I know of many people who really will not give their time to foreign movies, and I swear to God, if I had a nickel for every time I had heard, "If I wanted to read, I'd go to a library!" But I think that this movie is a fairly easy transition for a world cinema novice. Speech, of course, plays an important part, but a surprising amount of the movie is visual, and I believe transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries. Honestly, this could be a silent movie of the '20s with just a musical score and still work terrifically.

All this pussy and nobody's getting laid

As I said, I am no expert in Asian movies, and speak about three words of Japanese, but as an enthusiastic linguist of the English language, I can say that at times, the standard of acting is hard to judge due to the cadences of spoken Japanese. When compared to their corresponding subtitles, some regular spoken sequences can come across as over-acted to an English-speaking audience, but I understand that this could be due to the natural sound of the Japanese language. However, as I have observed with many a horror movie over the years, the actors are largely very convincing and engaging when acting frightened.


Director/writer Takashi Shimizu has fun within the visual and narrative boundaries he set for himself and his crew, and manages to communicate fear up-close and in long shots. Those iconic extreme close-ups of the faces of the ghosts' imminent victims are so well crafted and acted, and truly stand out as the highlights of the movie. The repeated sweeping tracking shots of victims as they succumb to the haunting are wonderfully simplistic while establishing key visual themes; by the third or fourth chapter of this chilling tale, we understand what is to come both visually and narratively, but that doesn't stop it from being absolutely terrifying when it arrives.

Helloooo? Avon calling!

As it happens, I did not find Ju-On: The Grudge as immediately terrifying as I either remembered or anticipated. I did not jump, and no scene gave me the chills or gave me trouble sleeping (as tall an order as that is for me these days), but as a film enthusiast, I really appreciate this picture. It clearly inspired enough tension and excitement in people to spew a whole gooey egg-nest from its cinematic loins, but the humility and understated charm of Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge is an entirely enjoyable and magnetic cinematic experience.

Slender Man (2018)

Who is the real savage?

How in the hell can you make a horror movie so boring and ugly to look at? How do you make a 90 minute movie feel so goddamn long? How do you make a movie without any sense of framing, momentum or feeling of any kind? Well I don't know, but I have a feeling director Sylvain White does. For some reason, makers decided that 2018 was not in the least bit five years too late to milk a buck out of the old creepy pasta Slender Man, and for reasons unclear, a fictional character that thousands around the world have crafted intriguing stories or ideas around wasn't able to become a good movie. It's irritating, seeing as the character has all the pieces to be something really scary, but what was turned out by (who else?) Sony in 2018 was not scary, not entertaining and not even watchable.

Forget everything you know about even the most basic storytelling techniques, because they have no place in this goddamn neighbourhood! Almost every good (or even mediocre) horror knows to open with an attention-grabbing scene to establish thrills and some idea of antagonist--hell, even the really crap movies know to do this. Know how Slender Man opens? With the most bland shots of a high school you can imagine, and then two girls sitting on the bleachers taking selfies. Cor damn! Unencumbered thrills are certain to follow. I don't know how they will possibly top this informative and exhilarating introduction.

Their exact reactions to receiving parts in this film

The first dialogue we get is from the four main girls talking about what age they would be if they could stay that way forever, before they cross paths with a group of boys who say they're going to be having a sleepover and doing secret stuff. As sexual as that sounds, one of the girls later tells the others that the boys are in fact summoning Slender Man--which still sounds pretty sexual. This serves as our very unceremonious introduction to what we know will be the antagonist, but only because the title tells us so.

Within five minutes, the girls are also having a sleepover and soon watch a stupid Ring-style 'website video' that supposedly summons the creature. The pacing of the first act (not that traditional acts are even decipherable) is so jarringly abrupt and sets the tone for the rest of this dull, dull movie: two minute scenes of nothing that continuously fail to establish any flow or linearity. Despite denouncing the concept of Slender Man as bullshit just moments before, they are suddenly creeped out by the video and begin to have crazy visions and stuff.

Although a caption helpfully informs the stupid audience that it is now a week later, the kids are suddenly on a class trip to a cemetery (?!?) and one of the girls just vanishes. Suddenly the cops are here to look for her, and she's a missing person. We're no more than fifteen minutes into the film. You thought that one of the four main characters would get any actual screen time or development? You should have known better. Next one of the other girls starts going crazy and stops coming to school. I can't even remember if she dies or what, the movie just forgets about her and I have no idea what we're supposed to make of it all. By this point Joey King's character has covered every inch of her bedroom wall with scribblings and newspaper clippings and is convinced that Slender Man is after them. It feels like perhaps they are positioning her to be the main character, but then she dies in tree-mendous fashion (sorry), and the one remaining girl is suddenly the central figure.

Sony could legit be the next Jason or Michael. True evil.

Everything is just so disjointed and inconsequential. I have never seen a movie so jumbled and pointless. The split-ended thread of a plotline is padded out to bursting point with pointless sequences of nightmares, hallucinations, stupid visual segues and the worst evil of all... Sony product placement. The movie seems certain that if it throws enough CGI mist and trees and dismembered limbs at you that it'll be scary or even somewhat arty. The real events of the movie could just about make a short, but it has nothing to offer a feature length picture. Decent movies use their run time to create tension and build characters that the audience cares about, whereas all the filler in Slender Man is boring and useless and does nothing to move anything along.

Slender Man is also understood to cause a beanie hat epidemic

The performances never once hit the right note, always falling into either underacting or overacting. Joey King is easily the strongest in the movie, but even she is poorly directed and always seems to be playing a part rather than being a person. White's direction is completely misjudged, coming off as either incompetent or lazy. Slender Man doesn't seem to fit very naturally into White's scant filmography, and he seems way in over his head with directing a horror movie that actually engages the audience. I kept wondering how fucking long the thing had left to run, and when it did end, it was in keeping with the rest of the crappy movie. One shot could have made a reasonable cut to black, but it goes on to another pointless scene, but then it still doesn't end. The final note is a voiceover and schoolkids in the hallways, talking about how we let ideas infect us like viruses or some such shit. The ending aims at some weird Lifetime TV movie moral, and doesn't fit at all with what came before it.

There are plenty of bad horror movies that are at least watchable or entertaining, but Slender Man is the dullest and least scary viewing experience I have had in a good long time. It really is as bad as people say, and having watched it twice now, can confirm that you will gain nothing for checking it out.

The Haunting of Sharon Tate (2019)

Making films, music and literature based - either loosely or otherwise - on real events, and more specifically, on true crime, is far from a modern trend, and yet it is still a divisive topic on moral grounds. The better known serial killers, such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, continue to inspire recreations of their lives and crimes, and the human condition of morbid curiosity keeps ensuring return on profit is seen. The question of whether it is ethical to rehash such crimes for 'entertainment purposes', and how such recreations can impact the survivors and their loved ones, continues to be asked, yet it seems to have little effect on the industry's production of such movies, or on audiences' viewing of them. Monster and The Girl Next Door are serious and well-made productions based to varying degrees on true crime, but for every Monster, there are easily a hundred The Haunting of Sharon Tate.

Critics have been slamming this movie for many reasons, and Lionsgate have been pulling out all of the damage control stops to ensure people still give their movie the benefit of the doubt. Not only is this not a well-made film, but it is a very inconsiderate one. It doesn't seek simply to recreate the crimes of the Manson family in 1969, but to put a supernatural twist on things, and perpetuate dismal rumours first circulated by the media mere hours after the news broke fifty years ago: talk of infidelities, open relationships and devil worship somehow being the cause of those events is tasteless and speculative at best. What, I ask you, could possibly be gained, or added to this story, by the suggestions of Roman Polanski (who is not portrayed onscreen in this movie) 'cheating' on his wife, or Gibby Folger and Wojciech Frykowski manipulating Sharon into a position of vulnerability? It drags this whole sorry tale to the depths of tabloid fodder in the least tactful way possible.

The media spin that continues to embody the Tate-LaBianca murders could be an interesting way to tell this story, but this is clearly not what the makers had in mind. If nothing else, its only real goals are to paint Sharon and her friends as people they were not, with an aim to add a sense of suspicion and tension that never existed. And this is not to say that this movie manages to achieve even the slightest feeling of suspense. It consists primarily of repetitive sequences of Sharon creeping wide-eyed around her dark house, convinced that she is in danger but for some reason doing nothing about it.

For some reason, Hilary Duff 'stars' as Sharon Tate, and we are suddenly and rudely reminded of why her repertoire never really expanded beyond Lizzie McGuire and being Steve Martin's stroppy teen daughter in Cheaper by the Dozen. She looks and sounds nothing like Sharon Tate, despite her fleeting attempts at some sort of regional accent. Duff is very strangely directed throughout this picture, in every way from accent to emotion and mindset. There are odd moments at which she seems to react to things in ways that just don't match the action, and her character's thought processes are sloppy. This heavily pregnant woman, whose several friends are literally in the next bedroom, keeps creeping around this dark house when she suspects intruders. No guns, no phone calls, she doesn't even turn on the lights or scream for someone. She just keeps skulking around in the dark.

The main narrative bookending this piece is what pissed me off the most. The movie opens in black and white, and purports to show us Sharon giving an interview in 1968. The interviewer asks her if she has ever had any experiences she considered psychic. Now this in itself is not crazy, as there was quite a trend for metaphysics, spirituality and psychedelia in the '60s and '70s, and this could have been an interesting approach in more competent hands. But Sharon responds that she had a nightmare in which she and her friends are murdered, which "I guess you could consider a psychic experience". We are given no other indication at this point in the story's timeline that could give weight to this idea that a simple bad dream is some form of premonition, and the narrative only seems to show Sharon come to recognise this much later on. This terribly contrived plot device is the frayed string from which the entire narrative precariously hangs.

Now when I did some basic research into this film (which I did when I got to this very point in writing my review), I made a striking discovery about the resume of writer/director Daniel Farrands. Not only is his filmography comprised almost entirely of horror sequels and true crime movies, but he actually wrote the aforementioned The Girl Next Door, which was a very good and considerately handled movie. Interestingly, that was more or less the first thing he wrote in twenty years, preceded by Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers in 1995. This in itself makes me wonder why and how Farrands' ability to craft believable dialogue that propels a difficult narrative seems to have evaporated. On top of this, his more recent credits include another dreadful Amityville movie, and production on an upcoming piece titled The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson. There is a definite pattern there, which I might not take such a distaste to if not for Farrands' sharply declining standards. In 2007, he proved himself capable of taking a horrific true crime, dramatising it in a way that gives context to the behaviours of its characters, and approaching what is essentially an exploitation picture with utmost dignity, respect and care. Somehow, he is now a shadow of his former professional self.

Farrands' habit of running with the scrag ends of existing narratives smacks of commercial and artistic cynicism. He demonstrates little ability to create original material, and he has absolutely forgotten - or neglected - the way real people speak, which is so crucial to his line of work. Often when we hear of true crime stories, particularly those in which people are somehow convinced or manipulated into committing crime by others, the mind really boggles at how things get from A to B. What does a person have to say, and how do they have to say it, in order to get another person to commit such cruelty on innocents? With The Girl Next Door, Farrands showed us just how an evil adult could have manipulated neighbourhood children into torturing and killing a young girl, and it was his way with dialogue that made these unimaginable events believable. Now, he can't even convince us that a woman is trying to tell her friends she thinks she is being stalked. I mean damn, that's not a lot to ask of a writer who has previously shown his mettle with conveying difficult ideas on screen.

Although The Haunting of Sharon Tate is nowhere near as technically inept as I had expected it to be, it is just a sad, sorry and puzzling excuse of a film. A film doesn't have to be a masterpiece to be redeemable, but this is just the laziest form of 'retelling', and is not entertaining, scary, intriguing or compelling. As unethical as it can seem, it is undeniable that our nature as humans is to find curiosity in the extraordinary, in the things we don't see every day or have never seen before. Whether this is a motorway pileup or a murdered film star, we can't help but be fascinated. But there are so many elements of the Manson crimes that actually warrant elaboration and exploration, that don't disrespect the memories of the victims, and better filmmakers have explored these. Cult mentality, the transition to a life of crime, the death of a social movement; these are all insights that can be gained from these awful events that people can learn from. We gain nothing from 60 minutes of Hilary Duff creeping around in the dark and 25 minutes of crass crime scene recreation. This movie is utterly worthless.

Hatchet III (2013)

I have written several times before of my love Adam Green's throwback slasher series Hatchet, and by this point, I would argue that it is also one of the most consistent series of its kind. Although I have been a fan of the first Hatchet movie for a lot longer than the others, and I've seen it a lot more than the others, I contend that every Hatchet installment is on par with its predecessor.

Hatchet is renowned for its FX, and in this third installment, it is not some elaborate death that is my

This sight is like freakin' Disneyland for Crowley

favourite, but in fact, a very subtle rebirth. By this point in the series, we know that Victor Crowley is a 'repeater', in that every time he is killed, he regenerates in the same form as the night he died. So when the police and coroners have come along to scoop the gloop of the previous night's shenanigans, and have the various pieces of Victor Crowley lumped in one huge body bag, the now lone coroner makes the mistake of turning his back to said bag with headphones in. The cramped body bag slowly deflates like a beach ball until entirely flat, and we just know who's on his way into town!

Having made mincemeat of Crowley, Marybeth rocks up in the local copshop armed and looking like Carrie on prom night. She is immediately detained and held in suspicion of leaving Honey Island Swamp smeared in human debris, much to the amused disbelief of several local hicks. Just like Giselle in Jeepers Creepers, this particular backwoods copshop has a police radio stalker in the form of Amanda (horror veteran Caroline Williams) who is the sheriff's ex-wife and a journalist who has spent years obsessing over the legend of Crowley and is desperate to prove his existence, which the latest massacre seems to evidence, in her opinion. She blags and bribes her way into grilling Marybeth about what happened, and eventually into breaking the suspect out of jail to supposedly put a stop to the latest slashfest.

Among the various police crew at the vast scene of the crime who are about to serve as Crowley's daily buffet of limbs, is coroner Andrew (once again the brilliant Parry Shen), whose character is not related to the recently-deceased tourguide Shaun or Reverand Zombie's employee Justin, but is played by the same actor. His colleague comments that two of the bodies he has recovered look just like Andrew, which the scene gets a good laugh at with the whole 'all Asians look the same' cliche. Andrew ends up one of the finale performers, but not before he gets pinned in the centre of major carnage.

Fuck yo' sista!

Amanda is one of those annoying horror characters who comes up with elaborate and unprecedented theories about how to defeat paranormal entities that basically always turn out to be wrong - and the theorists tend to find out the hard way! Naturally, Amanda drags several others into her ridiculous plight - one that maintains distance and hence survives is Sid Haig in a great cameo scene - leading to the logical but assumed death of both Marybeth and Crowley. Although we can't be sure that either are really dead by the end of the movie, it is hard to believe - even in Adam Green's world - that Marybeth will survive abdominal impalement on a tree branch. But as ever, there is no final overkill in terms of material, and by ending abruptly while the narrative is still midway back down the story arch. This makes for a good thrilling ending.

Oh no! Ma theory was wroowwng!

The third installment is not directed by Green this time around, but by BJ McDonnell, cameraman from the first two Hatchet movies. Having been elected by Green to direct the picture, McDonnell does a strong job of directing a very Greenesque movie that still feels individually crafted. It makes for a very natural extension of a strong franchise, sort of how Jeannot Szwarc did with Jaws II. It's exactly as fun, tense and utterly watchable as the first two Hatchets, so bravo BJ McDonnell.

Hatchet II (2010)

When it comes to post-millennial independent horror series, I don't think Adam Green's Hatchet can be beat. It's not just their technical and artistic proficiency, but the spirit behind them. Green, a kid of the slasher reign of the '80s, is one of those rare artists whose creativity is absorbed in childish imagine, bringing equal measure of excellence and adolescent thrill that no good horror fan has ever really grown out of.

In a Friedkin-style sound jump, Hatchet II jumps straight back in where the first left off, with Marybeth (now scream queen Danielle Harris) neck-deep in grimy swamp water at the hands of the still-not-fucking-dead Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder). A good old-fashioned thumb to the eyesocket sends him toppling overboard the boat and into the water with her, where she is inexplicably saved by old piss-drinker himself Jack Cracker.

He takes her back to his cabin and serves her a refreshing warm cup of piss (and this is before he realises he hates her!) When Marybeth reveals her recently-deceased pappy was Samson Dunston, old Jack cocks his shotgun and tells her to get the hell off his property, and that if she got any questions as to his sudden reversal of attitude toward her, to take it up with Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd).

She makes it back to town somehow, and drops in on Zombie, who reveals to her that her own beloved pappy was one of the three young hoodlums that threw firecrackers at the Crowley house that fateful Halloween night, and is basically directly responsible for the brick-shithouse of a mutant terrorising Honey Island Swamp. He summons his colleague Justin (the wonderful Parry Shen), who it turns out is the brother of Shaun, the hilarious fool whose illegal and "ONLY haunted swamp tour" *smacks with top hat* was the vehicle of the previous night's massacre - and whaddaya know, the guy is the spitting image of his recently-deceased tourguide brother.

Zombie sends him into town with a list of personnel to call to the shop, claiming if he is going to head out into the swamp, there are certain people he'd rather have there for backup. He also tells Marybeth that if she doesn't bring a relative (knowing full well that both her pappy and brother are dead), he will not agree to take her. So she enlists the reluctant help of Uncle Bob, and we are still not sure just what diabolical scheme is behind Zombie's insistence that her family member comes along for an imminent bloodbath.

Having had a fabulous but underexposed cameo in the first Hatchet, adding a few good points to its ensemble of horror icons, it is great to see Tony Todd take Zombie into a feature-length and central character in this sequel. He brings an interesting secondary villain role to the mix, and plays it sinister and yet oddly charismatic, to the point that we are never certain exactly what he's plotting. And naturally, after all of his scheming, he has wiggled his way to the front of the 'creatively horrible death' queue.

So an hour or so later a big old motley crew descend on the Zombie abode, ranging from beefy grey-bearded bikers with confederate flag patches on their denim waistcoats, to slutty girls, to unattractive redneck sex pests. They are all offered $500 a head to supposedly retrieve Zombie's boat, but he promises $5000 for the head of Crowley. Those who are not instantly scared off by the mention of Crowley swagger off into the swamp with guns a-blazin', certain that they needn't fear a 'children's story'. Famous last words.

The real joy of the Hatchet movies is their youthful vigour, with Adam Green at the helm. Dedicated to old-school effects and a zero-tolerance policy towards CGI, Green's series is characterised by its wickedly creative death scenes and its tongue-in-cheek freshman comedic style. For any good horror fan, it is the ultimately enjoyable combination, that makes for fully-loaded entertainment that allows us to laugh hysterically while marvelling in all the really gruesome FX.

The Haunting (1999)

I wanna tell y'all, my dear readers, about a little town nestled among the Lincolnshire hills and fields. An old market town full to the rafters with chavs and scum, it has aptly served as the base of my mother's career as a prosecutor for the last fifteen years. With more boarded up shops than open ones and an active disdain for the young, it is the worst place I have ever had the misfortune of spending an extended period of time in. Hell, it is the hometown of none other than the Milk Snatcher Herself, and I went to the same high school that she did. There is absolutely no redeeming quality of this town, except perhaps one... Not five miles outside of this shitheap, is a miniscule green village called Harlaxton, that is home to not much more than an old manor house that now is a campus for US university students. This manor house served as location for Jan de Bont's 1998 'remake' of the classic horror tale, here titled 'The Haunting'.

It is perhaps the most spectacular place you could imagine. Open only a few days a year to the public, my sister and I were once dragged along to the Manor for a string quartet recital. Naturally, we snuck out of the recital room and began to roam the expansive halls of the house, and it was unlike anything we had ever seen. While at this concert, Mum's friends asked her if we had seen 'The Haunting' yet, and she duly obliged maybe a week later with a VHS copy. At 12, it was one of the scariest things I had ever seen, and I was far from a stranger to horror at that point.

OK guys, if you could approach this awful script with only 10%
 of your talent....and ACTION!

I watched it again the other day, having read on forums for years how terrible people thought it was. I had long wondered what I was seeing that they weren't, and I now opine that they were able to get past the relatively few visually-haunting sequences and look at all the primary factors that came together to create this really silly movie. As a film buff, I can now say that director Jan de Bont is one of the culprits. He is another I would classify with Renny Harlin, in that through big and not-so-big budget, they have proven time and time again that they can sustain a respectable movie career without ever really making good movies. They are also both in the habit of starting strong and ending flaccid.

This kid needs a sound beating

Consider de Bont's probably best known picture as director, Speed. We all know and love that movie. But can you show me anyone who doesn't think the whole tacked-on ending with the subway train was the most festering form of overkill to what had been, until that point, a good movie? Harlin often does the same - and often overestimates his genius for good measure - and Th
e Haunting is caught red-handed committing this sin. However, rather like with Harlin's cult classic Deep Blue Sea, de Bont's fate is sealed by his overall directive technique, and his shameless misuse of decent actors.

Yeeeaaahh... if I could get a room with "less to dust", so to
speak... that'd be great!

I like Lili Taylor, and would later go on to appreciate her in such roles as Paula Klaw in The Notorious Bettie Page, but when faced with both her acceptance of this role and her performance in it, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry for her. Many a good actor has faltered under shoddy direction over the years, and she is one of them. Even the likes of Liam Neeson and the lovely Catherine Zeta Jones are not enough to save this picture, and the goofy addition of Owen Wilson just takes the cake.

Nell (Taylor) has spent the last decade or so caring for her invalid mother, and struggles with insomnia because of her constant need to attend to the old woman, even now she's dead. She receives a mysterious phone call advising her to look in the paper, where she finds an advert for a paid sleep study conducted by one Dr David Marrow (Neeson). Marrow, we see meanwhile, is in fact studying fear, and is luring bad sleepers to this "Addams Family mansion" under false pretense in order to do so. What Marrow doesn't seem to have counted upon is there being some vague familial link between Nell and the builder of the house Hugh Crane, whose horrifying portrait hangs in the foyer of the manor and gradually decays.

Cool portrait bro... paint it again.

One assertion I maintain is that there are still a handful of creepy-ass sequences that shit me up, even now. However, the movie goes waaaaay overboard with the crappy late-90s CGI, turning the third act into one long and ridiculous merry-go-round. As much as they may think otherwise, characters largely neglect to do any real thinking about their situation, and they serve as mere vehicles for a rather perplexing and weak script, so by the end of it, however creeped out (or not) we may be as viewers, we still don't give a toss about any of the characters either way. The patchy backstory of Hugh Crane and what is causing the haunting is fed us throughout, but it never really adds up, and even now, I don't think I really get it all. So either I'm getting stupider, or this is just a bad script. Tough call.

1408 (2007)

The movie 1408 came out at a pivotal time in my adolescence: my sister and I went to see it in our crappy two-screen local town cinema with our boyfriends, and it was one of the most terrifying cinematic experiences we had ever experienced, or have since. We were both avid Stephen King enthusiasts and were just blown away with this adaptation of his short story. It was not only a movie that made you jump, but gave you chills right to the core.


Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a paranormal investigator/writer/skeptic/world's sloppiest envelope-opener, who once had a career as a legitimate author. He makes his living visiting supposedly haunted hotels and houses and officially debunking all attached theories. One day he finds a mysterious postcard from the Dolphin Hotel in New York City, warning him not to enter room 1408. His manager (Tony Shalhoub) uses a lawyer to bend the hotel's resistance to Mike's demand for the room, and when he arrives, Mike faces further defensiveness from the hotel manager Mr Olin (Samuel L Jackson). Eventually, Mike gets into the room, and his mental and physical undoing commences.

Olin describes Mike as 'an intelligent man who doesn't believe in anyone or anything but himself',

and the writer's skepticism lasts a surprisingly short period, after which Olin's guarantee that 'nobody has ever lasted more than an hour in that room' will be fulfilled, as visualised by a ghostly digital bedside clock. For as long as a logical cynically-atheist man possibly can, Mike tries to apply the laws of physics to his ordeal, and his theory that Olin gifted him spiked whiskey seemingly holds up throughout. In the midst of his wildest nightmare scenarios, there are periodic shots portraying Mike in a perfectly untouched hotel room in hysterics.

Although the entire movie is your average decent-budget-with-several-big-names-attached in terms of style, it serves the space-bending narrative perfectly, and makes good use of perspective in the form of both newspaper articles and 1408 room paintings, all looking back at Mike as he examines them. As his ordeal (I apologise for my frequent use of this word; only I can think of no effective alternative) intensifies, there are some particularly wonderful works by the set designers and constructors, in a movie which, generally, I think was probably pretty cheap to make as the majority of the action takes place in a moderately-sized hotel suite that could be easily replicated on sound stages.

One thing I did not expect this evening was to end up crying at a horror movie I had seen a few times before. But I suppose every other time I had seen it, I was not the mother of an eight-year-old daughter like I am now. The central trauma that underpins Mike's ordeal in 1408 is the death of his young daughter Katie, and the child's implied resignation to her illness as a result of belief in God and Heaven. A sequence in which Mike is approached by a vision of his dead child - one he knows is not real - and holds her, crying hysterically and assuring her of his unending love. Cusack is an incredible actor, and both his sorrow and his terror are so tangible from the beginning of the movie to the very end.

1408 is mainly a one-man show by Cusack, and he is perfect. The role allows him to have fun with many emotions and attitudes in the same character, while Jackson's (sadly) minimal role allows him to oppose Cusack's determined disbelief... and deliver at least one joyously gratuitous 'fuckin'. It's a really good, tense and scary movie.

Grave Encounters (2011)

Found Footage is often snubbed by a certain faction of the movie-going world, considered dull, unoriginal and unwatchable due to the 'shakey camera' cliche; I maintain that it is the same as basically any other subgenre, in that there are a few really good examples and many bad ones, but the subgenre itself does not inherently make a movie bad - or good, for that matter. I have quite a few post-Blair Witch favourites of FF, which include Crowsnest, Apollo 18 and the Grave Encounters movies. The duology is unprecedented proof of that rare wonder: the sequel that lives up to its original. Writers/directors The Vicious Brothers are very much my kind of filmmakers: my generation, grungy as fuck, and worshippers of all good horror. They are the sort of dedicated and learned auteurs that you would be happy to see succeed, and they did exactly that with the Grave Encounters films.

"It's the gayest show in the fucking world!"

In a throwback to the format of the very first FF movie Cannibal Holocaust, the footage that constitutes the main narrative of the movie is set to a realistic framework, in which a TV producer explains to a documentary camera that the following picture was compiled from 76 hours of footage found after the disappearance of his crew on a job at an abandoned and supposedly haunted asylum. The show is Grave Encounters, and it is basically Ghost Hunters, as depicted by South Park ("It's the gayest show in the fucking world!"). Host Lance Preston and his colleagues pout at the camera, desperately try to look hard, and contrive non-existant ghostly experience, while we see their many outtakes in which their disbelief in the paranormal and generally unprofessional attitude is made evident.

They have arranged to spend the night - eight hours - locked in Collingwood Asylum, with the cooperation of the building's caretaker, who chains the door from the outside, and promises to return for them in the morning (how is this very notion somehow unsettling?). For a while they go about their media-whore jobs, but they inevitably soon come to realise that the ghosts they have spent five previous episodes simulating do actually exist, and they are none too satisfied with this revelation.

If you can't figure what happens in the next two seconds, you
have not seen a movie this side of the millennium.

I have yet to investigate any special features on my DVD, but have previously watched behind-the-scenes featurettes on the sequel, and it is very insightful. One of the main objectives that the Vicious Brothers had was that the many old horror tropes would be null and void in their line of narrative.

Like a souped up 1408, the asylum is an entity in itself, and shifts its shape to fuck with its captives. Every supposed escape and exit leads to another dark corridor. When 'rules' no longer apply, we the audience are unable to judge the characters' choices, because there is basically no way out and no way to fight. It is an inescapable nightmare, and this makes for a brilliantly tense viewing experience.

Blair Witch (2016)

I’d be willing to bet that few proper film fans out there were actually excited when a third Blair Witch movie was made – I wasn’t, but I figured it was going to be an hour and a half’s worth of moderately-entertaining stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily regret watching.

There are few movies out there with quite the cult status of The Blair Witch Project: although a tried-and-tested schtick even in the ‘90s, the concept of a film that blurred the lines between fiction and reality really hit home hard, especially when it coincided with the true advent of the internet. The web provided never-before-exploited marketing opportunities, and step by step, the makers had assembled something of a snuff film whose authenticity could be verified by all other sources – as well as the fact that the ‘actors’ seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. It was a true sensation, the likes of which has barely been emulated, if at all, since.  This is why it was a bold choice for a sequel, especially since the first one flew very much under the radar, and no one had ever attempted anything like it since.

The premise of the film is that James (James Allan McCune), the younger brother of Heather Donahue - our original protagonist of the dribbly nostril and considerable lung capacity – was a small child when his sister disappeared, and all these years later is using the mystery for his friend Lisa (Callie Hernandez) to base her college film project on. James has spent an unspecified time obsessing over the idea that his sister is still alive in the haunted woods of Burkittsville, prompting him to mull over mysterious internet videos and other clues that might affirm his suspicions.

 

His online musings have seen him make contact with a guy who uploaded mysterious footage of a woman running through a house that police searches of the area could never locate. Despite the woman’s face obviously not being that of Heather Donahue, this video gives James all the motivation he needs, and he sets out to team up with the internet guy to find his totally-still-alive sister. Where would a horror movie be without an overambitious assumption to set the ball rolling?

For diversity and that insulting bit of tokenism, they bring two black friends along – Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid) – whose sole purpose, it seems, is to complain about the imminent danger they are in. Oh, well, and of course to be the first ones to die. You didn’t think we’d moved past that old chestnut, didya? Not one black death, but two. This must be some kind of record.

This being a thoroughly modern murder mashup, the kids come prepared. Where Heather, Josh and Mike had weighty mid ‘90s VHS film equipment to lug around, these guys have earpiece cameras that don’t fall out, handheld cameras, GPS, cell phones, walkie-talkies and even a drone: about as well prepared for potential supernatural encounters as you can be. Equipment-wise, at least.

You remember that episode of South Park in which the plotline of the latest Indiana Jones movie is compared to our favourite archaeologist being sexually assaulted by Spielberg and Lucas? You might make a similar comparison with Blair Witch. Post-Millennial horror has become an incredibly formulaic experience, with a standard that is a million miles from everything that the original movie was, and it seems that the makers just couldn’t help themselves when it came to ‘modernising’ the beloved product. First night there are creepy noises outside – guy sits up to investigate – BOOM! It’s only his friend descending in a loud and stupidly unannounced fashion on his tent. It’s like the camping version of ‘Oh, its only the cat. Phew!’ Ashley cuts her foot when they decide to wade barefoot (?!) through a river, only for a closer inspection to reveal *GASP* something wiggling under her skin! Is this Blair Witch or fucking Alien? This whole build-up for no pay off is not only a waste, but totally ill-fitted to the genre.

The final act of the movie is where it loses all its rhythm. One of the major strengths of the original Blair Witch movie is that basically all of the horrors were unseen, so by the end we are not only terrified, but wondering quite what went on. What did happen to Josh? Why was Mike not fighting? Who left the goodies outside their tent? One thing we can establish onscreen is that all the action is contained within a very real and reliable world. Sure, they get lost in the woods and go round in circles, but that’s easy to do. Blair Witch decides to go down a more definitive route, and takes a leaf out of the book of…well, basically every found footage movie to be made in the past 15 years that took place in some sort of abandoned building. Grave Encounters et al.

The morning hours come but it is eternal darkness outside. We see tents being thrown through the air by unseen forces. Characters age years in a matter of hours. Yup, it’s one of those time- and space-bending theories that sounds like it should have a technical name but I haven’t managed to find it. Once again, it’s overkill. Being preyed upon by an unseen malevolent entity through seemingly endless woods is bad enough, and this twist really does nothing to enhance the plot – it just feels disjointed, like a rejected transplant organ.

The Blair Witch Project followed in the footsteps of some of the best horror/thrillers of our time, by using that classic Hitchcockian technique of keeping the antagonist off-camera. Psycho and Jaws are great examples of this, and the sheer horror created by The Blair Witch Project relied very heavily on letting our imaginations do the work. We were fed many influences, from the opening interviews with local townspeople and other folklore, giving us a haunting image of the witch and her atrocities, and we were taunted with terrifying sounds and the characters’ reactions to their surroundings. Never once did we see the Witch. Was she even real? This is the kind of direction strong horrors take.

Not only does Blair Witch break this golden rule, but it changes the story. You’ll recall Mary Brown telling Heather, Mike and Josh about her childhood encounter with the witch, and describing her as being a person covered in fur-like hair, whose feet never touched the ground. Lane and Talia - the internet guy and his girlfriend - shit all over this long-held impression, instead telling us that the Witch’s death at the hands of the townspeople saw her stripped naked and suspended from a tree, rocks weighing her arms and legs down - effectively a makeshift rack. When we finally get a look at the Witch (which we never should), she is the standard product of a modern horror movie: a pale, long-limbed humanoid that we have seen in a million other supernatural horror movies this side of the Millennium.

Research informs me that director Simon Barrett tried to make out like this creature wasn’t actually the witch, leading fans to deduce that this creature may in fact have been Heather, mutilated and controlled by the Witch. I call BS on this one, for the reason that Barrett made his utter ignorance of the entire Blair Witch mythology known in the DVD featurette exploring the sets. He seemed under the impression that the original house was still standing ‘somewhere in Maryland’, but this assumption seemed to have no bearing on his decision to build a set to replicate it (even though the set doesn’t replicate it at all). 

Were he any sort of fan, he would know that the historic Griggs House in Granite was demolished some years ago, before which it had gained a considerable cult following, with fans exploring and recreating classic scenes for their own photo albums. He struck me, sadly, as the type to rewrite history because he was too cool or important to actually learn the facts. After the film got a lukewarm reception – with many critics and fans agreeing that the introduction of the creature onscreen killed all tension – I reckon he was just looking to create a bit of a stir, which his ‘revelation’ managed to do. This reckless style of his is evident throughout the movie, always trying to add themes or take the mythology in a new direction, or just start again from scratch. His script is puzzling, and not in the good way that actually encourages theorisation, but in the bad way that is simply incoherent.

Grave Encounters 2 (2012)

What’s the best sequel of all time? While it may not be Grave Encounters 2, I would argue that it’s one of the strongest horror sequels we’ve had for some time. If I’m honest, I remember little of the first movie, but this is for good reason. It is one of a slurry of found footage horrors based on paranormal investigator TV crews getting lost in the bowels of an abandoned hospital/asylum/prison, and how often has a movie like this turned out a truly memorable character that you can instantly distinguish without having to subconsciously label them Brunette 1 and Brunette 2? The first Grave Encounters is one of these, and it’s a lot of fun and has plenty of good jump scares; the sequel manages to top itself by taking on the same fictitious reality as used in the Blair Witch Project 2, in which the first movie is acknowledged as a movie.

Alex (Richard Harmon) is an uptight obsessive who is working on his own horror movie while

Nothing unsettling about this guy

becoming engrossed in the mysteries surrounding the movie Grave Encounters, and soon abandons his own project in favour of an investigative piece, in which he aims to prove that the movie was reality and that a whole TV crew are dead by ghostly means. OK, let’s take an obligatory moment right here to appreciate the one eventuality that characters in these sorts of plotlines always seem to take for granted: they go somewhere dangerous and creepy to prove that ghosts exist, and then when they get that startling proof, they are far from overjoyed. In fact, one might venture to say that they bite off more than they can chew in the ghost-hunting business and give Yvette Fielding a run for her money on the screamometer. One time it might be cool for one of these crews to actually show some sort of spiritual efficiency when faced with ghosts.

19th century-style filmmaking

Anyhow, Alex brings along his small crew of friends and they break into the same abandoned asylum. But this isn’t just any asylum, this is a shapeshifting, time-bending asylum from M&S, so prepare for the mindfucks. What really made me look again at this movie was the featurette on the DVD, which gives you behind the scenes footage and interviews with director John Poliquin and writers/producers The Vicious Brothers. Part of a small gaggle of modern horrormakers that miss the spit-and-sawdust levels of filming and reach into the past for their inspiration, the Vicious Brothers detail the tremendous technical measure that goes into making a movie look so small-scale, and the box of tricks they use to pull it all off, including such Victorian wonders as forced perspective. Consider, for example, the simple genius that goes into designing a shot in which a creature twice the size of the characters comes crashing down a corridor like a huge house spider, by using a particularly tall and lanky actor in a scaled-down set. It’s just pure excellence.

A supernatural version of a Welcome Mat

There is further method to the madness: by introducing the building as a weird entity that seems to dangle between dimensions and is capable of manipulation, all classic audience reactions are suspended. The hackneyed knowledge of running outside instead of upstairs or not believing the bad guy is really dead is long forgotten once physical rules no longer apply, leaving the audience with little option but to sit tight and hope for the best. It’s filmed very well, and FF opponents will have to try harder than the ‘shaky camera’ excuse with this one, as it’s coherent even given the context. It is a gripping and watchable movie, and has a couple of really fantastic Oh Shit moments, which are particularly important in a film that is brimming with jump scares.

I suppose it would be beneficial to watch Grave Encounters before embarking on this interesting sequel, and if you’re here and interested in the sorts of movies I write about, it probably wouldn’t be a waste of 90 minutes of your life. But if all else fails, watch it so you can watch the second one and get it, because it’s a really good movie, and a rare example of a sequel outshining its predecessor. 

The Inkeepers (2011)

Ti West is an exceptional film-maker. This I concluded perhaps a third of the way into the first movie of his that I saw, the mind-blowing Jim Jones-based horror The Sacrament, which was a mockumentary. I resist the term Found Footage as the footage-makers got out alive to share said footage. The Innkeepers is an entirely different branch of horror, your traditional ghost picture. However, West's inimitable skill at cultivating horror for the screen makes for a 21st century Kubrick. Alas, there is no King-quality storyline or Nicholson-quality acting, but direction and actual technique is truly remarkable. I might even argue that not since Kubrick making The Shining has a horror director so exquisitely used space and pace to terrify.


The movie involves Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy), who are the last two remaining employees of the Yankee Pedlar Hotel, which is due to close within the week. There are only enough guests to count on the fingers of one hand, and the two have arranged to stay in the hotel itself and sleep in shifts rather than go home. Luke, a cool-enough bespectacled fella clicks away on a computer all day, alternating between XXX Chinese Pancakes (whatever the hell that entails) and a website he's created to document the supposed haunting of the hotel he works at. Claire, whose appearance and speaking voice seems stolen from 1992 Edward Furlong, is a loud tomboy whose aspirations seep no further than working at a hotel.

Faced with the boredom of only an irritable mother and her young child to associate with, the pair start investigating the hauntings together, and Claire grows convinced that there is some truth to it all. Just then a former actress-turned-medium played by Kelly McGillis turns up, whose work Claire is a fan of. She warns that there is something macabre in the basement, and that the place is not safe. If I'm very honest, standard horror action ensues from here. However, Mr West is an auteur of craft, so the actual format of the movie is something quite unique. Consider, for example, a brilliant scene in which Claire drags out a dripping garbage bag to the dumpster late at night. She starts doing a sideways crab routine to avoid the goo splashing onto her bare legs. When she makes it to the dumpster, which is taller than her, she makes repeated hilarious attempts to open the thing and swing the bag into it. I was in stitches throughout, utterly identifying with being of diminutive stature and not being the world's biggest fan of questionable bacteria-ridden liquids. It is little touches of situational humour and realism like this that help make the film special.

Consider another, in which that classic set-up has been followed, with Claire having slowly approached a darkened window to investigate a strange noise. When Luke suddenly appears, she releases all the pent-up adrenaline in a wonderfully realistic outburst. Again, it was relatable. I remember once being alone in my house and singing at the top of my lungs whilst cleaning a table. I turned around to see my friend standing right behind me, and being scared shitless, I found it took a good couple of minutes of making weird groans and shaking my arms about to calm down again.

Then, of course, there is the aforementioned spacial awareness. The hotel is no Overlook, but it's vast on the inside, and West takes full advantage of its long corridors, perpendicular turns and the angles that can be experimented with. He succeeds in planting us in the setting with the characters, and in suggesting to us where danger may be lurking. Technique even, at times, borders on Hitchcockian, playing with what we see and what we don't, and what horrors we can make up in our own minds. Agonising spans of time are used to allow us to work ourselves up, to experience the tension for ourselves. What is so special about Ti West's work is that no matter what source of horror he settles upon, be it supernatural or despicably man-made, he never fails to convince us of the terror. Although I do not rate this movie, in terms of a viewing experience, quite so highly as his amazing The Sacrament, it is an excellent piece in his portfolio, and truly his, and definitely worth watching for anyone who appreciates quality horror.

As Above, So Below (2014)

A fortnight ago, I was several hundred feet under the streets of Paris, wandering through endless tunnels walled with human bones, holding my video camera in one hand, and finding myself surprisingly regardless of the camera screen. I was focused on the real, what was going on around me in the place that I was at this very time. The footage was incidental; it could be looked at when I got home. For now, I was going to really have fun and learn a lot exploring the Catacombs. Having been alerted to the release of As Above, So Below from its exciting enough but rather usual marketing campaign last year, but not having seen it yet, I thought a lot about the idea of a handheld picture being made down there.

The Paris Catacombs only allow 200 people down at any one time, hence the often lengthy queue. The strange thing was, the place was so vast that we only saw perhaps six or eight other people the entire time we were down there. The majority of the time, we were alone. That sheds a little light on how huge the tunnels are, and that's the guided route. Visitors will observe alternative routes leading off of tunnels, the tourist route marked out by gates. Some of these alternative tunnels ride off into complete darkness. If people arrogant and intrusive enough to be found in a movie like this were to cut the locks and skulk off, it could most definitely end pretty disastrously.

What would make a movie like that even better, I decided, was my realisation that I paid no attention to what my camera was capturing, but what was in front of me. This offered massive potential for forces/creatures unseen to the characters but acknowledged by the audience. This could be really chilling. It was obvious: the Catacombs made for a brilliant horror film setting.

In fairness, As Above, So Below ended up going in a somewhat unexpected direction towards its conclusion, and although a bit messily constructed, it is a highly researched film. Respect must be paid for effort made. There is a lot of mythical and legendary namedropping, such as the philosopher's stone and Nicolas Flamel, and a lot of that irritatingly vague cryptography that the characters must battle their baffled little selves through. There is also a lot of jaw-dropping stupidity from one solitary character.

Leading lady Scarlett (Perdita Weeks) is a middle-class parent's wet dream. She looks no older than 25, yet she holds two PhDs, a Masters degree, and speaks six languages fluently (two of those being dead), and to top it all off, she is a university professor! She is everything I aspired to be at the naive age of 13. She is like Lara Croft. Because not only is she a painfully qualified academic, she is also a badass (which in this instance is synonymous with moron). She doesn't have the sexual prowess and ridiculously tightly clad bod, but she unlawfully trespasses on an Iranian cave system that is minutes from being demolished by dynamite, knowing the legal ramifications, and presumably, just how mindblowingly stupid and death-welcoming the decision is. All the warning alarms are blaring, and she finds the Rose Key, a large relic that her scholarly father sought his whole life. Lo and behold, explosives start going off all around her, and there is a frantic, and admittedly tense, run-for-life back to the exit, via helmetcam.

This is the format for most of the movie, plonking it in the increasingly cloudy subgenre I know and love...the Found Footage. The more people make this kind of fad movie, the more audiences ask, 'Who finds the footage?' The early and more classic examples of FF offered explanations as to the recovery of the materials, but of late, the genre is straying from being 'found', and settling as 'homemade'. There no longer has to be a barely-believable reason that this footage, exactly as it is presented to us, was recovered from some unsurvived crime scene or tragedy. It is now more of a medium, just a different narrative perspective, which continues to be exercised to varying levels of success. The premise for filming the incidents we witness are ever up for question: it helps if one or more persons has some kind of professional business in filmmaking or television; those assholes who just inexplicably film every mundane thing that he and his asshole friends do, with seemingly limitless battery power, are far less likely to keep our attention.

Scarlett is the subject of a documentary being filmed by Benji (Edwin Hodge) about her uptake of the search for the philosopher's stone, which drove her father to self-destructive madness. She seems minimally deterred by the stone's blatantly negative psychic affects, or by anything else for that matter. She breaks into demolition sites, churches, large underground tombs, and when her old flame George (Ben Feldman) is reluctantly recruited on her latest mission into the Catacombs, where she is convinced the stone is hidden, we find out that her shenanigans formerly resulted in the couple's incarceration in a Turkish prison. She is irritatingly relentless in her carelessness, which she masquerades as determination and adventurousness.

George speaks Arabic, which is why he is recruited for the various translations needed on the quest, and his skills are centre stage as he gives the English form of an Arabic riddle. And whaddaya know?! It still has perfect rhythm and rhyme, as though it were originally written in English, although this is surely impossible. Then, in a Paris nightclub, Scarlett ropes a semi-suave looking dude named Papion (not sure where the 'butterfly' symbolism occurs in any part of the film -- his parents must have seen in him some gentility which we do not). He is en garde, and swaggery, and he can show the group a non-official route to the treasure. And old Pap is a package deal: he brings relatively professional cronies along, who are experienced climbers, potholers, etc. Seems like a fairly safe setup for what is inevitably doomed to at least partial failure. Scarlett will still have her documentary regardless, we can concede early on.

It follows a fairly standard pattern at first: caves collapse, no way but forward, group leader arrogantly insists they take the tunnel of doom rather than the legit ones, a whole bunch of rather juvenile-feeling clue-busting, which Scarlett continuously solves quickly and inexplicably. It's always one of those things that could refer to fucking anything, and that only Jonathan Creek could solve, and only after several days of non-active conversations and thoughtful stares in a duffle coat. But then, a few peer-deaths down the line, things start getting... I dunno...not theological, not existential, perhaps a little spiritual. In another problem-solving scenario, and probably the most risky one yet, Scarlett concedes that the reason the world is going crazy and rooms are shifting and weird cloaked figures are stalking them, is that each of the survivors has some guilt, some personal demon which haunts them, that they must release before they are to get out. With a little Inferno referencing and a generally Abrahamic Damnation style, things steer away from the lower-market FF movies with many quick flashes of ghostly faces, and go in a far more big-budget direction with its ideology, leaning more toward the likes of Insidious and The Possession.

The plot and setting seemed relatively original for a movie of its kind, but it constantly felt like something was missing. We had the slow and subtle build-up, with plenty of calmness and establishment of plan and walking and talking, and the first few 'encounters' are typically ambiguous in nature, warranting the characters to shrug them off or not recognise them at all until shit really starts going down. And for the first hour or so, I believed that some kind of dramatic peak was imminent, but this movie left me totally blue-balled. All great (or good...or even just mediocre) horror movies must have at least one moment of forceful impact, the Oh Shit moment, in which everything that you have watched so far comes to fruition, and you feel thrilled. You need the moment in which everyday existence is turned upside down, and the hapless characters find themselves within a scenario that they never imagined they'd experience. We need the world to fall away.

And the crazy thing is that in this movie, it quite literally does, yet it is never enough. It's like 100 minutes of digital foreplay followed by the light going out...and not even a cigarette to conclude. It's all good stuff, but it didn't have any real climax. And moreover, the ending leaves everything unnervingly unanswered. From the course of action they've given us, we all make assumptions about the condition of the world the few survivors escape to. It's no real conclusion. But the movie is far less shaky and so more watchable than a lot of its kind, and gets some interesting shots, and some pretty great atmosphere from its sets.

I feel like I want to give As Above, So Below more credit than it truly deserves: the use of the Parisian catacombs is brilliant, themes are interesting and performances and camera work is somewhat above average. But the scary bits are far too diluted, and most of them turn out to have been contained in the trailer, which is one of my pet peeves. It seems unfulfilled, and that's how it left me feeling. Not all that I had expected. It's worth seeing, and it's fun enough, but if you're looking for a Found Footage movie that packs a punch, go for the Blair Witch Project, or even low-enders like Crowsnest and Grave Encounters 2. If you're strong of stomach, go straight to Cannibal Holocaust.