The Hole in the Ground is the rare film which would have benefited from being less subtlety and amping up the craziness to achieve the desired sense of unease.
The Clovehitch Killer is a creepy coming-of-age serial killer noir with a well-written script, three-dimensional characters and a career performance by Dylan McDermott.
The Haunting of Hill House is full of arresting images and startling moments of pure drama; this is a show that doesn’t skimp on the heft and it presses its viewers with an inherent need to invest.
Is this any way to sell a board game? Hasbro’s perennial moneymaker “Ouija” is the basis of Universal’s micro-budget horror franchise in the making, and it’s hard to imagine a game manufacturer working any harder to discourage people from buying its product. The 2014 release Ouija opened at number one, and a followup was inevitable.
Horror is in an extremely interesting place at the moment. Thanks to the rise of video-on-demand platforms and new technology, barriers between creator and distributor are disappearing, the amount of independently-made films are rising and the availability of these films is quite accessible. The trade-off of this is the problem of quantity over quality, which has meant that, much like the exploitation era of filmmaking in the 1970’s, every new or original film that is successful is followed with a string of derivative imitators, looking to cash in on genre recognition or fans looking to branch out on that particular subject matter.
The original Ouija is the kind of movie that pisses off cinephiles far more than the average moviegoer. It was competently made schlock, a paint by numbers horror film that never took a single chance. If it had faded into obscurity, then none of us would say anything about it.
So you like John Gallagher Jr., huh? Well, get ready to have that emotion shaken, because in Hush he abandons his usual affability to play a killer toying with a deaf and mute woman.
