Demons, possession, ghost girls—this trio of flicks from my Shudder watchlist definitely deliver on the ghoulish tormentors, but are they worth a watch beyond the horror eye candy?
ELEVATOR GAME (2023)
If you’re looking for yet another film in the revival of ghost girl type of moves from the early 2000s, look no further than Elevator Game.
But be warned. This one is sloooooooow until the satisfying popcorn movie kills finally kick in at about the 45-minute mark.
So there’s an online challenge in which you ride an elevator to different floors in a certain order to release “the 5th floor woman”.
A group of recent high school graduates have a video channel on which they debunk urban legends. Thus begins the first forty-five boring minutes.
When they finally do the challenge, nothing happens until they all split up. This unleashes the elevator ghost, whose first kill takes place…in a stairwell.
There are really some fun and bloody kills, but they are all this movie has going for it and provide the only brief hints of suspense. Characters are flat, story is flat. The back story of the ghost is okay, though, and was giving me Fatal Frame video game vibes.
The silliest part of the film is when the ghost girl suddenly decides to chomp on a victim’s neck like a zombie.
SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET (2024)
I won’t even spend much time on this one. Somehow Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. star, and we get Sally Kirkland and Udo Kier as different psychic mediums, but the movie looks cheap and is mostly incoherent.
Howard’s wife starts getting scary vibes around her young daughter, leading to a movie plagued by choppy flashing edits of sinister visions. The girl has cancer. Howard loses his job. His buddy Cuba gets out of jail.
The wife has nightmares of a killer scarecrow and of some other creepy demon (the two highlights of the movie and what I guess are the “skeltons” in the mom’s closet). The wife consults a priest. She then consults Kirkland.
There are sightings of a ghost girl in white. The family eventually consults Udo Kier.
He is sinister and drags them into dark magic. It ends up as a ritual involving burying a book. The killer scarecrow appears in real life and chases them around. I understood none of it.
BLOOD FLOWER (2023)
This Malaysian film will be a satisfying ride for those who love flicks with contorting possessed girls, gory ghost movies, and demonic entity films.
It even has a main character with a personal internal struggle going on, as well as a non-gender conforming best friend character.
Our main teen boy is the member of a family of exorcists who is afraid to tap into his own supernatural powers, which could help with the exorcisms. His timidity in using those powers leads to tragedy, causing guilt that follows him as there’s a possession outbreak in his apartment building.
The movie is a bit all over the place, so the main kid and his friends accidentally open a portal that unleashes a cool demon when they unlock a door they weren’t supposed to touch in a greenhouse with weird exotic plants. Yeah, there’s a lot going on here.
The boy also has the power to see dead people so that adds a little more chaos. We have ghosts, the demon, and the people in his apartment building getting possessed. It’s a lot to juggle, but it definitely delivers plenty of blood, gore, and freaky visuals. I had fun with this one—but beware the baby eating scene and other fetal abuses.
And finally, I’ll just add that the father’s friend is hot…
