A guy and girl rely on flashbacks to find out what supernatural force caused mayhem and murder in a haunted house years before. I’m actually describing two films with the same sentence. Bet you thought that only worked with slashers….
HAUNT (2013)
If you love a good old ghost girl with scary hair, you’ll love Haunt, in which she’s the star of all the rinse and repeat tween scares. Plus, you’re treated to an hour and a half of modern horror atmosphere: absolutely no light in a house even when daylight is streaming through every window.
A family moves into a house, the teen boy finds a radio that lets him communicate with the dead, the girl next door just starts sleeping in his bed with him every night and his parents say not a word, his little sister acts weird, the ghost girl appears around every corner to make us scream in terror, and they see flashbacks of the deaths of the family that lived there before them….
Annabelle and Insidious fans, this one is sure to make you wet yourself.
OCULUS (2013)
Despite its long, self-indulgent storytelling, Oculus waters down to a mirror that makes people into murderous demons. If it could have just gotten right to the demon people, I would have been one happy demon schlock lover.
This chick’s brother was sent to a crazy house for a decade for killing his dad. But she’s convinced the evil supernatural mirror in their dad’s office did the nasty deed. So she and her freshly released brother sit in a room with the mirror for the whole movie trying to remember what exactly happened years before.
Nonstop flashbacks tell the story of the past—actually two sides of the story as we are bombarded by alternate versions of how the brother and the sister remember things going down. Which makes it exhausting trying to understand what the hell is going down.
The two also start doing weird shit and forgetting they’ve done it—or thinking they imagined it—in the present, but choose to stay in the room with the evil mirror. Blah blah blah blah blah and on and on and on.
Finally, at the end, there are a handful of cool demons. I would totally watch the last fifteen minutes of the film a second time. But if you like some depth to your horror, have fun digging yourself deeper and deeper into all one hundred and five minutes of it. Personally, I’d suggest you watch director Mike Flanagan’s for superior indie horror flick Absentia.
I liked Oculus the first time around, but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s not one of those flicks that has much of a re-watchability factor. Like you said, it did take a long time to get going, and if you look away for a minute you’re bound to get lost. Loved Insidious, have not seen Annabelle, but did not like Haunt at all.
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