Thursday, March 13, 2014

Horror Off-Season: Haunt


Haunt is another 2013 movie that hit VOD in early 2014.  It's also another debut, this time of director Mac Carter who's previous directorial work had been on a documentary.

Haunt as a film is a good old fashioned ghost story.  Something you'd expect to hear around a campfire or from some old lady at midnight at the local social lodge (Those are things, right?).  I enjoyed it, it wasn't bad, but I feel like it missed in a few ways.

First, the story (which I liked plenty), is about a house.  A haunted house.  In the mid-80's a couple, both successful doctors, moved their family into a large house.  In 1984 almost the entire family died tragically:  The son died in a car accident at 16, then the youngest daughter drowned, followed by the eldest daughter committing suicide, and finally the father in a mysterious incident at the house.  Fast forward a few decades and a new family, the Ashers, is just moving into the house.  The teen son of that family, while out for a walk, befriends a local girl named Sam and the two become involved quite quickly.  While their relationship blossoms, increasingly odd things happen around the house, culminating in the two of them delving into supernatural investigation.  Since it is a fairly straight and folksy ghost story I do want to try to stay away from spoilers so that's about all the detail I'll go into.

On to the odd: During the film the behavior of the Asher parents struck me as strange.  They seemed to be the most accepting and trusting parents ever portrayed.  As an example, one of the first few nights the Asher's son, Evan, meets Sam she follows him home.  Not wanting to go back to her house she sleeps the night in his bed.  In the morning he just brings her down to the family who had no idea she was there and they were completely unperturbed by it.  Everyone's cool with strange girls following their son/brother home and sleeping in his room.  Not this is really a bad thing that detracts from the story, but it just seemed so odd.

There are two more aspects I feel like they also missed with, and they're both part of the visual aesthetic of the film.  First off, a lot of lower budget supernatural horror movies seem to feel like they have to compensate for being a slower creepshow by nature and find ways to up their pace.  So when things that should be low-key and creepy happen, these movies try to amp them up and make them more intense.  Specifically what I'm talking about are shots where, because there's a ghost around, the movie will drop frames, random frames will be zoomed in and grainy or with weird color effects.  Basically this technique where they decide to make their movie resemble a mid-90's alternative rock music video.  I dislike this.  I feel like it cheapens the effect of supernatural elements.  The House at the End of the Street did this a lot, and it didn't even have any supernatural elements to its story, it was just being weird.

Second, I think ghost effects in movies tend to follow whatever precedent was set by the last really successful ghost movie regardless of their own aesthetic or what would actually look good.  The Ring ensured that every ghost story would have frame-skipped jerky moving ghosts for years.  I think Haunt is taking its cues from Mama, which featured a fast moving but very smooth ghost with lots of floating whispy strands of hair and clothing.  And while I adore Mama, I don't like this in Haunt.  The design of the ghost is very sensible.  It relates to the backstory, it looks creepy...it's a totally competent ghost...but then in post they made it all floaty and it has those whispy bits around it which makes absolutely no sense.  Considering the ghost isn't actually on screen in full view very much, this is a really minor gripe...but it really just rubbed me the wrong way.

That aside, it's got some fairly chilling implications and I really did enjoy the story teller narration that bookends the film.  It's not really great by any stretch but I would definitely call it good enough and nothing about it is particularly objectionable so Haunt gets a "well done".

--PXA

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