Sam McNaughton

Left me with more questions than answers

Boring, cliched, predictable. Avoid.

Spoiler Alert. I haven’t read the book. I haven’t seen any other film versions so I had no expectations. The film starts strongly and builds tension well, however it lost me in the first nighttime cemetery scene where the director decided that loads of dry ice was required to make the scene “scarier”. But really, are these old school fax required? Surely, the idea of not only digging up your beloved daughter but then bringing her back to “life” is true horror in itself? I felt the film makers couldn’t just let that awful idea be enough, so they bizarrely added a very distracting, confusing and seemingly completely unrelated side story of the wife’s sisters illness and death and subsequent “haunting” of the wife’s character. That seemed to be almost a potential movie in itself. Truly good horror films don’t go “obvious” or gratuitous, instead they allow the viewer to fill in the gaps with their own personal fears and anxieties. This movie fell back into the worn out cliche of gratuitous violence in order to shock or upset the audience. It didn’t need to. The central theme of love, loss, grief then the resurrection of a beloved child is certainly horror enough, if done with subtlety, without needing knife, scalpel attacks. In summary this movie was a missed opportunity to create a truly haunting experience which could have touched the darkest corner of the viewers souls. Which is exactly what makes Stephen King such a master of the written horror genre.