While I’m generally about as susceptible to scare tactics as an overripe watermelon, I do love me a good ghost story though. Unfortunately, due to Hollywood’s tendency to rely more on buckets of blood than actual spookiness, they are hard to come by. Hammer Films, one of the genre’s progenitors, are trying to change that though. They had a great start with the gothic The Woman in Black, and now they’re at it again with The Quiet Ones.
Instead of an ex-boy wizard messiah once again leading the ghostbusting charge though, this time they have a Sherlock Holmes nemesis in Jared Harris and a guy who’s just got done playing some deadly (and hungry) games in an arena in Sam Claflin. Ghost Ship and The Skulls writer John Pogue (who also penned 2002’s Rollerball, but let’s leave that out of the conversation) is directing and co-wrote the film along with The Messenger and Rampart’s Oscar nominated writer/director Oren Moverman.
A university student (Sam Claflin of “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”) and some classmates are recruited to carry out a private experiment — to create a poltergeist. Their subject: an alluring, but dangerously disturbed young woman (Olivia Cooke of “Bates Motel”). Their quest: to explore the dark energy that her damaged psyche might manifest. As the experiment unravels along with their sanity, the rogue PHD students are soon confronted with a terrifying reality: they have triggered an unspeakable force with a power beyond all explanation
While I have no doubt that this is going to be responsible for a few chewed off fingernails, unfortunately this seems to have devolved back to generic horror movie mode. Gone is that overwhelming creep factor and throwback production design we saw working so superbly in The Woman in Black. And yes, this is just a trailer, so I could be completely wrong, and this could actually scare the poop out of me faster than dodgy Mexican food, but at this stage I’m not holding my breath.
The Quiet Ones stars Jared Harris, Sam Claflin, Erin Richards, Rory Fleck-Byrne and Olivia Cooke, and will be possessing cinemas on April 25, 2014.
Last Updated: January 17, 2014
RinceThis2014
January 17, 2014 at 09:53
Gods that looks terrible. Loved Women in Black, but this just looks like another The Glass House, lots of gore and little emphasis on the psychological. Le Sigh.