I wanted to like a new American horror movie so badly that I somehow thought that ‘The Haunting in Connecticut’ looked good from the trailers and posters. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the material out there, and then someone said to me in passing that it looked scary, and from then on when I saw a poster I thought that it did look creepy. But that was the posters, if you are looking for someone to advertise your film, and can’t get the guys who did the amazing ‘The Dark Knight’ push, then hire these guys, because they can make a creepy poster from a dull movie.
That is all ‘The Haunting in Connecticut’ is. Dull. Not even ‘so bad it’s good’, just boring. There is no level of suspense and there are no jump moments, which was disappointing as my friend promised me that she can really scream in horror films and she was never given the opportunity. I think a large part of the lack of true horror is that the ghosts of the film never seem particularly dangerous, and the film ends with a body count of zero. I don’t necessarily need gore but I would appreciate the tension of a threat.
Maybe there was a danger that I missed. It may have been the simple fact that characters were shallow and never given much depth beyond ‘a teenager with cancer’, ‘a mother with a son with cancer’, ‘a father who drinks to deal with the fact that he has a teenager with cancer.’ These were hollow clichés rather than ever feeling like, I don’t want to say real people because fictional characters should not feel like real people, but like characters you could understand and sympathise with. Kill them for all I care, the gore at least may generate vicarious thrills.
And weak characters make for weak narrative momentum. The choices they make during the film are illogical, and the director tries to explain them by stereotype, i.e. a teenager with want to hang out in dark and clearly haunted basement because he has cancer and wants to be alone, or a priest wants to fight ghosts because his wife died.
It makes one miss the better days of American horror films, a genre in which I am currently trying to capture and address in a feature screenplay. When was the last time we saw a film that could match ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ or ‘Night of the Living Dead’ or ‘Halloween’ or ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ or ‘Alien’ or ‘Jaws’ or ‘The Thing’ or ‘The Exorcist’. The newest American horror film to make the genre’s top 10 according to The Internet Movie Database is from 1986. This in unacceptable and I can’t get my head around why American filmmakers are letting other nations do horror so much better than them when they used to do it best.
