by Raven Kross:
When I first saw the commercials for this movie, I had high expectations for it. At a first glance, it doesn’t seem like your typical monsters-under-the-bed movie. It had a creepy house, mysterious voices, disappearing children, and lots of blood- perfect, right?
Wrong.
This movie was… ehh. It wasn’t bad in and of itself, it’s just that I was expecting a little… more. It follows a little girl named Sally who moves into a huge mansion with her dad and his girlfriend. They’ve moved in while the couple fixes up the place to present it to the Historical Society or something- I wasn’t too clear on the itty bitty details. One day Sally is playing in the garden when she discovers what appears to be the glass ceiling of a hidden room. They manage to pinpoint where the room is and discover a doorway hidden under the front stairs. It leads to a grim, dusty room containing little more than a dollhouse, some bookshelves, and an old furnace.
When Sally approaches the furnace, she hears voices on the other side. They whisper her name, tell her that they’ll play with her, be her friend. She continues to hear the voices throughout the house. At first, she seems to like them; they give her comfort from the feelings of alienation that she gets from her father and his girlfriend. But it’s not long before the voices become a menace, and Sally realizes that they aren’t here to play.
Sound interesting? Of course it does. What self-respecting horror fan wouldn’t want to see a little girl being attacked by five-inch tall gremlins with rusty scissors and garden shears? This movies has so many basic horror elements- a child who can’t convince the adults that the monsters in her room are real; the mysterious whispering voices coming from the vents; bloodthirsty creatures who just love snacking on children’s bones; even a stuffed bear whose mechanical “I love you” keeps playing even though no one’s touching it. And as for the gore factor, well, those little buggers won’t stop at anything to get someone out of the picture.
But even so, there was still something missing. Maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me that it had too many typical horror factors to really stand out on its own. I mean, when you think about it, what the whole movie boils down to is a bunch of monsters who are… scared of the light.
The ending as well was so… I don’t know. Anticlimactic? I won’t give it away, but something about it just sort of bothered me. After all the violence that the main characters endured, you’d expect the ending to go one of two ways- everyone dies, or everyone lives. A movie like this just can’t afford that kind of plot twist.
Even so, I’d still recommend you see it, if only to expand your repertoire of horror movies. It is indeed dark despite a multitude of cliches, and maybe you’ll find something in it that I didn’t. Even if you hate it, at least you get to see an old man get stabbed in the neck with his own shears.
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