The things that terrify us are as common and as personal as possible. Yes, death, rape, getting strangled by guitar strings on the one hand, and, at least on a personal level, I have recurring nightmares about being fired from my job, not everybody, not most people I guess, have that recurring nightmare.
Which is why horror movies, their main job, is to tap into something both big and small in you; in your particularly superego’d horrowshow. And what I like most about Vincenzo Natali, the Director of the best mutated monster movie ever “Splice”, is he finds a great subject for a horror movie. No, Vincent doesn’t come close to making it payoff, and it soon ends up a supernatural haunted house killer movie, but “Haunter” starts off as an idea brimming over with mountains of wit: a teenage girl on the Eve of the her sixteenth birthday, is living the same lousy Sunday over and over again. When Abigail Breslin as Lisa Johnson tells her Mom, “But I did the washing yesterday”, what she means is she did the washing yesterday.
The gothic sideshow of teenangerhood endless misunderstood no one knows me, lock me in my room, on a never ending Sunday is captured so well, you can feel the moments tick and tick and tick and tock, it is is all those groundhog day movies without the moral kick: it is making Lisa sick and bored and tired, it is really as bad as these things can possibly get.
Slowly, Vincent ups the anxiety from the tedium and blandness of living the same day over and over again, to strange changes , suddenly her father smokes where he didn’t before and the atmosphere in the house becomes toxic. Then she begins hearing noises.
At this point the movie becomes a haunted house but who is doing the haunting story, the story of a serial killers evil spirit living on and at this time it isn’t really scary any more.
But the first 45 minutes are such a terrific idea, you sort of which that’s all there was to it.
Grade: B
