After setting those goals at the start of this year, focusing on watching older stuff, and broadening the genres a little, I think it's hurt my movie count. While I like many of these older movies I've watched, and I find the experience interesting, I also have a lot to learn from these modern, cheap horror movies.
This was a B movie. It's intended to get the normal gross for a horror movie, and not much more. This means that the movie is predictable. It also means that it follows certain expectations of the time period. And that's where we hit some interesting territory. There are plenty of Ring (or Japanese) influenced elements. There's the creepy pale girl with long black hair, concealing her face with the hair. There are swarms of bugs (moths in this one). There is a bizarre sequence that has a pair of fingers reaching up from a girl's throat. These are creepy elements, but they seem like they've already become cliche.
To make this Japanese influence even weirder, there's a Jewish angle to this movie. I actually like this element a bit more. I think there's a small sub-genre of Jewish horror (but the only thing I can think of is stuff involving golems). It's nice to spice up a horror genre that has been almost exclusively Catholic since The Exorcist.
For the most part, this movie is unremarkable. It's interesting enough to keep my attention though.
I did notice one thing that has been bothering me. It seems like in every horror movie, whenever a pair of parents are involved in the story, they are always divorced, or at least estranged. I think this was acceptable in The Hole, because their separation was a key aspect of the story. There are a few other exceptions I can think of. The couple in Stir of Echoes was married. Vacancy has a newlywed couple. I guess I just feel like making a couple divorced is a cheap way to try to build the characters.
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