61 - Altar

    A family moves into a decrepit old mansion, which the mother plans on restoring.  They find that there are ghosts that gradually possess the father.
    Ugh.  With a summary like that, I probably shouldn’t have expected anything original.  Still, I tend to like bad movies, and I was looking for horror…
    It’s weak.  It’s really weak.  It’s weak enough that I had a hard time looking for the interesting elements.
    First, the good stuff.  There’s a scene where the father starts getting weirdly preoccupied with dripping his blood onto his wife’s back, and massaging it in.  After she flips out, she runs to the shower and washes it off.  He follows her and takes a bunch of pictures.  This is a really strange sequence, and it captures the imagination pretty well.  The problem is that this strange event should be a point of contention between them.  It doesn’t seem to be something that bothers them.  The house is well-designed and interesting.  The acting is perfectly fine.
    Where the movie goes wrong is a bigger problem.
    1.  I’m sick of seeing movies - especially horror movies - that think that filming everything in darkness with muted colors is an effective way of creating atmosphere.  Even movies that take place heavily in the darkness can shoot things in a way that makes them understandable.  When I see dark blobs moving around in the darkness, I don’t think “that’s spooky.”  I’m curious about what I’m seeing, but I usually give up pretty quickly.
    2.  The movie seems to be a strange amalgamation of horror elements gathered from a wide range of sources.  The Shining, Hellraiser, nearly every haunted house story out there.  I don’t mind borrowing from sources or paying tribute to influential works, but this seemed to do it without regard for creating a unique story for itself.
    3.  The biggest problem.  No answers are ever given.  The vast majority of what makes a haunted house story interesting is the backstory for the house.  What happened that made it haunted?  Here, we learn of a human sacrifice, and a suicide.  We never learn why either of them happened, and what the reasoning was.
    At the end of the movie, there’s a little dark twist to imply that the evil spirits haven’t been defeated.  When that happened, I realized that I didn’t care.  What does it matter?  We don’t have any motivation for the ghost.  We don’t even know if he’s evil, or if he just wants to complete some ritual.