Haunted (2013)

Director: Steven M. Smith, Zane Quazzani, Svenja Quazzani, Zane Casablanca

Year: 2013

Country: United Kingdom

Alternate Titles: Ghosts

Genre: Supernatural

Plot:

Gathered together for a new TV show, a group of people is brought out to a supposedly haunted train station rumored to house the ghost of a former employee who died years ago when it was in operation, but the longer they stay there, the more they believe something more supernatural is going on.

Review:

Overall, this was a rather strong and effective feature. One of the finer features here is the pretty intriguing setup that gives everything the necessary space to work its storylines together. The whole concept of the intended show-within-the-film, where it takes skeptics who don’t believe in the paranormal and takes them out to a haunted location to investigate the property for themselves, sets this one going in a wholly unique fashion, where it takes a far more believable and realistic tactic than expected to form the basis for the show’s hook. As they learn more about the history of the station and the grisly outcomes that occurred there over the years, it gets everything going for the later scenes involving them looking through the various buildings and locations at the station that generate some intriguing and wholly suspenseful factors within here.

These setups create the kind of atmosphere where the various attempts at injecting the kind of shocks in this kind of genre fare come to fruition. Since it’s established the haunted nature of the location with the kind of backstory that we get here, the scenes involving the medium being physically affected by events around a train car parked out in the middle of nowhere or the different encounters around the platform as the team sets about their mission, provide some tense ideas with a lot to like. Later scenes, including a suspenseful sequence where a participant is left alone in a haunted train car to deal with everything, get a lot to like as the real-time presentation of everything regarding the recording means that the series of explanations and other bits here get the proper setup for the later interactions to come about, completing the behind-the-scenes format of the show really nicely, all giving this a lot to like.

There are some issues here that bring this down. The biggest factor against the film is the really disjointed and underwhelming finale, where it’s nearly impossible to figure out what’s going on. The found-footage format of this whole sequence is the wrong way to go about this, with the close-quarter nature of the frame making it incredibly difficult to see what’s actually going on, focusing on barely-determinate blobs of vague human-like shapes running around screaming and crying out over something not visible on camera. It never provides any point of reference for the action presented or who’s filming, where they are on the location itself, and the frantic setup comes out of nowhere, with it being a complete shock that makes it hard to figure out, since the rest of the film is slow-going and sluggish until this point. Coupled with the obvious low-budget limitations here, these all manage to hold this down overall.

Overview: ***/5

An intriguing enough take on the genre, there’s a lot of likable factors on display here that manage to make this one enjoyable enough to hold off the drawbacks that keep it down. Those with an interest in the style, who are hardcore found-footage aficionados, or who are fans of the creative crew, will be the main audience here, as most others might want to heed caution.