The Hallow is another shallow addition to the horror genre.
The Hallow, though not without its accomplishments, is little more than another horror movie that mistakes handheld camera and rapid-fire edits for tension. It wears its influences on its sleeve more often than is healthy and fails to deliver any sort of innovative twist on the genre or the story it’s telling. Even as a straightforward monster movie it fails to thrill, thanks to bland creature designs and the lack of any sympathetic characters.
Directed by Corin Hardy, The Hallow is the story of the Hitchens, Adam (Joseph Mawle) and Clare (Bojana Novakovic) , who move to a secluded house in Ireland only to find themselves terrorized by a local man named Colm (Michael McElhatton) and the creatures that live in the woods. We don’t really get any context to why they’re living there or why Colm seems hellbent on terrorizing them. In fact, the only way we’d pick up most of these tidbits is from reading a plot synopsis, which is something I actually liked about the movie: it’s commitment to story subtlety.
Despite the movie’s eagerness to show you the monsters within it, The Hallow is sparse when it comes to setup and exposition. There’s no backstory to get bogged down in, no grand mythology to deal with. This means no long-winded, unnatural information dumps that always interrupt the tension and destroy the pacing. It’s clear that the story is based on real folklore, but it doesn’t bother to lead you through it beat-for-beat. It’s a tad refreshing, though the flipside is that we really don’t truly don’t care about any of these characters despite the actors’ perfectly acceptable performances.
Worse, they’re the most infuriating sort of horror movie characters – the kind who have clearly never watched a horror movie themselves. We are told these people are well educated, yet they make bizarre leaps of logic, they see more than a few things that would make a normal person’s skin crawl, yet they stick around. They open doors, investigate noises, and isolate themselves when it’s the most convenient moment to get them killed.
We want to hear it.
This sort of thing can be fun, of course, but The Hallow’s tone suggests that we’re to take it seriously (it puts a baby and a dog in mortal peril, so you know it means business) and so our expectations are automatically – and reasonably – set higher than accepting that the deductive reasoning skills of this supposedly brilliant scientist are on par only with a horny teenager at Camp Crystal Lake.
Additionally, we never get a sense of this world the characters have moved into. Colm would suggest that there’s a bizarre troupe of villagers that are in on the secret of these creatures, but that’s never dealt with. The movie clings to the hope that you’ll be creeped out by the creatures themselves rather than what they represent, which is its most tragic mistake. It settles for face-value horror when the nature of what these creatures– and the myth they’re based on – are ripe for something so much deeper and scarring.
The scares it does go for are little more than repurposed material from its clear – and better – influences. You’ll find shades of Evil Dead, The Shining, Paranormal Activity, The Thing, and even Gremlins all over this movie, yet The Hallow is unable to filter its influences to create something unique or exciting. Instead, it just regurgitates and leaves us with that lingering desire to pop in one of those flicks once we’re done with this one.
To cap things off, The Hallow suffers from terrible editing and camera work that tries to mask its lack of story and suspense with jarring cuts and shaky visuals. Withholding the scariest details of the movie is a tried-and-true horror trope, but rather than accomplish this through calculated blocking or clever camera work, Hardy instead opts to just confuse the viewer and obfuscate the action without purpose.
We want to hear it.
The Hallow does have a few positives going for it: the start of the movie is a slow burn that accomplishes a sense of mystery and will keep you engaged for at least the first act; before everything devolves into typical horror fare. It’s also got a few cool effects here and there. One that comes to mind in particular is a moment in the middle of the film in which Clare is trying to prevent a creature from breaking through to the attic ceiling, and we are introduced to an angular, slimy hand inches from her face. It’s absolutely the best sequence in the film, but unfortunately it’s sandwiched between an overwhelmingly generic – and rather boring – monster movie.
The Hallow brings nothing new to the table and will leave you with a desire to watch the far superior movies that influenced it. Despite a neat effect here and there, it’s got little to offer horror fans; cardboard characters, typical scares, terrible editing, and the lack of atmosphere make this one dead after the first act.
The Hallow opens in theaters Nov. 6th and on VOD on Nov. 5.
