Fear Theatre - Horror Reviews

Guillermo Del Toro, the amazingly skilled writer of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone”, brings us another master-class in eerie terror as a caring mother is served up the ultimate nightmare when her son goes missing in their home during an opening party for her new orphanage. The police are baffled, and the mother herself starts to unravel when she’s haunted by a strange child in a sack-mask, a bogus social worker plays on her mind, and a terrifying secret from the past is dragged kicking and screaming into the present.

Scared    me    fucking    shitless.

I thought “Pan’s Labyrinth” was great, and “The Devil’s Backbone” was one of the best ‘ghost story’ chillers I had ever seen, but this motherfucker takes the biscuit in the ‘hair-raising’ stakes with two particular parts standing out as a couple of the most disturbing scenes ever played out on my television - yes, even worse than the Plumper’s video I briefly watched last week.

The part of the movie were the psychics hold a séance in the huge house damn near made me shit myself.  The scene where the mother is playing a kind of twisted ‘musical statues’ game with a gaggle of dead kids made me wince with mental anguish every time the neighbors’ kid laughed too loud next door.

This is one of those movies where you forget there are subtitles within about twenty minutes, so please don’t let that put you off.  You really would be missing a treat; there’s all the horror classics on display here for your horror perusal: dead kids, ghosts, a huge fucking mental looking house, an absolutely shit and incompetent police force (and for once it’s not Strathclyde police, Aaron can you make those words a link to how fucking incompetent our coppers are? Cheers), a crazy and quite frankly mental looking old woman who gets half her face ripped off by a passing ambulance (result), past horrors, mental breakdowns, creepy caves, and a pretty woman for the scaring.

Trust me, it’s all good.

Not dead kids though; I’m not saying dead kids are good, I’m just saying they are in this movie.

Shit. That sounds bad, too.

Just watch the fucking movie.

OFFICIAL REVIEW

It might come as no surprise that the producer of the Spanish supernatural thriller THE ORPHANAGE is none other than Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro (PAN’S LABYRINTH, THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE), for his influence is felt greatly throughout the picture. Made by an entire crew of newcomers–director Juan Antonio Bayona, screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez, director of photography Oscar Faura, composer Fernando Velazquez–THE ORPHANAGE is an extremely accomplished work. The story concerns Laura (Belen Rueda), who has returned with her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and adopted child Simon (Roger Princep) to the large manor where she was raised in an orphanage as a child. Laura is determined to fix up the abandoned house and open it as a refuge for ill children. But from the moment she returns, the past begins to haunt her. It isn’t long before she begins to see the children who she used to play with as a seven-year-old. And when Simon goes missing one afternoon, she’s convinced that they have taken him hostage. What follows is a murky descent into Laura’s mind, where she doesn’t know what is real and what is a figment of her tortured imagination.

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This post is tagged big creepy house, dead kids, foreign, ghosts, subtitled