I've been reading Stephen King for about 30 years. Started reading him at what a lot of folks might say is too young... but my parents, fortunately, were not among them, and they had no problem with me reading Cujo and Pet Semetery at the age of 10 or so. The fact that my Grandma gave me these books to read probably helped.
Anyway, as the world knows, Stephen King's written a bazillion books. And when you write that many, some will be brilliant and some will be terrible. His latest, Doctor Sleep, isn't brilliant (although it certainly has a few moments of it at the start and at the end), but it's consistently good. It's less concerned with horror than it is with character, and since character is where King is the best, that's fine with me. It's also interesting that, while there is a large cast of villains in the book (a band of road-wandering child-killing vampires who drink psychic powers, not blood) who are pretty reprehensible (what with the child killing and all that)... you kinda end up feeling a little sorry for them. In fact, the villains of Doctor Sleep are strangely out of their league against our protagonists, which is an unusual way to tell a story about child-killing mind-drinking vampires.
OH! It's a sequel to The Shining also. One of the scariest books King's written, and one of the best, perhaps THE best book about a haunted house I've read—it's only competition would be Nazareth Hill or The Haunting of Hill House. As he mentions in is afterword, Stephen King was a very different person when he wrote The Shining, and it shows. And not in a bad way! But... I love The Shining, and it's hard to top it. King doesn't try to top it—Doctor Sleep tells a VERY different story that just happens to be about Danny Torrence, the same little boy, now all grown up, who once saw something very bad in the Overlook Hotel.
... needed only 7 or so pages to give me the chills. It never really equals the dread of those first few pages... but then again, it's not really trying to. The dread is a cool carry over from The Shining to ease you out of that book's world and into the world of Doctor Sleep.
... will confuse folks who only know the Kubrick version of The Shining. King's version is pretty different.
... makes me eager to see King do squeals to other novels. Pet Semetery, in particular.
OBSERVATION: Between 1914 and 1919 war and influenza have claimed more than a million lives in Britain alone.
CONCLUSION: This is a time for ghosts.
So claims the opening scene of The Awakening, in the form of plain white text on a grainy black background while low, ominous music builds. It's a powerful way to start a movie, and for the first 60 minutes or so, the movie keeps that power in a slow burn buildup of tension and creepiness. The plot centers on a woman named Florence Cathcart, a woman desperate to find proof of the afterlife and ghosts in order to take the edge off of some of her own personal losses, yet in investigation after investigation she reveals so-called hauntings to be misunderstandings or hoaxes. She's called upon to investigate a possible haunting at a boarding school that may just have resulted in a student's death, and so begins a classic plotline that would fit well in any era.
But by setting the movie in the direct shadow of World War I in 1921 Britain, the movie becomes something more—it seems infected with the hopelessness and despair that must have gripped the world after a decade of some of the most horrifying mass deaths modern civilization has ever endured. Indeed... if any time is a time for ghosts, it is after the planet's been seized by war and disease for nearly a decade.
Unfortunately, the movie can't keep its momentum going. I've come to really appreciate ghost movies these days that simply tell a spooky tale that unfolds gradually, allowing us to learn the mysterious and macabre background that caused the haunting as the film progresses... WITHOUT feeling the need to add in a third-act surprise that turns everything that's come before into something else entirely. I blame The Sixth Sense, of course, for the popularity of this type of movie. For a while, I was hoping that The Awakening would be something more like The Innkeepers or The Devil's Backbone, but no... it couldn't resist the twist ending.
Yeah. Old timey ghost photos. The easiest way to creep me out.
And no... Comparing it to the Sixth Sense doesn't reveal the surprise twist—it's actually a pretty creative twist, but it wasn't NEAR enough to live up to the film's opening thesis. Still... pretty creepy ride getting there, and once the surprise was out in the open, I was able to continue enjoying the movie... just not at the same level as I had when it started.
... loses sight of its intriguing story in its attempt to provide a twist ending.
... is never not spooky to look at, even when there's nothing particularly supernatural going on.
... actually has a second twist to the storyline once the primary twist is revealed; this second one is a lot more spooky and disturbing, and I kind of wish they'd just abandoned the first twist and kept the second one.
... gets a lot of mileage out of its time period and setting. It's rare to see a horror movie take place in a non-contemporary setting, it seems.
So, yeah. I'm a sucker for found footage films. I saw the first "Grave Encounters" a while back, and was pleasantly surprised by the movie. It was about the cast and crew of a ghost hunting show that supposedly went up to an old asylum in some remote area that was supposedly haunted, and they set up all their film equipment to film an episode of their show there, and as it worked out... the place really was haunted. By more than ghosts, although ghosts are certainly involved. But so might be some mad scientist stuff, some demon summoning stuff, and just maybe some extra-dimensional horrors. You see, as the movie progressed, the asylum they were exploring and filming in took on a life of its own and started rearranging its layout, changing where doors and hallways go and basically keeping them trapped in a perpetual night within a haunted asylum that had no end and no beginning.
Pretty nifty movie!
And so when the sequel was announced, I was interested. And lo and behold, it went live on Netflix streaming this week!
The sequel, like the original, is a found footage movie, but it gets even more meta than that. The central conceit of "Grave Encounters 2" is that the first movie exists, and it starts out with lots of movie reviews of the first movie–some folks love it, some hate it, some think it's real, some think it's fake, and so on. The movie settles on one young film student who's convinced it's fake, but then he starts receiving strange emails from someone called "Death Awaits." Intrigued, he starts to look into things, and soon discovers that the cast of the original movie are nowhere to be found and the producer reveals that, yes indeed, the footage WAS real.
So... shocked that this Hollywood producer basically cashed in on the deaths of a bunch of movie makers and turned their unintentional ghost snuff film into a movie, the film student and his friends set out to find the real site of the asylum and find out just what happened.
Yeah... there's some pretty good quality nightmare fuel in here, I'll give the movie that.
The thing that's actually quite intersting about this movie is that it takes about a third of the running time for the movie to actually GET to the haunted asylum... up until then it's a slow burn of character building and some pretty interesting research about the fates of the cast of the first movie. The movie stays interesting once it inexorably moves to the asylum... but alas, things start to get a little too over the top... although there is a pretty unexpected and delightful third-act development I didn't see coming. Alas, the unusual and compelling setup for the movie ends up not delivering as satisfying a conclusion as it could have... still a fun ride, though!
... is at its best when it's being subtle, and when the ghosts themselves are actually on screen, but can't quite keep the momentum going once it goes beyond ghosts into that over-the-top third act.
... has one of the most interesting premisies for a sequel I've seen.
... also has one of the more frightening visual themes for its ghosts I've seen... the themes worked better in the first movie when we weren't quite ready for the disfigured black-mouthed specters, but when they show up here, they're still quite unsettling. Even if, by this time, we really DO want to know a bit more about WHY the ghosts look the way they do.
... isn't as good as the first one, but is pretty close. If the movie had managed to keep its excellent writing and script going all the way to the end, it would have been a great little movie! But good is sometimes good enough.
... makes me want to see a "Grave Encounters 3," which is absolutely a compliment, but if they DO do a third one, I want to know more about the genesis of what's going on behind things. The sequel to [REC] did this really quite well, as did the first two sequels to Paranormal Activity. Not so much Paranormal Activity 4.
... also makes me want to see someone try a big-budget film adaptation of "House of Leaves."
