A Haunting in Connecticut (2009)

The Campbell's have tough challenge; with their oldest son, Matt (Gallner), riddled with cancer, they are forced to make a financially difficult move closer to the treatment of the hospital. Their situation brightens only slightly with the discovery of a home in a perfect location with a seemingly perfect low price. Unbeknownst to the Campbell family however, it is a house with a dark, dark history.

The situation in the new home doesn't waste much time to reveal itself. Matt, weakened by prescribed drugs and troubled with the real possibility of death, succumbs to visions of things lurking in the shadows and other tricks of blood and fright. The family soon makes gruesome discoveries in the revelation that the home was once a funeral home, and the place wasn't even necessarily cleaned out after that closure. While this might be creepy enough, the darkest things that remain to be discovered by the tortured family are downright hellish.

The tune of A Haunting in Connecticut is a familiar beat that most of us have danced to before; family moves into a nice home, nice home reveals itself to be not so nice, family does battle with the forces of evil, then things get resolved one way or the other and we all have pie. The enjoyable parts of a familiar film like this are in the execution of the scares and dark things lurking up behind us to give us a tap on the shoulder. While A Haunting in Connecticut is successful in some ways, it is in this most crucial arena, the critical scenes of spooks and scares, that it suffers the most.

The bulk of these scenes are executed with a stylized flare of rapid edits, fuzzy lenses, and other varieties of camera tricks that any graduate film student would be proud to show off in a video resume. The problem is that they are completely inorganic, distracting, and remove any of the effective context of the haunting. The film takes the MTV music video approach of attempting to scare the audience with a lot of showing off, a lot of glitz and sophisticated shine, and a complete forgetfulness of what scares us.

Film tricks are great; they also remind us that we're looking through a camera lens. The scares in A Haunting in Connecticut fail because they constantly remind us that we're watching a movie. The best scares never remind us we're watching a movie; instead, they creepy into our mind's eye, possess it with a subtle and cold grip, and gently convince us that what we are watching is real, and that it is terrifying. Take the viewer out of the film, and you take them away from what scares them. Unfortunately, A Haunting in Connecticut repeatedly reminds us we're watching a film because it just can't stop showing off.

That's not to say that A Haunting in Connecticut doesn't have some moments; it does. It carries some effective jump scares, and some of its third act reveals were wonderfully nightmarish. These scares were obviously well conceived and well written with a sound understanding of contextual horror; their execution aside for the moment. On a similarly positive note, the acting performances felt believable and strong, particularly in Kyle Gallner's well done representation of a young man dying of cancer yet trying to retain a semblance of a sense of humor.

This film has a supposedly true story behind it, and beyond mentioning this fact, I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself the truth of such matters. It was also made for television some years ago as part of the A Haunting series on the Discovery Channel. I will say that this adaptation of the tale is leaps and bounds better than the original in nearly all areas. The original was TV cheese made to scare the children of the Flanders' family; this theatrical release is significantly more sophisticated.

As a non-scary horror film, A Haunting in Connecticut isn't bad. The acting and general dynamics of the story are well done, and it does have a few decent imaginative moments of great visuals; most moments, however, are ultimately neutered by over-stylization and too much busy work. It is worth a Netflix or maybe a slow day's matinee. Have fun.