Horror Film Review #5

The Apparition

 Film Review five of six

My first introduction to this movie was a poster with star Ashley Greene of the Twilight Saga . She was covered by a series of hands ready to pull her in, the hands were reminiscent of Asian horror films like the Grudge. The description of the poster sets the overall premise, once you believe and stop resisting , the entity kills you. Ok this is sort the premise, its centers around the Charles Experiment (reality spoiler alert: this experiment does not exist on record). Where four young adults look at a painting of a dead man and concentrate, the experiment is re-tried again in present day, but through technological science four new young adults do the experiment and amplify the concentration to 400 times the mental concentration. The results open a supernatural doorway, and the female member of the group gets sucked into the wall; the entity follows the survivors and leaves traces of mold and decay in their home.

One survivor member floods his house with negative energy to protect him from the evil entity, and calls on the survivors to come to his house. Now I’m going to stop there with the film overview, cause I’m over

simplifying it, and then again I’m not, the Charles experiment was conducted in 1973, in accordance to the movie. Ok now fast forwarding to the ending; logic and an understanding of how the central characters get killed off is not explained or seen on camera, they are just shown in the aftermath. Ashley Greene’s character who enters a Costco, appears to be all alone, as if she on a dead part of the planet. I say this, due to hue color of the film. If the writer and director came out and said after the experiment the 4 adults transported themselves into purgatory like a quasi film version of ABC’s Lost, the television series then I think people would have a better appreciation of this film. The movie never made back the production cost on its ticket sales, and it opened up in 12th place on its opening day weekend. Generally all critics disapproved of the movie and people who I spoke to who seen the movie had nothing good to say about it. Watching the film its clear to me the writer was thinking along the lines of

Noetic Science (which was established in 1973), and maybe if they explored the science a little more, they could have made the film a little more comprehensive. Instead, you get the feeling the director was running out of time or money and decided to skip explaining and just have people disappear in the most illogical manner possible (in hopes that unanswerable will be scary) so the movie can wrap in the final moments with closure.