2005 – Horror Ghouls

Hide and Seek (2005)

Posted on April 11, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

David Callaway wakes up and finds the body of his wife Alison in the bathtub. Their 9-year old daughter, Emily, also comes in and witnesses her mother’s apparent suicide. As can be expected, this whacks a huge dent in the girl’s psyche. Who wouldn’t be a mess after witnessing a parent committing suicide? David is a psychologist so he should be well aware of some of the coping mechanisms, so when he decides to move to upstate New York and Emily starts interacting with an imaginary friend called Charlie, he doesn’t consider it much of a problem. Children always imagine things, and this imaginary friend could very well just be a way Emily deals with her grief. That is…until the actions of this “Charlie“ becomes quite sinister. One day David even discovers their dead cat in the bathtub, which Emily claims was killed by Charlie. Still, he refuses to get her help which should be quite apparent that she’s in need of right now. On top of that, something is up with David himself, where he keeps having nightmares about a New Year’s Eve party that took place before his wife’s death…

Hide and Seek is a psychological thriller from 2005, starring Robert De Niro as David and Dakota Fanning as Emily. It was directed by John Polson, and written by Ari Schlossberg. Originally, Albert Hughes was set to direct, but it’s said that he left “due to creative differences“. The movie grossed $127 million worldwide on a budget of $25 million.

As a psychological thriller, Hide and Seek works pretty fine. It’s mysterious, has a certain atmosphere, but never goes into actual scary territory. You keep wondering if Emily is just mentally broken, or if something else is going on. Whether it is something psychological, supernatural, or something else entirely, is kept a mystery for quite a long time without giving too much away early on, and the movie is also deliberately throwing a handful of red herrings at us. The movie is upheld by strong performances, and a young Dakota Fanning (who played the leading role in last year’s The Watchers by Ishana Night Shyamalan) plays her role as the disturbed child fairly well. There are some things about the character’s behaviour in the movie that, later on, feels quite illogical.. but that’s due to the script rather than the actual performances. It was also fun to see Famke Janssen in a minor role here.

The main problem with Hide and Seek is the nonsensical twist (yes, it’s one of those movies), where little actually makes sense, and it drags out a bit too much before wrapping things up entirely. Overall, though, it’s a fine and suspenseful thriller, it just happens to fall a bit apart due to a pretty muddled twist.

The movie was also given five different endings, and the one we watched was the US theatrical ending.

Director: John Polson
Writer: Ari Schlossberg
Country & year: USA, 2005
Actors: Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Famke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue, Amy Irving, Dylan Baker, Melissa Leo, Robert John Burke, Molly Grant Kallins
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382077/

The Booth (2005)

Posted on April 1, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

Shogo is the star of a popular call-in radio show, who is forced to broadcast from the infamous “Studio 6“ which is a creepy and abandoned booth. The last time someone used it was several years ago, when the DJ there committed suicide. Yay. Shogo is also a prime example of the douchebag breed, and of course he’s got some skeletons in the closet. His crew isn’t exactly treated fairly by him, either. When someone on the line starts whispering “liar“ to him, he starts fearing that someone knows about his troubled past. Or maybe…the studio is cursed and the same fate that fell on the previous DJ will also fall upon him? Shogo keeps getting more and paranoid.

The Booth is a J-Horror movie from 2005, written and directed by Yoshihiro Nakamura. The leading role in the movie is played by Ryûta Satô, and this was actually his first leading role. He’s most known for his role in the Netflix movie Fullmetal Alchemist from 2017.

There are many early 2000’s J-Horror films that are little known. Some for obvious reasons, while others never got the attention they deserved. The Booth falls a bit into the latter category, as it’s a very decent mystery horror film. It’s mostly a one-location movie, which focuses on the tension built from Shogo’s asshole-behaviour and creeping sense of unease as he fears that his bad attitude has started catching up on him. As the film opens with the reveal of the DJ having committed suicide in the notorious Studio 6, we already know that there might be some supernatural influences here. Or is there, really? The movie offers so many twists and turns underway, some which you’re very unlikely to see coming.

Limited location movies often depend a lot on the leading role character, and Ryûta Satô does a great job performing as the arrogant and despicable DJ Shogo. All throughout the movie, you get snippets from his past and several misdeeds, and there’s especially one that ends up revealing quite the unexpected turn of events. You don’t root for this guy at all, so you end up looking forward to see him get a bit of karma teeth on his ass. Whether or not it’s a curse, supernatural forces of some kind, or simply his barebones bad conscience that catches up with him…well, that’s something the movie keeps as a mystery until the very end.

The Booth is an obscure, creepy little J-Horror film, definitely worth a watch if you’re looking for a claustrophobic horror chamber film that will keep you guessing.

Writer and director: Yoshihiro Nakamura
Original title: Bûsu
Country & year: Japan, 2005
Actors: Maiko Asano, Makoto Ashikawa, Mansaku Ikeuchi, Seiko Iwaidô, Hijiri Kojima, Masaki Miura
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0760506/

Fragile (2005)

Posted on May 7, 2024June 12, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Mercy Falls is an old hospital that’s about to get closed down, but due to a horrible train accident the main hospital, St. James’s, can’t take in any more patients. Thus, Mercy Falls will need to stay partly open for a while more, keeping some of their patients there and the children located in the children’s ward. One of these children is Maggie, a little girl suffering from cystic fibrosis. She is terrified of “Charlotte”, someone she claims to see. One of the new nurses, Amy Nicholls, bonds with Maggie as they have something in common: they’re both orphans. Maggie confides in Amy, telling her about this Charlotte character which Amy later finds out is some kind of urban legend at the hospital, where several children have claimed to see her over the past two decades. When Amy starts looking even further into the mystery about Charlotte, she discovers that all the other children who claimed to have seen Charlotte are deceased, and she fears that Maggie might be next.

Fragile (aka Frágiles) is a supernatural horror film from 2005, directed by Jaume Balagueró (who is most known for the two first REC movies). He came up with the idea for this film after seeing an old photo of a little girl suffering from Osteogenesis Imperfecta, a horrible disease where bones are easily fractured, also known as “brittle bone disease”.

Fragile is going in a well trodden path, but the savoring points of the film is the atmosphere from the old, gloomy hospital where the Bearwood College in Berkshire, England, was used for the exterior shots. There’s certainly a fair amount of good old-fashioned gothic atmosphere, tinged with mystery. The story unfolds slowly, where you’re being introduced to the main character Amy Nicholls (Calista Flockhart), various nurses and the sick children in the hospital. Since the plot starts with knowing that the hospital is about to be completely abandoned, but having to postpone it for the children due to the full main hospital after the train accident, you get a feeling of the characters being in an even more isolated and threatening situation. And of course, there’s the abandoned floor where we know something terrible happened. It’s all a nice recipe for a solid, albeit not especially strong, ghost story. Its suspenseful, atmospheric, and quite decent.

The ghost here, though…well, she’s something that looks more like she came from a Hellraiser movie and wandered into the wrong set. While there are certainly a lot of horror movies where the ghosts appear a bit over-the-top malformed (like for example the Insidious franchise), she does feel a little bit misplaced here amongst the otherwise traditional gothic elements. Then again, this does make her first full appearance an unexpected surprise. The scenes when she is more obscured works a lot better though than the ones where we see her full on, but overall we don’t really get to see all that much of her.

There’s a scene where the children are watching an animated “Sleeping Beauty” film (nope, not the Disney one, as you might have guessed), and this animated film was actually created specifically for this movie. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be anywhere in its entirety, aside from in the clip from Fragile. This animated clip does have a certain significance to the movie’s sad but sugar-coated ending.

Overall, Fragile is a familiar-looking entry into the supernatural genre of vengeful spirits, mostly held up by its atmosphere and moody locations.

Director: Jaume Balagueró
Writers: Jaume Balagueró, Jordi Galceran
Country & year: Spain, UK, 2005
Actors: Calista Flockhart, Richard Roxburgh, Elena Anaya, Gemma Jones, Yasmin Murphy, Colin McFarlane, Michael Pennington, Daniel Ortiz, Susie Trayling, Michael Gatward, Scarlet Carey, Cameron Antrobus
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0422272/

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)

Posted on December 30, 2022August 1, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Erin Bruner is a lawyer filled with ambition, who takes on the case of a Catholic diocesan priest who is charged with negligent homicide following an attempted exorcism on a 19-year old girl, Emily Rose. The archdiocese wants the priest, Father Richard Moore, to just plead guilty so they can scuffle this under the carpet and do as much damage control as possible, but Moore won’t have it, and pleads not guilty. He is determined to tell Emily’s story. Bruner then starts experiencing strange things on her own, like waking up at 3 a.m. to the smell of something burning. Moore warns her that she might have become a target for demons, and through bits and pieces we get to know Emily’s story.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose was written and directed by Scott Derrickson and co-written by Paul Harris Boardman. Derrickson actually chose to use Boardman as his co-writer because, with himself being a believer and Boardman a skeptic, he thought this would balance the screenplay with enough realism from both perspectives. And I dare say this was probably a very good decision, as the movie does a solid job on walking the line between religion and science, constantly making you wonder if she really was possessed or just terribly mentally disturbed.

The movie is told with some back-and-forth between the trial and the lawyer-related stuff, and flashbacks from Emily’s life. What makes this movie different from the plethora of other demonic possession movies, is its blend between courtroom drama and the supernatural, carefully balancing between the two and offering enough for both believers and skeptics to hold on to. The movie is inspired by the true story of Anneliese Michel from Germany. There’s actually another film based on this story, called Requiem, which is more based on the, well…actual true events. The young German woman was born in 1952, and died in 1976 after she underwent 67 (!) exorcisms. She died of malnutrition, and her parents and the priest were convicted of negligent homicide. Just like the Conjuring movies, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is best viewed as pure fiction with a few slices of truth, otherwise it would just become completely convoluted with thoughts of what is obviously invented for the purpose of scares in the movie, and what’s inspired from the true events. The true story was indeed a religion vs science trial regarding the aftermath, but the backstory of Emily Rose (Anneliese Michel) is very loosely based on what really happened. I guess in that sense, it’s wise to not even have the character named after her to make the distinction even more obvious.

Jennifer Carpenter, who is playing the role of Emily Rose, does nothing but a stellar performance as the struggling/sick/possessed young girl, and does so with some pretty chilling possession scenes that are bereft of any pea soup vomiting or head twisting. In order to prepare for her role, Jennifer actually spent hours in a room full of mirrors while trying out different body positions and facial expressions to see what was scariest. Many of the scenes where Emily is experiencing the effects of her “possession”, it is still very much left in the open whether it’s really demons causing it, or a result of her mentally disturbed mind. Feel free to take your pick on which is the scariest alternative.

There’s a ton of chilling atmosphere and a lot of subtle creative details that add to the creepy vibe. The actors did a stellar job by providing convincing performances, and the courtroom drama manages to add both suspense and ties in with the rest in a way that makes it feel wholesome. With the movie being a bit old, some of the CGI (which there isn’t much of anyway) is perhaps a little outdated, but not at all bad and it’s being sparsely which doesn’t affect anything negatively. The Exorcism of Emily Rose stands out as a solid and chilling possession horror movie which has aged quite well, and provided a well founded start on Derrickson’s horror movie career (with him later giving us movies like Sinister, Deliver Us From Evil, and The Black Phone). And no matter whether you consider the story as one of demonic possession or mental illness, the result is equally creepy and frightening.

Director: Scott Derrickson
Writers: Paul Harris Boardman, Scott Derrickson
Country & year: USA, 2005
Actors: Jennifer Carpenter, Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Campbell Scott, Colm Feore, Joshua Close, Kenneth Welsh, Duncan Fraser, JR Bourne, Mary Beth Hurt, Henry Czerny, Shohreh Aghdashloo
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0404032/