Slender Man (2018)

"Once you see him, you can't unsee him."

This is certainly a contender for one of the worst films I've ever blogged. It's shockingly poor.

Slender Man is one of those computer game characters that the kids find utterly terrifying in spite of the character being but a decade or so old and whom I, at 42, am far too old to know anything about. The concept and appearance of the character seems quite terrifying, however, and you'd think it would make a good basis for a horror film, although perhaps not best released so soon after the well-known murder by two American schoolgirls of their classmate supposedly inspired by the character.

This is, to put it far too mildly, not that film. It's not just that the film is boring and talky, that we never get to know about the characters, or that the plot is simplistic and drawn out. No; the direction is so poor, even if you forgive the overly dark lighting in which you can't bloody see anything, that it fails to clearly tell the story and it's far from clear what's going on. Even if this were not the case, though, the film is shockingly dull, Mrs Llamastrangler fell asleep. Even the CGI sequences where Slender Man actually bloody appears are not worth waiting for. Avoid.

Oculus (2013)

"It was the mirror..."

This could have been a very good horror film. The central idea is sound, indeed very good, if a little derivative, and the performances (though Karen Gillen's accent slips) are generally good. This isn't, however, much of a start for Gillan's post-Doctor Who film career.

The concept- a mysterious mirror of a MacGuffin manipulates reality around it to cause murder, violence and gore and is resistant to scientific inquiry- is strong, and making the protagonists two siblings trying to make sense of their parents' deaths ten years previously increases the drama. The use of two parallel narratives, the present and the past, works well. The ending is particularly clever and horrific, with Tim being arrested for a murder he didn't commit in both time zones, and I love the philosophical implication that reality itself is subjective.

However, the realisation of this is hampered by the direction. Oh, it looks professional in its way, but it's over-glossy and suffers from that modern curse of MTV-derived directorial styles that simply don't work on a horror film. One is left to wonder just what a previous generation would have made of this script.