Review of The Haunting in Connecticut (2009) by Chads. — 27 Mar 2009

Priests err. The priest in Peter Hyams' "End of Days" corrects the biggest clergical error of them all: the sign of the devil was misread("666" is actually "999" upside-down).

When the priest in "The Haunting in Connecticut" realizes his own error, he calls the family and leaves a message on their answering machine. It's only natural that the urgent transmission goes unheard.

The message itself has a self-relexive quality WHICH deconstructs the horror sub-genre that is the haunted house flick. Reverend Propescu's words are plain-old common sense, but the characters that inhabit these fatalistic diegeses are stuck in a circumstantial paradox.

If these non-people behaved in a rational manner, the narrative would be over before the first reel. In this case, we'd miss out on the supernatural hurl. It's bad enough that Matt(Kyle Gallner) insists on sleeping in the same room where the ghosts without eyelids regularly scare the bejesus out of him, but his sister Wendy(Amanda Crew) takes the customary lobotomized thrill-seeking nonchalance of haunted house victimization to the next level.

Unfazed by the systematic decomposition of all the house's perishables, Wendy takes a shower, where the unflappable girl seemingly starts a fight with the shower curtain. And still Wendy won't leave the goddamn house.

Once the ghosts can't be allocated solely to the mental sphere; a mere psychosomatic reaction towards Matt's cancer-fighting drugs, the Campbells need to make like the Lutzs and flee. The family's painfully slow-reaction time to the obvious dangers of the house, makes "The Haunting in Connecticut" increasingly convoluted as the facts about their home stack up like a hundred dead textual bodies.