I had friends round for my annual Halloween horror screening. I showed them The Pact, which is the best horror film I've seen this year. I only watched this for the first time a few weeks ago and it's one of those films that are great to re-watch after you know what's going on, because I picked up on a lot of things that I didn't first time round.
The film doesn't re-invent the wheel, it is a fairly traditional ghost story (with touches of MR James' Mezzotint and J-horror in its use of "haunted technology"), but it is the best directed horror film I've seen this year. It's very well shot, establishing a real sense of place and it has fantastic sound design. The Pact avoids cheap jump scares to build a slow burning atmosphere of genuine dread. While neither weird nor surreal, the way it generates scares reminded me more of David Lynch, than what you usually get in this type of film. Especially in the way a character gets swallowed up by the darkness behind a door and a scene in a crack den, set to a deafening rock drone, which is reminiscent of a scene from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
After the rubbish period haunted house films I've seen recently (The Woman in Black, The Awakening), which rely on all the cliches of the genre (dolls upon creepy dolls, ghostly children in white make up failing to look scary) I loved how this is set in an impoverished, modern blue collar town in the US. The house itself looks just slightly 'off', with a 'wrong' layout and subtly oppressive wallpaper, instead of being decorated like a Blackpool ghost train.
The way the mystery slowly unfolds is cleverly handled. The lead actress, playing a character who is tough on the outside but also quite traumatised and vulnerable, was excellent. In some ways the film is reminiscent of the Kevin Bacon starring Stir of Echoes from the 90s, but this does a better job with similar material.
The film is only let down by the 'blah' title and an awful poster/DVD cover, which looks like the dated looking (and much copied) CGI spook from The Frighteners, a visual that doesn't appear anywhere in the film.
