Seven Days to Live

I tend to get freaked out more by ghost stories lately than anything else, at least when they're properly done, because when I watch them my apartment turns against me and starts making weird noises, and things fall in my room and give me a heart attack, and it all adds to the general creepiness of the movie I'm watching. either I'm really unlucky or there are angry ghosts in my apartment who don't like the way they are portrayed in these movies, I'm not sure, but either way, these kinds of movies can really get under my skin when they're done well, and I think this one was done well.

This movie reminds me a lot of a novel I once read called "Julia," because in that book a woman accidentally killed her daughter after trying to save her life with an emergency tracheotomy when the girl was choking, and this movie has a very similar scene, but it's cool with me if this movie ripped that book off, because that book sucked and this movie is pretty well done. Here, a man and wife move into a house in the country after the death of their son. The man is a writer and he needs to write a new novel because money is running out and his publisher is breathing down his neck. the wife is still mourning the death of their son and having nightmares, which get worse when they move into the house where no one bothered to tell them that people have died before under mysterious circumstances.

The husband doesn't seem to feel much emotion. Except when he's blowing up and yelling at his wife or snidely mocking her for getting creeped out by the scary happenings around the house, he has a flat affect and just kind of floats around not doing much and never leaving the house (which can't be healthy since we know there's something evil there). The wife at least tries to get involved in the community, meeting the neighbors, adopting a stray dog, and going to the doctor to get help when she thinks she's having hallucinations of bad things in the house (they're not hallucinations though, and you should probably move if your house is this determined to kill you).

The movie isn't perfect. There are some hokey special effects that the movie could have done without, and it's hard to believe that no one researched the old house and found out its history before a popular author moved there, but otherwise, this movie is pretty compelling and worth a watch.