Atrocious

Ok, this movie honestly scared the absolute shit out of me.  Seriously.  I was sitting there shaking when it ended, and now I'm sitting here, hearing strange noises around me in the house, and thinking of never sleeping ever ever again.  Sounds like a plan.  This is amazing to me, not only because I've seen a LOT of movies so it's hard for a movie to get to me like this, but also because I almost passed this movie by.  I'd heard nothing about it, and I don't understand why everyone isn't talking about this movie.  It's great!  People need to see this!  THIS right here is how you do a "found footage" type movie and do it right, dammit.

The description of this movie makes it sound like one thing, but for the first 45 minutes or so, the movie looks and sounds like it's going to be something entirely different, and that had me off-base because I wasn't sure what was going on.  Basically, the movie is footage taken on a family vacation, where a mother, father, and three children are spending a week at the mother's childhood home in the country.  The two older teenage kids are bored with the very idea, so they take along video cameras and try to entertain themselves by making a documentary about a local legend, a little girl ghost who supposedly roams the surrounding woods.  By the time things start to get ugly, when the family dog disappears, I already liked these kids and was dreading what was going to happen next, since the movie's description pretty much gives away what happens to them (to an extent, and I'm not going to spoil it here because that brief description leads you off track anyway...you'll just have to hunt down the movie and watch it for yourself, and with any luck, you'll be as terrified as I am right now).

The movie actually gives a halfway decent reason for the kids to be taking the cameras around and filming everything, with the documentary angle, and even near the end, when they're running around in the woods, they need the cameras because of the night vision function which keeps them from being totally blind in the dark, so it even makes sense in that instance.  I thought I knew what was going on in the movie, and then I wasn't so sure, and then I changed suspects again, and it wound up that I was right the second time, though I didn't know the whole story because the whole story isn't complete until the very end of the movie (and I don't want to think about it, because I'm getting scared again).  Just do yourself a favor and give this movie a shot.  It's everything I love about scary movies when they're done right.