Sunday, October 15, 2017

October Horror Challenge 2017 #48: "A Haunting in Saginaw, Michigan"



Ok, I live in Michigan, so hearing that there was a documentary movie made about a haunting that occurred in Michigan, I immediately wanted to see it. I can't believe I've never heard about this movie before now. If I had a movie made about my haunted house, I'd be shouting it from the rooftops.

So this takes the form of one of those "true life" haunting shows like Ghost Hunters. A mother and her two daughters move into their dream home, which is right next to a cemetery (bad idea, lady). Soon they experience strange sightings, hear creepy noises, and eventually the entity makes physical contact, hurting one of the daughters to the point where she has a bruise on her arm. The mother calls two ghost hunters who come to her house and film their efforts to contact the spirit and find out what it wants.

As much as I always yell at the screen during haunted house movies and tell people to just move out, I realize that it's not always that simple. I don't have a lot of money either, and I wouldn't be able to just pack up and move that easily. So I get why the family stayed, and I was invested in their story, but the movie is mostly boring, featuring shots of a guy sitting at a table trying to talk to a ghost, with the same footage shown over and over again, with muffled sounds in the background which the filmmakers insist we're voices saying different phrases, but it didn't sound like much to me.

Scarier things than the ones in this movie have happened in my apartment, and I didn't have to pay to watch those. And I'm sure seeing things fall over when there's no one in the room is creepy to the people who have to live in the house, but it just bores me having to watch it. The interviews with the main ghost hunters guy are pretty flat and boring too, because he has a flat monotone voice that isn't very animated, so I had trouble not falling asleep during those scenes. Overall, I wanted to like this movie, but it would work better as a story told around a campfire than it does as a movie.

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