October Horror Challenge 2018 #27: "Malevolent (2018)"

Netflix is really killing it with their original content these days. They've had some very successful original series, like "Orange is the New Black," and they've had some popular original movies in recent months too, so I'm happy to see that they've tried their hand at a horror movie. I owe a lot of my challenge success to being able to watch a bunch of horror movies streaming on Netflix each year, so it was cool to see them make their own horror movie this October.

This movie is about a team of paranormal investigators who travel to places that are supposed to be haunted, document the paranormal activity, and then send the spirits onto their final resting place. It's a good way to make a living, only problem is the team is full of crap and they're only scamming people. It seems to work pretty well for them, until of course they encounter some actual ghosts. Crap, I hate it when that happens.

This isn't the first movie I've seen to pull the whole "fake ghost hunters encounter real ghosts." It even happened back in the bible, when a witch who supposedly could speak with the dead freaked herself out when she talked with the real ghost of the departed Samuel in the book of 1 Samuel chapter 28. In this movie, the fake ghost hunters aren't all that likeable, and I don't exactly feel sorry for them when real evil spirits crash their fake ghost catching get rich quick scheme.

One of the ghost hunters, it turns out, had a mother who could communicate with ghosts. She never believed this, of course, and she thought her mother was crazy, until she sees real ghosts herself and wants to know what she should do about it. Things start unraveling pretty quickly, but because these people are characters in a horror movie, they do the stupidest thing they could possibly do at every turn, so they take another ghost hunting job even after the girl worries that she's seeing real ghosts.

Great idea, and of course all hell breaks loose. By this point I had even begun to sympathize with some of the characters, so I did care what happened to them, and the acting is actually pretty good, so that helps too. The production quality is good and there are some really tense sequences, so overall I was impressed with this movie. It's much better than a lot of non-Netflix-made movies I've seen, so I was impressed.