October Horror Challenge 2022 #55: "The Dark and the Wicked"

These posters were all so cool I couldn't decide which one was my favorite, so I had to use all three in this review. They really make this movie seem like something out of the 70s horror surge. Retro! I know nothing about this movie except that it was recommended to me by a few of my Twitter friends and it looks really dark and bleak from everything I have seen of the movie. I just finished watching a movie that came highly recommended and it was amazing, so let's hope this one is good too.

In this movie, two siblings are plagued by waking nightmares and eventually they begin to suspect that something sinister is taking over their family at the isolated farmhouse where their mother lives. Their father is slowly dying, and they have gathered to mourn him in this small rural town in which he has lived all his life. Soon, however, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary mourning ritual as the darkness slowly takes over everything they love.

This movie is very dark. Like physically dark, and it's hard to see everything through the shadows, which adds to the creepiness of the atmosphere, but also makes it hard sometimes to tell what's going on. The visions that the brother and sister see are unsettling, to say the least, and it's hard to tell what's real and what's not, since some pretty terrible things happen on screen and they aren't visions. That keeps you on your toes watching the movie to see what will happen next and whether it will be real or not.

You know how bad things happen in horror movies and you always tell at the characters and tell them to leave the house or wherever they are? Well the evil in this movie is a creeping kind of terror that infects everything and it follows you no matter where you go, so even if you try to leave, it won't do you any good, the evil will follow you and make you see terrible things and do terrible things. There are a lot of jump scares in this movie too, so I was constantly jumping out of my skin. The lead actors, Marin Ireland and Michael Abbot Jr., who play the brother and sister, do a great job with their roles. They practically had me seeing ghosts, that's how good this movie is at getting under your skin. The ending is a bit abrupt and left me with a lot of questions, but overall that's a small quibble and this movie really is worth seeing, so give it a shot.