What do you do when your movie feels played out before you even shoot your first scene? That was the struggle faced by the filmmakers of this movie. there were already a whopping SIX other films in this series by the time they started work on this movie, the seventh in the series. I would be overwhelmed with the history of the six other movies that came before, but these filmmakers decided to start fresh and create a story that had nothing to do with the other flicks in the series (but it's tied to the other films in that it's a found footage horror film about demonic activity caught on camera). I remember liking it the last time I watched it, so I'm intrigued to check it out again and see if I still feel that way.
In this movie, a young college aged woman does an online DNA test to find out about her ancestry, and discovers that she has relatives who live out in isolated Amish country. She was abandoned as a baby, so she's desperate to find out more about her family, so she travels with a film crew ready to make a movie about her experiences retracing her heritage. The people she eventually meets are very isolated and they hwve some strange religious beliefs. That's not all they're hiding, though, and pretty soon the small film crew find themselves fighting for their lives against a supernatural force that they don't understand. Will they be able to stop the evil before it's too late?
The Amish are fascinating. they live their simple existence away from technology and prying eyes, and their ways are often not fully understood, so they face a lot of prejudice from those outside their community. That makes them fodder for many writers who want to juxtapose their lives with our modern world and exploit the contrast between the two for dramatic effect. I don't think I've seen a horror movie about the Amish yet, and I don't know why more filmmakers don't use the quiet lives of the Amish as a backdrop for their horror stories. The trick is effective, though, because we feel how isolated they are so far away from modern technology. The Amish communityas a whole seems like they are the villain for most of the movie.
The isolated setting adds to the tension of the movie, because once their vehicle breaks down, they're stranded in the middle of nowhere without much modern technology to help them out. They also don't know what they're up against and what is REALLY going on in the small community where they find themselves trapped. The more they learn about the girl's mother and her history, they begin to realize they're in grave danger, and that's when the tension is really built. As our protagonists uncover more and more secrets, it becomes more and more clear that the evil they are fighting is bigger than they could have imagined. This movie is creepy, and it uses darkness and shadow to great effect, always keeping us guessing about what will come next. Since they dropped the 3D aspect of the last film in the series, there are no big grabby demon arms reaching out of the screen and trying to scare us while they look more like Inspector Gadget's go go gadget arms. I like the pared-back scares here because they are a return to the simplicity of the original film. I really cared about the characters too, which always helps in this kind of movie. Not to give too much away, but when they uncover the biggest secret that the community is hiding, it chilled me to the bone. overall, I enjoyed this film on my second viewing and I recommend that you check it out.
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