The trouble with too many horror movies is that they muster all that technology and timing and rictus-grin-in-the-medicine-chest-mirror creepiness to basically say “Boo!” Watching “The Unholy,” I jumped a few times, but beyond the scare factor the film’s resurgent demon becomes a true character who reveals her nature in a kind of evil dance of the seven veils. There’s a poetic restraint to the effects. The tropes may appear standard - the flash cuts of evil, the whispers on the soundtrack, the cloaked specter who keeps showing up to jolt us, like Slender Man or Candyman or a recurring ghost out of “Insidious 9: Please Don’t Go in the Attic Again.” But Spiliotopoulos doesn’t assault the audience with supernatural imagery as though he were tossing grisly confetti. This is the first feature directed by Evan Spiliotopoulos, who has worked as a screenwriter on films like “Hercules” and “The Huntsman: Winter’s War,” and while he hits conventional beats of megaplex horror, he’s able to mold them with a streamlined coherence and directness. When the forces of Satan show up, you feel like they’re violating a daydream. It’s the depth of faith she conveys in the miracles she’s channeling that draws us into the movie. Her Alice is like Joan of Arc turned into a teenage televangelist who doesn’t just swoon for God she takes command. She seems possessed, all right - by the emotions surging around inside her.
When she starts to heal people, and he watches a kid with muscular dystrophy walk away from his wheelchair, he realizes he’s got a scoop.Ĭricket Brown, who at times evokes the young Natalie Portman, has a melodious voice and features that quiver with life even when she’s in repose.
But he hangs around long enough to see Alice, standing in front of a spindly dead tree, go into a beatific trance-out. Fenn has come to Banfield to cover a bogus sensational story about the mutilation of cows. The central character, apart from Alice, is a defrocked journalist-turned-tabloid reporter named Gerry Fenn, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan with a sleazy middle-aged panache that makes him a winningly jaded stand-in for all of us skeptics in the audience. Good and evil face off in every horror movie, but this one is truly a holy war.
The unholy cast movie#
We know that the movie can’t be all sweetness and light, but what matters is how solidly it believes in those things. “The Unholy” is adapted from a 1983 James Herbert novel, and as written and directed by Evan Spiliotopoulos it could almost be a faith-based horror film. Absorbing Mary’s spirit, Alice can suddenly hear and speak, and she can heal the sick, which attracts crowds of people to her rural town of Banfield, Mass. It stars an unheralded actress named Cricket Brown - mark my words, she’s going to go on to major things - who plays a deaf-mute young woman named Alice, who has visions of what she thinks is the Virgin Mary.
But “The Unholy” has a religious plot that actually works for it. Its spooks and demons unfurl within a pop version of Christianity, which makes it sound no more exotic than last week’s “Exorcist” knockoff or last year’s helping of the “Conjuring” franchise. “ The Unholy” is a good tight scary commercial theological horror film.
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