MovieChat Forums > Deliver Us from Evil (2014) Discussion > Suffers from many of the flaws of modern...

Suffers from many of the flaws of modern horror.


This movie suffered from overstyling, overproduction, overacting... and a technique which kills most horrors dead- underlighting.

End result is way, way too much on screen darkness- even domestic scenes at home were pointlessly full of impenetrable shadows. Meaning the visual palette quickly becomes exhausted and thus repetitive, and for large sections of the movie the screen was largely dark. This is a quick way to bore your audience.

Horror is much more effective with juxtaposition, variation; some light, some dark. For example look at the brightly lit scene in the The Shining, when Danny Torrance enters Room 237. That scene is truly horrible because we can see everything that going on... the slow advance of the bathtub corpse is much more horrible under bright electric light. A quality of nightmare is created.

The same applies to sound. This whole film was spattered with echoing childrens laughter, static, weird demonic gasping noises, whistling and droning. This is lazy shorthand for horror, simply applying 'scary' noises to a scene does not make it scare people. Overuse of such techniques in fact kills tension, as you begin to pre-telegraph your shocks to the audience, and diffuse the impact of key moments. Used sparingly and tightly in context, such sounds can be very effective- for example the death rattle sound of the ghost in the original Grudge movies. By halfway through Grudge 2, I saw people in the cinema covering their face in horror the moment they heard it.

In the end these mistakes are simply lazy and thus bad direction- such basic stylistic errors show a core misunderstanding of how horror works.

If you want to scare people- be subtle, build menace gradually, then hit the audience very hard when they don't expect it. And sometimes... leave the lights ON.

A waste of a serious budget, 5/10.

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Spot on. Really nice remark about the Shining

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[deleted]

I agree with your points on the movie...this is very bad in overall...and so many illogical gaps that doesnt make any sense at all...like when Bana gets attacked in Jimmys house by Jimmy himself...why didnt even Jimmys wife appear? did she just vanish after she let him into the house? just lame like most horror flicks, but about the noises and statics Sarchie hears all the time is taken from his real life...he says that he hear voices and statics and stuff like that, so its not in the movie to just make some lame scares.

~If the realistic details fails, the movie fails~

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