Dark Horror Tales

PLOT SUMMARY: Every year, Rachel is tormented by the guilt of not saving her sister when they were younger. This year, Hannah's ghost comes to haunt her sister.  Sometimes when you come across a random movie and begin watching it with low expectations, you can surprise yourself by getting completely immersed in it. You may start watching a horror movie with the lights on, thinking about giving it a few minutes before you start looking for something else to watch. The opening scene comes along, it grips you and suddenly, you're reaching for the light switch to create an eerie atmosphere. More often than not, you also make some popcorn. Happy Birthday Hannah will make you keep your lights on. Yes, the story is decent, the horror sequences are passable, but the execution and the acting will make you cringe. It is told through first-person, that is, the protagonist records herself continuously and for some reason, the house she shares with her boyfriend has cameras installed in ev

 Best seller author Dean Koontz’s DEVOTED has found itself on the top of the list this week.  The premise is as follows (taken from Amazon.com ):  Woody Bookman hasn’t spoken a word in his eleven years of life. Not when his father died in a freak accident. Not when his mother, Megan, tells him she loves him. For Megan, keeping her boy safe and happy is what matters. But Woody believes a monstrous evil was behind his father’s death and now threatens him and his mother. And he’s not alone in his thoughts. An ally unknown to him is listening. A uniquely gifted dog with a heart as golden as his breed, Kipp is devoted beyond reason to people. When he hears the boy who communicates like he does, without speaking, Kipp knows he needs to find him before it’s too late. Woody’s fearful suspicions are taking shape. A man driven by a malicious evil has set a depraved plan into motion. And he’s coming after Woody and his mother. The reasons are primal. His powers are growing. And he’

  PLOT SUMMARY: A woman is travelling with her son on a plane when it gets hijacked. Unknown to the terrorists, the woman has an ailment that may just take them all down. Think about travelling and you will automatically start stressing about the preparations that need to be made rather than the destination you are headed to. The questions that pop into your mind are usually about whether the flight timings will be convenient, will try flight even be on time? Is the luggage the right weight allowed on board?

  PLOT SUMMARY: Detective Zeke finds himself handling a case where the murders resemble those committed by Jigsaw. In a test to survive, how many of us would readily give up a piece of ourselves just so we can live? The Saw franchise is gory, focuses on torture a lot and basically puts this question into your mind: How far would you go to save your life? Now you know most of the sequences in Saw is about people ready to cut off their arms and legs, rip out their tongues or fingers just so they can survive. But the thing is,  what kind of living would it be? First of all, there would be the trauma to live with. Picking life over a body part is sure to haunt someone's mind forever. Then there's the missing body part that will cause some obstacles for the future. For example, in Spiral , a police detective is made to choose between his fingers or his life. He is ready to get his fingers ripped off in order to save himself. Supposing he had survived, would he really have been

  Here's a thought after watching I know what you did last summer: it has become incredibly important to invest in therapy programs to help teens through. It appears that teens lose all sense of morality pretending to be adults who know what they are doing. They are not. In fact, every school should introduce a mandatory program where every student has to speak to a therapist every month or so, depending on the needs and case. Because if this is the way teens behave nowadays it is no wonder there is a rise in crime. I Know What You Did Last Summer was supposed to be about an accident. The characters were supposed to be good people. Okay, maybe some of them had a mean streak, but still essentially good. They make one little mistake and are made to pay for it.

PLOT SUMMARY: Aya, a pizza delivery girl, finds herself in a trap set by a serial killer.  There will be times when you come across someone and immediately judge them by the way they dress or behave. After all, first impressions are last impressions, and chances are, your instincts are right. Then again, you can be charged with being judgmental if you don't actually give them a chance. Learn their stories, find out their likes and dislikes. Without that knowledge, you never know if they should belong to your life or not. Even the quiet ones can sometimes show the most intellect and courage.

PLOT SUMMARY: When Liberty meets her mother's new boyfriend, she learns that there is something odd about the charming man who cares a little too much about the environment.  I would imagine it must be hard to meet someone who is going to be your stepparent or accept him or her in your family. There have been plenty of movies about that with not all of them ending on an unhappy note. Then there's this movie: What Lies Below, and the one thing I found hard to watch and believe was the actress who played the daughter, Liberty and was supposed to be sixteen years old. Sure she played an awkward nerd well, but clearly, she needed better make-up to look like a sixteen-year-old. Why even make her character that young anyway? It didn't add to the story. They could have just shown her coming from college on a break. But no, Liberty is sixteen and just back from camp and being picked up by her mother.

  We've all heard of sirens In some legend or another, luring men to their doom. There are tales of beautiful women with melodic voices sitting atop a rock by the shores and beckoning men to the point that many have crashed their ships after getting into a trance-like state. Maybe these seamen really did sirens or perhaps what they saw was a mirage in the vastness of the sea after spending so many days on board. After so many tales based around oceans and seas, why shouldn't there be an urban legend based on the world's longest river? In the 1950s a tale was passed around of an evil mermaid or a siren called El Naddaha. El Naddaha was described as a strikingly, tall, beautiful woman with long dark hair, a svelte figure and fair skin. She appeared to men in a semi-transparent dress and is said to be almost translucent herself making everyone believe that she was perhaps a Djinn. Just like the other sirens, El Naddaha called to men who were walking about the sho

  PLOT SUMMARY: A group of friends hold a seance via a Zoom meeting. Things go wrong quickly when they make a connection.  With the lockdown enforced in most countries due to the dreaded coronavirus, a lot of people have been depressed due to the lack of social interaction. Then Zoom came along and decided to solve at least this problem caused by the virus. People can now arrange meetings online and see each other. But the free plan only allows around 40 minutes of a meeting. Considering Host is based entirely on a group of friends who will interact via Zoom, we know the movie isn’t going to drag and get to the horror bits quickly.

  Plot Summary: After Dylan who is a mute, performs a ritual to summon a Djinn to grant him a wish, he must survive the night if he wants his wish to come true.  There's something about the way characters with disabilities are portrayed in movies that bothers me. It is the way they interact with other characters who are supposed to be "normal" and who pointedly give advice about accepting who you are and that it is alright if they have something lacking, it is what defines them, etc. On the surface, this seems like very sympathetic advice but when these dialogues are not inserted well into the story, more often than not it comes off as if the character is making light of the other character who is different from them. In the Djinn, there's a scene when the father tells his son, Dylan, that there is nothing wrong with the way he is. Now Dylan is a mute boy who also has asthma issues. He can hear and must have heard his father tell him several times that it is alrig

  Remember the phrase "sleep tight don't let the bedbugs bite"? Well, here comes a horror short film about how careful you should be about these metaphorical bedbugs. In this short movie, you can see a young man who is confined to a wheelchair about to go to sleep. He wants independence, his father finds it hard to let go. The pair rib each other about their personal tastes when the son decides to go to bed, and the father is about to switch off the lights when the son tells him to leave the lights on. The father blames the horror movies and then leaves. The son is still paranoid as he checks about the whole room in the dark before going off to bed. And that's when the "bedbug" shows up. In this case, it is a horrific monster woman who straddles the son and gets ready for the kill. Luckily the father shows up only to misunderstand the whole situation. Was it really too dark that the father couldn't see the woman's face or has he decided to be sup

  Once called the King of the Road, the Jeepney can still be found on roads in the Philippines. It's usually brightly coloured, has flashy decor and is an important mode of public transportation. Some Jeepneys can carry up to 15 to 25 passengers. The Jeepney is considered to be a Filipino National Symbol. The Jeepney is so popular that it has an urban legend based on it too. Now it so happens that one night, a girl got into a Jeepney all alone. She told the driver her destination and sat back to enjoy the ride. But it wasn't long before she noticed the driver glancing at her through the rearview mirror. She grew nervous as suspicions of the driver's intentions grew. She told him to stop and that she wanted to get down but yeh driver paid her no heed. Now she was absolutely certain that something untoward would happen. She considered simply jumping out of the vehicle when the driver stopped, having arrived at her destination. She got down quickly, relief

  PLOT SUMMARY: During a zombie apocalypse, a group of mercenaries head into a quarantine zone to pull off a heist. You would think that losing some brain functions and becoming sick would make one sluggish and just sit in one corner with drool running down the side of their mouth. But no, when one turns into a zombie and is infected with a virus, for some reason, they turn into murderous freaks who keep walking on and on looking for their next feed. And when this dystopian nightmare occurs, quarantine zones are formed, areas are cordoned off, people make sure they go nowhere near the infected. In Army of the Dead, there are a lot of people who actually want to go inside the red zone; some to steal money, others to save a woman they befriended at camp for those who are quarantined.