Holy shit, this movie came out ten years ago? I can’t really remember why I was excited to see this movie or why it was getting publicity, maybe it was just because Tom Cruise produced it and his then-wife was in it. Also maybe because it was some guy from Spain directing an actress from Australia who was pretending to be British? Or maybe just the fact that The Sixth Sense was so popular just two years earlier that people had more faith in haunted house movies. I saw this in New York with my brother and I think my mind was blown over the fact that the movie started after 10PM, which wasn’t really something that happened in Massachusetts. Life in the big city, huh?!

The beginning stages of when Nicole Kidman cut her face off, then attached it back to her face, and every month would tighten it more and more.

Nicole Kidman plays the mother of two children in 1940’s England in a giant mansion. Her husband is away in the war, but luckily the beginning of the film shows three individuals being hired to take care of the house. The small catch is that these kids have a rare disease that doesn’t allow them to be exposed to sunlight. It’s a giant empty house, filled with groans and creaks, but it’s hard to tell what’s normal and what’s supernatural. The children tell tales of seeing other people in the house, but their mom just thinks it’s her children playing tricks on her. It isn’t until she experiences things firsthand, such as doors forcefully opening or closing, music from the piano, running footsteps, and even her daughter appearing as an old woman, she starts to believe them. When the frustrations get to be too much, Kidman tries to travel to a neighboring house, only to be met by a dense, impenetrable fog, and also her husband, back from the war. The strange activities seem to stop while the husband comes back, but things still seem off. The husband disappears, and then shit starts “popping off”, as the kids would say. With the discovery of grave markers on the property and questioning why the caretakers are at the house, we learn that the caretakers are ghosts! No! As the kids and their mom take refuge in the house, the activity seems to culminate in seeing multiple apparitions who are conducting a séance. We then learn that it is in fact Nicole Kidman and her family that are ghosts, and the activity that they thought to be “ghosts” were people trying to contact their spirits! The film ends with the family refusing to acknowledge they are ghosts and vowing to stick together and stay in their house….FOREVER!!!!!

KILL IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE!

I really only remember there being two or three good scares in this movie, with one towards the end of the movie being pants-shittingly scary. After watching this movie again, there are definitely five or six segments that could creep you out, but there’s an emphasis on “could”. Unfortunately, with all of my haunted house movie viewings, they all seem to lose their creepiness the more you see them. Knowing when all of these surprises and scares are coming makes them seem cheesy, but I really have no one to blame for that except myself. The isolation of the family in their home adds to the creepy ambiance of the whole movie, and the twist at the end definitely surprised me the first time I saw it. Because the story isn’t really too original or unique, the twist is what makes this movie stand out from most other contemporary haunted house movies. You can also believe that Nicole Kidman could be driven insane with the amount of care she is paying to her children’s disease because she is a raging bitch throughout most of the movie. In fact, you kind of wish that her kids were the ones to kill her so that she’d shut the fuck up. Did I mention that the fog got thicker because she was attempting to leave the home she was haunting? Well that was why, but since I fell asleep while writing this review, I’m not even sure I’m making sense right now. If you’ve never seen this movie before and like haunted house movies, I recommend checking this out, but if you’ve seen it before, do yourself a favor and hold off on repeat viewings as much as possible so that it doesn’t lose anything with repetition.

Wolfman Moon Scale