Director: Alex Turner
Writer: Simon Barrett
Stars: Henry Thomas, Patrick Fugit, Nicki Aycox
Run Time: 1 Hour, 31 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/2BMauQf
Synopsis
It’s Civil War times in Fairhope, Alabama. Some soldiers go into a bank to make a big deposit. A different group of men come to the bank, and there’s a fight outside. The second group kills everyone inside and carry out the heavy bags of gold and make their escape.
After a long ride, they finally come upon an old farmhouse with a creepy too-humanlike scarecrow outside. A weird creature comes out of the cornfield and attacks. They shoot it easily enough, but they can’t identify what it is. As the group explores, we see that the house is huge, old, and apparently deserted.
Time passes, and not much happens. The paranoia starts setting in, and everyone starts looking sideways at each other as they wait out a storm.
Each man starts experiencing something weird. The first hears a child calling for help from an old well. When he lowers a rope down, the thing inside pulls him down.
The girl sees a creepy boy hiding under her bed who runs away before we get a good look at it. The wounded man sees the boy and his father in the bedroom. The father says he put the children where they’ll never be found, since they were demons.
The night drags on, and the paranoia gets worse. Through visions, we find out where the scarecrow came from, we find out what the father did, and we find out where the children are. And then we finally find out about the strange creature that they ran into early in the cornfield.
Commentary
It’s a good ensemble cast, and a nice setting and idea. On the other hand, the horror elements are pretty poorly used. There is almost nothing but jump scares and “flashes” of scary children that you’ll literally miss if you blink a the wrong time. There’s a lot of suspense, but it’s very slow paced and pretty dull overall.