The Ghoulish Plot: gather round kiddos and let me tell you a tale of a state so comfortable and rich and white, that the most common terrifying issues you may face while in that state are that your tee time is pushed back due to rain, or that the Republican you quietly supported gave you slightly less of an upper-crust tax cut than you were expecting. Looks like the Beamer is gonna have to last another season, mumzy!

This is Connecticut, home mostly to people who want to be close to NYC but would prefer to not have to say they live in Jersey. We join Sara in 1987 as she is driving her son to and from chemo treatments on long, difficult drives from their current home. They decide to simplify their problems by renting a place closer to the hospital and find a location that looks great, can fit their whole family, and whoopsie-doodles! Just happens to be the former site of a funeral home run by an insane man who enjoyed doing satanic experiments and rituals on corpses to bind their souls to the house. But on the plus side, the water pressure in the house is pretty solid.

The family moves in, including Sara’s husband who begins commuting back and forth regularly and we discover is a recovering alcoholic, which in movie terms means we automatically start the countdown until he falls off the wagon. As a fellow “friend of Bill,” this is among the most annoying tropes in all scriptwriting (and this movie features plenty of straight-from-“Save The Cat”-trope screenwriting) and just once it would be nice to see a character be introduced as a recovering drunk, and then at the end of the movie do what many of us would do: say, “man, I wish I could have a drink after that! Welp, time to celebrate with a Diet Coke!” and fade to black.

Matt, the son, starts seeing visions of the spirits trapped in the house as well as a young boy who initially appears to have been collaborating with the undertaker…until we realize he may have been trying to free the spirits from his clutches.

This flick was released a few years before “The Conjuring” but features some of the same jumpy-scary tricks, combined with some more outright nasty visual gore and torture aspects a la the “Saw” franchise, which was still running strong at this point. It’s not necessarily a good mixture of either, and is a fairly straightforward paint-by-numbers fictional retelling of a story based in fact that ends with corpses coming out of the walls and a giant fire and a knowing ghost nod that even the writers of Scooby Doo would call “unearned.”

The Scariest Part of the Movie: the house in the story is apparently still standing and being rented to families and never actually burnt down. So if you wanted, you could go live in the former funeral home of Satan!

Spookiness Factor: some jumps and grossout stuff, including bodies carved with symbols. But just like The Conjuring flicks, if you’re familiar at all with the formula you’ll see it all coming.

Rating: 3 out of 10 Swedish Fish