It’s been a bang-up year for horror films. Evil Dead, The Conjuring, Mama … like them or loathe them, they’ve managed to get audiences into the seats for some scary thrills. Coming up this October, just in time for Halloween, is Vincenzo Natali’s Haunter, starring Abigail Breslin. The trailer for the film just hit today and honestly, it doesn’t look half bad.
Abigail Breslin stars as a teenage girl trying to save her family from a seriously screwed-up haunted house in this thriller. There’s more to the story, given details that hit when Haunter was originally announced, but the trailer does not seem to want to reveal the whole plot in one go.
From what’s shown here, the film looks like your standard haunted house fare, which can be just fine. There are ghosts and slamming doors, an evil that will not die, murders and old crinkled newspapers telling horrible stories of death and destruction. So this is really about how the film is executed. The images we have so far are nicely scary, but it feels a bit like something we’ve seen before. Haunted house narratives are a dime a dozen right now – they have to do something interesting with the genre to get me into the theatre. People were split on Natali’s last thriller Splice, and there’s a good chance that this one will cause a rift too.
Still, it is nice to see Abigail Breslin growing up and taking on different kinds of roles than we might expect from the star of Little Miss Sunshine. She’s likely to grow from an excellent young actress to an even better older one. Haunter looks like it can either way – totally generic, or marvelously unexpected. Only time will tell.
You can check out the trailer for Haunter below. Does this look like something you’d pay to see?
Haunter comes to theatres October 18, 2013.
