The Haunted

For anyone who has ever stayed up late watching a supernatural reenactment show like A HAUNTING or UNSOLVED MYSTERIES and found themselves with an unshakable sense of the creeps, This 1991 television movie may be just for you. Unavailable on VHS or DVD, it has never the less acquired a following thanks to repeated showings on the SCIFI network over the years. SALLY KIRKLAND plays Pennsylvania house wife Janet Smurl, a woman whose family is overtaken by malevolent spirits. With little by the way of special effects or money-shots, this straightforward slice of alleged reality gets under the skin in a way most of its big-budgeted haunted house brethren could only dream of. Taking place over several years and involving not only the family but their neighbors, church, and the media at large, it presents the ghostly manifestations as something exhaustingly relentless in a way that the old "one lone night in a mansion of strangers" never could. KIRKLAND, with her downplayed narration and histrionic free performance, warrants actual sympathy and it's almost impossible for the viewer not to imagine what they would do under similar circumstances. Whether you believe in things that go bump in the night or wonder if the Smurls were bumped in the head, this tale is real "keep the lights on" material.

INDELIBLE SCENE(S)

• Dad is raped by face changing succubus
• Voices in the pillow
• AMITYVILLE HORROR rejects Ed and Loraine Warren investigate and discover creepy looking pilgrim ghosts
• The strange amorphous shadow that travels through the duplex wall and upsets poor granny
• The crazy shape crashes the camping trip while the vacant house goes bananas disrupting the neighborhood with shrieks and groans
• Hey! It's that amulet toting "Bitch" ASHLEY BANK from MONSTER SQUAD! Someone's cruising for a honorary traumatot award!