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Nov 06, 2015 By Stephen Danay Web Exclusive

Adam, Claire and their newborn son have relocated from the bustle of London to the rural Irish countryside to allow Adam to pursue his work as a forest conservationist. Although they ignore the warnings of the superstitious locals regarding fairies, a series of frightening disturbances and accidents begins to convince them that they are being stalked by gruesome, nocturnal creatures, known as the hallow.

The feature debut of writer/director Corin Hardy, The Hallow wears many of its influences on it’s sleeve. It combines the city-folk-besieged-by-rural-horror of Straw Dogs with the dark fairytale appropriation of Pan’s Labyrinth and the grotesque practical monster effects of The Thing and Alien. While The Hallow is not in the same class as any of those films, it is certainly a cut above the rest when it comes to the deluge of small-scale horror films that have flooded Netflix and VOD over the last several years.

Although Hardy blows past a lot of thematic and narrative details–the film only has four or five speaking parts, little in the way of set-up and never does much with the eco-friendly cautionary tale elements it introduces in the first act–it ends up being a smart move, and done in clear service to his obvious fascination with the Hallows themselves. Achieved mostly via practical effects and actors in suits, the Hallows are marvelously hideous, as though the creatures from The Descent were made of rotted tree bark and wet fungus. The film leans on the expected jump scares in the first third, but once the monsters make themselves known, Hardy doesn’t skimp on showing off the great work done by his effects and make-up team. The black oozing fungus the creatures use to corrupt everything, from electronics to flesh, is a particular highlight, and makes for several unsettling moments of body horror.

As Adam and Claire, actors Joseph Mawle and Bojana Novakovic are convincingly terrified and determined as parents protecting their child, but the film leans heavily on that motivation in lieu of making them actual characters. Given that nearly every frame of the film features one or both of them, it becomes a bit of a problem. The characters aren’t stupid or annoying as protagonists of this type of film can often be, but they never feel like more than ciphers. That’s unlikely to bother horror aficionados, however, who will likely find that the superior creature work and the haunting backwoods atmosphere of The Hallow make it a worthwhile, if slight, entry in the genre.

www.ifcfilms.com/films/the-hallow

Author rating: 6.5/10