When the Campbell family moves to Connecticut, they soon learn that their charming Victorian home has a disturbing history: not only was the house a transformed funeral parlor where inconceivable acts occurred, but the owner’s clairvoyant son Jonah served as a demonic messenger, providing a gateway for spiritual entities to crossover. (source: IMDB)

The movie is really well made, the writing is powerful and the acting is excellent. So why only 3 stars? All the ingredients are there to make me love it, yet I just manage to like it.

Maybe haunted mansion stories didn’t manage to scare me anymore? But it’s not the case, since The Enfield Poltergeist (The Conjuring 2) is one of my favourite horror movies. However, by comparing these two movies that I finally found out what’s wrong with The Haunting in Connecticut: it doesn’t manage to build a feeling of terror, while The Conjuring 2 does it perfectly.

When an horror movie is supposed to be creepy, it has to create a deep sense of threat, the malevolent entity has to inspire a sense of terror. The Haunting in Connecticut, while dark doesn’t do any of that. I guess that the story of the sick kid and the unnecessary drunk father overshadows the occult part of the movie.

Anyway, it’s not a bad horror movie but, with such a potential, it’s sad that it doesn’t manage to hit its mark.

By the way, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who are known for involvement in The Enfield Poltergeist case, were also investigators for this case.

A widow begins to uncover her recently deceased husband’s disturbing secrets. – iMDB

I’m writing this post not to forget that we’ve watched this movie. Weird thing, we did, and I already forgot about its’ existence. If it weren’t for Sardokens’ infallible memory, this one would have gone straight to oblivion. Makes me wonder what happened that night though.

After watching the trailer, I now remember it was an entertaining watch. There was this eerie vibe throughout the entire movie, but I wouldn’t have called it scary. As a reference, I haven’t jumped once, and coming from me that means something.

I would definitely not call this a horror fest, it’s more of a haunting mystery thriller. The story was pretty solid and original, maybe not the best movie, but worth the watch none the less.

This is a timelapse of us building the LEGO Haunted House (10273). 

We wanted the house to be ready for Halloween but we didn’t think that it would be that big, so we’ve spent the entire 30th of October assembling it. We’ve watched the complete first season of Sulphur Springs on Disney+ (great show), Frankenweenie and Final Destination 3 during the build. 

Just as in the previous timelapse (Building the Falcon), I made the music and I still didn’t have the time to edit the track, I just bounced the loop with Logic Pro. 

The video ends on a picture of the completed house but it doesn’t looks as great as it does in real. Also, it kinda sucks that the video stops so abruptly, I’ll find a way to make it smoother in our next timelapse, which will probably be the new LEGO Christmas House (Santas’s Visit – 10293). I’ve almost spent more time creating the vignette with Affinity photo than making the video on Imovie.

As a side note, I’d like to give a big thumbs up to Affinity Photo which replaces nicely Photoshop. We didn’t renew our Creative Cloud subscription because we want to stay as far from Adobe and it’s subscription system as we can. I don’t really do any in depth photo editing, I mostly use the software to correct the levels and add a stroke around the text. At that level, I don’t have the feeling to have lost anything by leaving Photoshop.

Sardoken

Last week, I went to the street fair in Liège with Inge. One of our tradition is to visit the haunted house. It’s safe, it’s in plain sight, packed with people. There are kids (actually, it’s mostly kids and us), which makes it feel even safer… The attraction in itself is not really creepy, it’s just a lot of decoration and not much light. There’s one thing though… the people who hide in the dark, wearing masks, ready to yell at us. We know that they are there, yet it always scares us. As always, the biggest creep is the human.

Now, imagine that the haunted house is located in the middle of nowhere, that there’s no one else and that you have to sign a waver and surrender your phone to a creepy clown who doesn’t even talk. Would you still go?

In Haunt, just like at the street fair, the creepiest part of the haunted house isn’t the decoration, but the people inside. Too bad we didn’t watch the movie before going to Liège, it would have added to the tension.

Following the same reasoning, I should have watched Final Destination before going in “The Turbine”. I know, I’m a daredevil 😉

Soforah

This is the movie that I expected to see when Rob Zombies’ 31 came out. Unfortunately, 31 was so bad that Chris and I stopped watching it in the middle. Fun fact, though, was that the song in the closing credits of Haunt was a cover of Mr. Zombies’ Dragula.

There is so much to love about this movie, the setting, the acting, the costumes and masks, the haunted house theme, the fact that it keeps you sitting on the edge of your seat,… all perfect for Halloween.

Even though I love to visit haunted houses myself, I would never enter one so remote where a disturbingly creepy clown makes you sign a contract, and asks you to leave your phone in a lockbox. Never going to happen!

Also, kudos to Eli Roth, this dude sure knows his stuff. I’ve always been a great fan of his projects. I wonder what he’s going to work on next. In the mean time, grab the popcorn and saddle up, it’s going to be one hell of a ride!