K-SCORE: 68
Director: Vincenzo Natali
Writer: Brian King
Starring: Abigail Breslin
Spoiler Level: Moderate
Haunter is clever, albeit somewhat boring. It’s rated PG-13, and striving for such a rating I think actually may have encouraged the director to have more creative creepiness than cheap scares and gratuitous gore. (It’s not often I praise a PG-13 film for being so.)
The premise is that Breslin’s character, Lisa, and her family are already dead, haunting a house, and only slowly coming to realize it. Unraveling the mystery of their deaths lets her and other victims of a malevolent spirit peacefully move on to whatever comes after death. It’s an interesting idea, though far too often the film randomly switches from the modern occupants of the house to Breslin’s stuck-in-time 1980s family and then back. They should have picked one time and been more creative with the connections between the ghost world and real world. Also the very end is exceptionally cheesy, basically culminating in a great big door to heaven opening up for Lisa.