The Silent House

The Silent House

Ahh yes. Now that hand-held cameras are all the rage, it was seemingly about time that another gimmicky horror film was to rear it's head up. This time the selling point is "real time". Now admittedly, that is a cool gimmick. It takes a lot of planning and a lot of effort to do any amount of filming done in one continuous take, but I highly doubt that's what happens here. Not even Hitchcock's Rope was one continuous take, however it was filmed to hide the cuts as well as possible. From what I've read about this film, it uses a similar tactic of conveniently placed "black outs" where it's rather obvious cuts were made. That's all fine and dandy, as I can't imagine filming a movie in one shot, but advertising the film as "REAL TIME" and "one continuous shot!" when it isn't is cheap marketing and doesn't instill confidence in the viewer that the film is actually, you know, any good. It's one thing to draw attention to your movie by playing with people's heads ala Blair Witch, but it's another to flat out lie about how a movie is made. I suspect the "inspired by true events" is equally as false, but that always goes without saying.

Trailer analysis:





To be fair, aside from the oddly out of place music, it looks like a pretty good movie. The actress seems like she does a decent enough job as long as she's consistent within the rest of the film outside the trailer. The atmosphere also looks to be a major focus which is very good. If you're going to even attempt to look as though you filmed a horror movie in one take, then atmosphere needs to be your priority since clearly gore and jump out scares can't be as readily available. IMDB lists it as a 5.5 at the moment, but given people tend to vote either 10 or 1 on that site, and only 417 votes are up, that's a little ambiguous to judge by at the moment. Overall it looks enjoyable and I'll watch it when I can find it.