Disappointing- Not scary at all!

Rating: 2/10 (19 June 2015)

If i'm going to be perfectly honest, I found this film absolutely terrible. I'm not quite sure why everyone else seems to have absolutely loved it, even finding it scary enough to put in their top 5. Let me start by saying I'm a total horror movie newbie. The only horror films I've seen before this were the Woman in Black and the Cabin in the Woods. I scare very, very easily. And I did not scream a single time during this film.
The characters were bland and flat. The parents, Josh and Renai, had no chemistry. The best actors in the film were the children, who sadly, played very minor roles (despite the fact that they portrayed Dalton as the main character?). No offence to Patrick Wilson (this is the first film I've seen him in), but is he capable of forming a facial expression other than mildly worried? By watching this film, you'd never know. The dialogue was also extremely stilted, and felt completely unrealistic. What totally made me mad was that horror is supposed to be the genre the most capable of following the rule "show, not tell", and half the movie was a pseudo-monologue detailing every character's life story and persona struggles. Seriously. Did they even try? The budget for this film was supposed to be around $1,500,000, but the villains looked cartoon-like and exaggerated in a way that made me laugh more than it scared me. Honestly, completely disappointing.
The film was a bad mixture of Grey's Anatomy (in terms of dramatic), Beetlejuice, and Hocus Pocus – which, I love independently but should never ever be mixed together.
The trailer scared me more than the actual film. Which, congrats, I guess.