If you've seen the Conjuring, you've seen this.

Rating: 2/10 (1 July 2019)

3 years before The Conjuring they had already made it.
This semblable example of a Dark Supernatural Thriller trying to pass as a horror is just as heavy handed, just as obnoxiously cliched, just as simpering with its bland, normative characters learning the hard way that "ghouls just wanna have fun".
With its less than original black and brownish filter making it feel even more factory produced than it already is, the occasional atmospheric moment makes me want to try and put my guard down and enjoy it as an oldschool horror. But every time I want to meet this picture half way it does something to make me just go "f#*@ you, movie". Whether it's an in-your-face effect, using a sudden burst of strings to kill a frightening moment (seriously, that's the horror equivalent of a laugh track) or any of the many cheap scares.
Like Conjuring they bring in the paranormal experts. That's why it's a paranormal thriller not a horror. They're more focused on world building than actual chills.
It feels more like a Simpsons halloween special so often that I wonder if they should have just made it a horror comedy but it takes itself way too seriously to be taken seriously. By the end, the only pleasure I could get from it was to laugh at its own expense.
Even its ending (which has real potential) wasted its own potential by clumsy execution.
This decade has been the best decade ever for horror. But this is everything wrong with the horror of this decade. This didn't annoy me as much as The Conjuring but it was pretty dang close.