Eruption

Rating: Null/10 (8 October 2013)

We have here a film made from the files of the same paranormal investigators behind the Amityville hoax. The film begins with a 16mm film they have shot around a previous haunted case which they are showing to an audience of eager believers, ourselves. We're shown other footage of possession, but nothing so far that couldn't have been doctored.
Clever, introducing us to a tentative world of uncertain narration. But a horror film must unfold from a ground of haunted truth so we miss that slippery edge.
No this is a pretty ordinary haunted house movie with bouncing balls, noises from the cellar and stopped clocks. These work for me when we have a concentration to the present moment, not for any of the animated gizmos, but for the camera that penetrates a thick palpable space, that tries to part a viscous darkness behind the door in which nothing yet moves but is at the brink of doing so.
I'm talking about that specific moment where our vision is ready to erupt, has not yet but we're already embodying it, hoax and truth blending in the tension.
There is some of that here but it's too haphazard for my taste. That is because we shift from haunted spatiality itself to exorcism, so we have all sorts of stuff tossed together: poltergeist, visions, demonic spirits, the gnarly exorcism which is always the centerpiece.
I think Insidious did a better job in the apparitions, but then it had a much sillier finale as we literally parted space to enter a ghost dimension.