Good not great ghost story

Rating: 6/10 (24 November 2013)

A decent spooker - it doesn't live up to many of the rave reviews it has received, but it's not bad at all. Most horror films these days are so by-the-numbers that the better ones like this often get graded higher on a curve. As with so many ghost stories I found Conjuring's windup better and way more frightening than the eventual climactic events - the atmosphere was so dread-filled that I (a died-in-the-wool horror veteran) was genuinely uneasy for the first half hour or so. As more was revealed it got less frightening - I still find that the less you see, the less you know, the more your imagination has to fill in the blanks - the scarier a movie tends to be. The performances were all top-notch, particularly Vera Farmiga as the medium; special mention should be made of the younger actresses, who were all very believable. Definitely the best horror film of 2013 that I've seen, but again, I'm grading it on a curve.