The Horror Show
Pay the Ghost (2015)
by Uli Edel
With the Halloween season being upon us, an aged Nicolas Cage stars in Uli Edel’s festive paranormal horror, Pay the Ghost, in which – in a nutshell - every cliché of the genre has been touched upon.
Cage portrays Mike Lawford, a devoted professor and unwittingly neglectful father, who - instead of celebrating his big promotion - is seen drowning in a whirlpool of agony and pain when his seven year old son goes missing at a Halloween carnival.
After a year of obsessing over his son’s sudden abduction, Mike and his estranged wife Kristen join forces with the hope to find their only son, who – evidently – was snatched by the malicious spirit of an Irish witch, who was burnt along with her three children during a hate attack by locals back in the 1700s. Her tormented and evil soul wandered through the centuries and every Halloween she haunts the streets of New York searching for children to satisfy her demonic desires.
Sporting a significant number of clichés, Pay the Ghost ticks all the boxes of unoriginality: the creepy cabin in the woods where events of black magic took place ages ago, the innocent child who draws dark ghosts before his paranormal abduction, the restless father overwhelmed by guilt, and the suffering mother.
It feels as if a rather generic story repeats itself in a boringly formulaic fashion, but its failure to entertain isn’t just attributed to the lack of originality. Most damagingly of all, the performances failed to convince and they were devoid of any soul. Nicolas Cage and Sarah Wayne Callies (The Walking Dead) are of great commercial appeal, but with limited emotional power they didn’t manage to create the much needed gripping atmosphere.
The lady-ghost herself was not a particular FX success either. It reminded me of the Tooth Fairy in Darkness Falls, and not in a good way.
Edel’s Pay the Ghost is just a stereotypical paranormal horror movie that yearns for a heartbeat and is certainly bereft of shocks and excitement – nothing but a few predictable jump scares.
Maria Kriva, HMS
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