I just watched the preview for SiREN, the feature film based off of the short film “amateur Night” from the horror anthology V/H/S. It looks promising, but three things give me pause. First, every time I see “Chiller Films” I immediately feel disappointed because they are generally worse than SyFy Channel originals. At least SyFy Channel movies can be so bad that they’re good (see also Ghost Shark, Frankenfish & Sharknado). Chiller Films are just bad.

The second thing is that as I looked it up on IMDb, there was no rating. This could be a good thing if it is unrated to avoid an NC-17, but most likely it is unrated to avoid a PG-13. This movie’s subject matter should be sexually charged and that’s hard to do with a PG-13 rating. Why would Chiller make an R-rated movie that they would have to edit to hell in order to show it on their channel?  I’ll never know why they don’t adopt a policy like the El Rey Network has where they show movies uncut after a certain time of night.

The third thing is that most horror movies that spinoff from other properties fail. My evidence?

Oculus

Some people did enjoy Oculus, but I thought it was lackluster due to the bad CGI, change of characters and the pacing. It wasn’t horrible, but it could have been so much better. You can check out the original short film on YouTube for yourself to see what could have been. I saw no reason for them to change the characters so drastically and add all manner of unneccessary bullsh!t.

Annabelle

Annabelle was one of the creepiest elements in The Conjuring, so it makes sense for there to be a movie made about her. The fact that the only two scary scenes in the whole Annabelle movie, one of which involved a close up of a woman sewing, and the other involving elevators doors not closing properly, should tell you something about how well it actually went. There really was a haunted/possessed Annabelle doll. Of course she looked nothing like the doll in the movie.

Annabelle could have been a truly scary movie if they used her actual story. Listen to the real story of Annabelle the doll.

Two nursing students living together in an apartment, one receives a doll for her birthday, and strange and scary things occur. They call a medium and a priest and discover the truth about the doll. Wouldn’t that have made a good movie?

Lights Out

Another missed opportunity. The original short was so creepy, I’m not even going to rewatch it as I add it to this post. The movie had some great creepy imagery, but they didn’t know what to do with it. They should have made it a slow burn type movie. Introducing the characters, working on character development and showing their relationships and then having all the scary lights out stuff happen in the second half of the movie. The movie starts off with another version of the short and then just steadily goes nowhere from there. Check out the original short if you dare.

The Crooked Man

The character of the Crooked Man was featured in The Conjuring 2. Many viewers thought that he was a CGI character, but he was really played by Javier Botot. Javier Botet also played Mama, Niña Medeiros in REC, and all three ghosts in Crimson Peak. He’s 6’6″ and weighs just over 140 lbs due to a rare condition, but his proportions and ability to movie his body in amazing ways allows him to do stuff like this:

Did they hire Javier Botet to reprise his role as the Crooked Man? Hell no, they made some garbage @$$ made for TV film that even Michael Jai White couldn’t save.

The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 where ripe for spin-offs. Look forward to “The Nun” in 2017. I’m sure there is a horror spin-off that was good but I really can’t think of one.