Horror-ween Kick-Off

Ms. Spenser has declared an early start to the Halloween scary movies season. So we watched a bunch of recent (ish) streamers.

Demonic (2015) takes place in two time frames. Frank Grillo is a cop heading to his girlfriend's place when he gets a call. There was a disturbance in an old mansion, and he finds several dead kids, and one live but traumatized one. He calls his girlfriend (Maria Bello), a psychologist, to talk to the kid while he searches the scene. 

Then there's the "how they got there" time frame. A bunch of college kids want to investigate a house where a mass murder occurred. They include Dustin Milligan (the survivor), his girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend, and the usual cameraman, gadget guy, etc. Turns out Milligan's mother was the lone survivor of the murder, and there's a demon involved.

Malevolent (2018) also has a bunch of kids investigating haunted houses, but in this case, they are charlatans. Working in Scotland, they pretend to investigate, make some spooky noises, tell the "ghosts" to go in peace and collect a fee. Florence Pugh wants to quit this scheme, because she's getting too many real ghost vibes. But her brother. Ben Lloyd-Hughes has to keep going because he owes a lot of money. So they take a job investigating a house where several children were killed - ostensibly by the now dead son of the woman who hired them. They died with their mouths sewn shut. Hope this doesn't happen to any of the ghost busters... 

Temple (2017) takes place in Japan. A young woman wants to research and photgraph Japanese country temples. She convinces her boyfriend to come along, along with her longtime platonic male friend. He has been a little depressed lately, and speaks a little Japanese. They find an old book with some info about an old temple, but the shopkeeper won't sell it to them. They buy it from a little boy who just kind of appears.

They go to the temple (against everyone's advice, and of course, bad things happen - including platonic boyfriend stepping through the floorboards and breaking his leg. So they are stuck for the night - until they freak out and leave Platonic on his own. Bad decision.

It's odd that these movies shared so many elements. Of course, there's the young-people-doing-research/making-a-documentary angle. That's a pretty common setup, I guess. But two of these have a real boyfriend/ex- or non-boyfriend dynamic, and Malevolent has a brother/wannabe boyfriend thing that is somewhat similar. And both Malevolent and Temple have someone fall through a floor and break a leg, so the group can't run away. Maybe everyone is working from the same template somewhere.