Season: 1
Episode: 7
Original Airdate: January 29, 2011
Director: Neill Fearnley
If you've ever to a graveyard regardless of the time of day, you'd probably get two types of feelings from a place like this. The first feeling might be an eerie one, as if someone were following you around and wanted to cause harm. The other might be a sad feeling like your heart has become a lead weight as it sinks at the thought that hundreds or thousands of perished souls are buried there. So with that said, let's take a gander at this episode's story!
Lauren (Emma Grabinsky) and Mark (Jason Spevack) learn that when cemeteries are disturbed, not everything stays buried. A ghost replaces Mark when he falls into a grave. Lauren sets off to get her brother back. In a twist ending, Lauren is replaced by a ghost named Alice Clairborne and the real Lauren becomes dead.
The first thing that I like about this episode is the atmosphere. Yeah I know I said that episodes of The Haunting Hour have a lot of atmosphere but this episode takes that one step further. There's a lot of quiet moments with no dialogue and moments where music just plays. I think there's this emphasis on atmosphere in this episode because when you get down to it, the plot is rather basic so it's not like they had a lot to go off of in the first place. Which leads me to my next point.
Another thing that I like about this episode is that this episode pulls off simple scares rather well. I think this has to do with the fact that scares like this don't really require that much set up to get right. It's basically scares that you would hear in a typical campfire story. They're not very complex but they're still effective within the context of the story.
There is one issue I had with this episode and that was with Lauren's brother. Don't get me wrong, he's not a terrible actor but he seems way too old for the role. The character he plays is written as if he was 7 or 8 years old while the actor himself looks to be around 12 or 13. While it might not seem like that big of an issue to some, I honestly found this kind of distracting.
On the whole, Ghostly Stare is a basic but enjoyable ghost story that really takes advantage of its setting and has fun with its premise. If your into ghost stories like this, you'll enjoy this episode OK.
Overall Grade: A-
Last year (about this time, in fact) I had a profound experience in a cemetery. It was actually the one my father is buried in, but that's not the profound part. I went to the old section where they had graves for people who had been dead for about a hundred years, and it really made me think about things. I totally agree that there's a certain atmosphere in cemeteries. I'm glad that this episode was quietly yet effectively scary instead of trying to forced scares on people. I'm glad there are still people doing atmospheric stories.
ReplyDelete-Raidra