So normally, great horror movies and the Midwest don’t go hand and hand. There isn’t really much scary about hardworking people. So directors Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing took a big step making this little horror movie The Gallows. Now let me start off by saying that I am a horror purest and kind of a snob when it comes to my horror movies. There are elements that need to take place in the movie to make it, in my eyes, not only enjoyable but just in general watchable. This movie in my opinion was a horror fan’s movie, executed very well with a pretty young cast. Normally found-footage movies aren’t hard to make but they are hard to get right. The actors have a much harder job ahead of them looking genuinely scared, and trust me I have seen the whole spectrum of found-footage movies.
The Gallows starts with a tragedy that takes places 20 years before the story begins. During a performance of the play, The Gallows, a poor student is hanged on stage while a crowd of parents and other students watch in horror. Now, back to normal day, the school is giving the play another shot. The majority of the movie is in the point of view of the protagonist’s friend, who is a typical bully. He fills his role in the movie very well. The movie consistently hits the 4 major roles in most horror movies. You have the jock bully who gets the group in trouble, the jock’s slutty girlfriend whose major role is to be the match to an already combustible situation, the protag with a heart of gold who is just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the innocent bystander, also caught in the wrong place at the wrong time but with a different motive. So, without giving away too much of the movie, the school is haunted by the student who was hanged that night in the gallows prop two decades ago. The students come up with a plan to stop the play from happening, but all they do is walk into the nightmare that is about to take place. If you are looking for a monster or gory horror movie, this isn’t the movie for you. It is a very straight forward movie with a good number of pop-scares. If that is what gets your blood pumping, this is the perfect movie for you. But like a lot of other horror fans, pop-scares don’t have much of a lasting effect on me. Other than that, I still thought this was a very good movie and worth seeing. It is definitely a slow burn for a lot of the movie but in a way that make the scares so much more intense. Now the movie did have a pretty amazing twist to it that you have to see to believe. Maybe taken a little too far, but none-the-less, a good bait and switch. So on a scale of watch it to forget it, I would say to definitely give it a chance but don’t expect it to be a masterpiece, just a good movie for fans of the genre.
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