When Keira Woods' daughter mysteriously vanishes in the cellar of their new house in the country, she soon discovers there is an ancient and powerful entity controlling their home that she will have to face or risk losing her family's souls forever.
**Classic horror formula brought back to haunt our modern times**
I do feel this movie has a potential to one day become a classic of it's own. A good horror movie takes the things that plague the everyday lives of it's contemporary audience and exposes their dark side, but without spelling things out. Resulting in the audience feeling very uneasy, but not knowing exactly why. All classic horror movies pull that off and this one does an equally good job targeting a modern audience with modern issues.
Like with all horror movies that apply this formula (and all the good ones ALWAYS do) this movie therefore relies on building things up in the first act and having the audience relate to the characters and their relatable everyday issues and interpersonal conflicts. Which might seem dull (especially for today's audience with its notoriously short attention span) but it's an absolutely crucial and necessary build up for the 3rd act in which the *bleep* will finally hit the fan.
So while the everyday problems of an average modern family might seem boring to sit through and might seem like they have nothing to do with the scary monster that will figuratively and/or literally, but inevitably show up at the end, it in reality has EVERYTHING to do with it and actually any monster is merely the personification of the dark aspects of the issues that are addressed in the first act.
Also, like so many horror movies nowadays, this movie includes some references to the occult. But unlike in many other horror movies, these occult aspects are not in any way glorified, yet are portrayed fairly accurately, though of course taken with a slight artistic license. Which I think is what you would want. I mean after all and assuming black magic is real, you wouldn't want your audience accidentally summoning the dark forces after casually reciting some dialogue from the latest haunted house movie :-)
The Cellar is an old-school horror movie that does a lot of things right.
This film started out with a bit of a generic horror house intro with cliché spooky music but went a lot deeper than I expected. It's got some solid twists on classic tropes, a mysterious atmosphere and some actually scary scenes that don't have to rely on cheap jumpscares. While all of the cast is solid, I feel like Tara Lee deserves a special mention for her performance on the stairs to the cellar. She made a simple scene insanely tense just by delivering such a great performance.
The buildup throughout the story was very well done and the payoff was great as well.
I just wish that the ending explained a bit more of the background and why these things were happening. The character of the old lady who owned the house before was a bit wasted and didn't really add as much to the story as I had hoped.
I can recommend this film to any fan of the genre. I was well entertained throughout.
