DIRECTED BY: Brett Sullivan
FEATURING: Alanna Chisholm, Lauren Roy, Nick Abraham, Paul Soren
PLOT: A new tenant in an old house is sucked into a sordid, violent riddle when she
discovers evidence of sick psychological experiments.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Chair offers a novel twist on the age old soul possession concept, as seen in films such as Child’s Play or The Skeleton Key. That twist is perverse and unsettling. The movie becomes puzzling when parts of the story are told non-sequentially, from changing perspectives. While it may have an unconventional feel, The Chair is still a more or less standard horror story about a soul seeking a new host.
COMMENTS: Don’t be fooled by the opening shots when you watch The Chair. It is not as customary as it appears to be. It tricks the viewer. Not fast-paced enough to be a horror-thriller, The Chair is an imaginative horror-mystery with puzzler and shocker elements. The film develops it’s storyline differently than other supernatural vehicles.
Here is the setup: Danielle rents a creepy Victorian house (is there any other kind?) where slightly sinister things start to occur—slowly. Due to the mildness of the events, and because the movie would last all of five minutes if Danielle left, she doesn’t think of simply moving out.
Oh, and conveniently, Danielle is a psychology student with an interest in the paranormal. She wants to capitalize on the spooky bumps in the night and investigate them to have material for her senior thesis. (Apparently Danielle has enough imagination to take an interest in parapsychology, but not enough to pick a no-brainer psychology research topic like ‘partial reinforcement similarities between cocaine and World Of Warcraft.’) Lucky for us, because someone has to stick their neck out or we would be watching another mild-mannered Poltergeist retread.
And so Danielle pokes around the creaky manor and turns up eerie hidden rooms, bizarre metaphysics documents, disturbing furniture, and puzzling mechanical parts. All of this leads her to discover that an occult scientist a century before found some very interesting uses for mesmerism when he dabbled in suspended animation, the trapping of souls, and other funny business. The results of his efforts created a lasting malevolent Continue reading CAPSULE: THE CHAIR (2007)