Be Afraid

USA • 2017 • 99m •

• Directed by: Drew Gabreski. • Starring: Brian Krause, Kevin Grevioux, Louis Herthum, Jaimi Paige, Callie Thorne, Jared Abrahamson, Noell Coet, Michelle Hurd, Michael Leone, Sade Kimora Young, Kevin M. Horton, Todd Goble, Bill Laing. • Music by: Corey Wallace.

Not long after John Chambers and his family arrive at their new home in a small country town of Pennsylvania, John begins to experience sleep paralysis. Trapped within his own nightmare, other-worldly beings, entities which exist in the darkest shadows of the night and can only be seen out of the corner of one's eye, visit him. These encounters begin to haunt John, transforming to complete terror as he discovers the entities' sole purpose... the abduction of his seven year old son.

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Trailer

1:42

Review:

This movies description intrigued me so I thought I would give it a go. I am not going to say I was entirely disappointed as the film had some good points; however, it has a lot of bad points as well. The film does not seem to know what lore it is trying to craft its movie around, some of the acting is pretty bad and the plot has some rather stupid twists in that they just seem to infer stuff rather than actually just coming out and saying stuff. I did enjoy some of the visuals and most of the actors in this one were decent. They should have just crafted their own monsters though instead of using that of the Shadow People because they just did not seem to do enough research and they just added stuff to them that really does not fit what they are and what they do.

The story begins with a man raving that something is after his daughter and then she proceeds to disappear. Flash a bit later and a new doctor in town is trying to settle in. His older son comes to live with the doctor and his wife and son. The older son is from a different marriage apparently. Well the younger boy sees things and the father sees things and there is some sort of cover up that really makes no sense going on while these strange creatures that lurk out of most people's field of vision seem to take children away!

The Shadow People here just don't work. I have always been interested in this phenomenon that does happen to people. The whole thinking they see stuff when they awaken. They get some of it right, but the whole taking children thing is not something associated with them as this is generally associated with the completely fictitious Slenderman. Then there is a scene where the older son is in a tunnel trying to prove himself where the creatures drag two other guys off and kill them in gruesome fashion which doesn't really fit either the Shadow People or Slenderman. Just kind of a jumbled mess as they do not seem to know what type of movie they are making.

So, any chance of this being a good horror movie pretty much died with all the inconsistencies within. Not sure why they did Shadow People when they clearly wanted to do something totally different as the creatures were living in some sort of cave. They had a good idea, but should have made them more of a physical presence that would have went along with the two guys in the cave getting killed. The revelation of the boys being taken just did not work as it was all kind of implied and you are left wondering why would these creatures who can't be killed make a deal with anyone. Interesting but just fails with too many questions and such.

Review by Aaron1375 from the Internet Movie Database.