The Cellar offers nothing new in the way of haunted house films, which makes it an overly familiar viewing experience. The main problem with The Cellar is that we’ve seen all this before, and we’ve seen it done better. This is especially true of Keira’s husband Brian ( Eoin Macken, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter), who predictably disbelieves his wife’s claims of supernatural activity (until it’s too late, of course). She does well here, but her costars are unfortunately stuck with underwritten roles. She does much of the heavy-lifting, tracking Keira’s grief as it morphs into resolve as the film slowly but surely makes its way to the big climax. The Cellar is Cuthbert’s film, and it’s refreshing to see the actress return to the genre after a 15-year absence (her last horror film was 2007’s Captivity). The rest of the film follows Keira as she hunts for her daughter and unravels the mystery of the house and its previous owners.
By using the short as a jumping-off point for the story (it’s essentially remade with the new cast in a scene that takes place 20 minutes into the film), The Cellar is able to do away with the short’s content early on and focus on being able to stand on its own. Keira must then battle with the entity occupying her house’s cellar, or risk losing her daughter forever.Īdapted from Muldowney’s 2004 short film The Ten Steps ( watch here), The Cellar thankfully avoids the criticism that plagues so many features adapted from short films: mainly that they feel like shorts stretched to feature length. After a number of strange supernatural experiences, she comes to the conclusion that the house took Ellie. Ellie’s mother Keira ( Elisha Cuthbert, House of Wax) investigates and finds that the walls have strange symbols engraved into them. Brendan Muldowney‘s The Cellar aims to remedy that with a dark, moody and somber film that emphasizes atmosphere over gore, making for a (mostly) family-friendly viewing experience that unfortunately feels all too familiar.Ībout a week after the Woods family moves into an old house in the Irish countryside, their daughter Ellie ( Abby Fitz) goes missing during a power outage.
We’ve had films like Monster House, Coraline and Joe Dante’s under-seen The Hole, but nothing really in the same vein as something like Gremlins or The Witches, which actually tried to frighten their younger viewers. Popular IPs like Goosebumps have been adapted into films that emphasize comedy over horror, and it’s nigh impossible to find any original family horror films getting released nowadays. Family horror is a sub-genre that hasn’t really been given its due in recent years.