A Ghost You Can’t See

In the 2015 scare-deficient The Dead Room, three paranormal researchers go into a run down house in the woods that a family fled after being spooked out of their lease by something invisible and angry. Think Casper the Unfriendly Ghost. An insurance company hired them to prove/disprove the place is haunted. It is. Claim settled.

The team is made up of Holly, a young Goth-y girl who is a psychic, Liam, the guy who knows how to run all the cameras/gear by plugging the right chords into the right holes, and the older man, Scott, is an outright skeptic. Once geared up, they wait for the ghost to make spooky stuff happen. It takes a while, but soon the unseeable entity starts throwing furniture around like it was being yanked by fishing line. Then anything sharp gets hucked right at soft and splittable heads.

After much door slamming, windows breaking, books unshelving themselves and indoor wind, the crew abandons their paid gig and packs their cameras to leave. It’s here they see smoke-like smoke coming from behind a wall. Doesn’t smell like burning, so clearly there’s a ghost in the walls. Time for some sledgehammer action.

After breaking through the sheetrock, they discover a room with a ladder leading down into a hole. Well heck, who wouldn’t want to go down there? I’m surprised there wasn’t a pushing contest to see who got to go first. Once in the “basement”, they find a mummified corpse of an old woman chained to a chair. She looks like she hasn’t washed her hair for decades. Ick.

And it’s here the team figures out the secret behind the hauntings. Unfortunately, their revelation came a few beats too late and the ghost you never get to see evicts all of them — permanently. If this sounds familiar, it’s because they took giant ice cream scoops of The Legend of Hell House (1973) and slapped a dumb title on it.