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Critics Consensus: Drenched in dark atmosphere and bolstered with some real emotion underneath all the chills, The Hallow suggests a wonderfully horrifying future for director Corin Hardy.
Critic Consensus: Drenched in dark atmosphere and bolstered with some real emotion underneath all the chills, The Hallow suggests a wonderfully horrifying future for director Corin Hardy.
All Critics (58) | Top Critics (10) | Fresh (42) | Rotten (16)
This ecologically themed horror movie scores points for atmosphere and imagination, though it isn't particularly scary. The characters are little more than ciphers, so I wasn't inclined to root for them when they got into trouble.
In a departure from the sexually active teens of most slasher movies, "The Hallow" plays on more grown-up fears: keeping your family safe and steering clear of a vengeful Mother Nature.
This backwoods monster movie boasts compelling performances, eye-catching creatures and an effective blend of practical and digital effects.
Amid all the horror and the black ooze, there emerges a deeply touching story about the power of love.
Pretty quickly, you'll be suffering from fiend fatigue.
High on atmosphere and chills, but only passable when it comes to anything beyond surface-deep emotional content. It's almost there, but just shy of greatness.
Instead, The Hallow delivers a pedestrian fear-inducing fairy tale that never quite seems to stimulate beyond its impressive scope of shadowy aesthetics.
A promising début that reinforces the latest upwards trend of an abused genre. The Hallow is tense, haunting, horrific and fiendishly frightening
The Hallow made me afraid of the dark again.
The Hallow starts off well, establishing itself as a tense and atmospheric low-budget horror, with its foreboding milieu instilling immediate unease... But it's nowhere near as effective as it promised to be.
It's an impressive debut feature and will be interesting to see Corin Hardy's elevation from the indie to the mainstream.
... different from the usual horror film about a little house lost in the forest. [Full review in Spanish]
It has some clichés here and there that could have been avoided and the characters sometimes don't seem to be the brightest people in this sort of situation, but still this atmospheric horror movie works quite well, especially in a second half that can be really unnerving.
Super Reviewer
Some originality and top notch creature design, that's about all The Hallow has going for it, but evidently, that's enough. Oh, there's also a flaming-scythe. That's a thing.
This is a movie that never quite clicked for me despite, in theory, of having all the pieces necessary to make a fairly solid horror movie, to me at least. Part of it is the fact that the movie's story really rang hollow for me. There is a certain universality about parents sacrificing everything hey have, including their lives, for their kids and this movie follows that mentality, but I just never really bought into it. This is a film, of course, but part of the enjoyment of this medium is suspending your disbelief and, if even for a brief moment, pretending that what you're watching has some actual weight or importance. That's not the case in this movie. It just feels like they're telling me that this is what I should feel, since it's what the characters themselves are feeling, but it just did not work for me. There's just something about the film and the way the characters are written that negated any hard work put in by the cast. And I'm not saying that the leads were terribly written, but there's just something off-putting about both of them and I honestly can't put my finger on what it was. I did like, however, how it explored Irish folklore. That stuff is always interesting to me, like seeing the difference in myths and monsters, how that differs from culture to culture. The film's atmosphere is really appropriate for the tone, so no complaints on that front. But, and this might be nitpicking, I think it sort of rushes you into the fire, as it were. It's like they spend some time exploring the myth behind who the hallow are, what they do and what they want, but then they just reveal them out of nowhere. It's like there's no build-up, no teasing (well with the exception of one moment) to the actual reveal. And that's just poor writing to me. The creatures themselves are well-designed, but they're not particularly great looking either. Don't come in expecting Pan's Labyrinth-level monster design. And I don't wanna come across as suggesting that this film was bad, it actually wasn't, it's just that, for everything that it gets right, there's almost as much that they don't. I have no problem admitting that, at the very least, this is an average horror movie. But it's one that, to me, should've been better than it ended up being. I just failed to get into the story. Still, if you have Netflix, then this is worth a watch if you're a horror geek.
Its better than awful, as a young urban couple relocate to the country. Now if only they would listen to their neighbors warnings about the critters that live in the woods, but noooo. And that's what pisses me off about these films, characters doing just what they're not supposed to do, and doing it over and over, until they get got. I get tired of mentally yelling at the screen "don't do it!!!" and yet they do it anyway. Must that be the crutch all these films hobble on? Can't there be a horror wherein everyone does the right thing and THEN gets got? Now that would be something different.
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