cricketbat The Haunting in Connecticut is mostly a family drama with a bunch of annoying jump-out moments and disturbing images scattered around. If you want scary, watch the A Haunting episode on the Discovery channel about this same story. The real story is more frightening than this adaptation.

LordCringe First off this movie is one of the truly remarkable horror movie out there. With a slight cliché but still be able to bring some thing good in horror movie scenes out there.This movie contains all of the element that you need to make a great horror movie. Every scenes give you different feelings about the situations, But still packed with scary, emotional, intense scenes to put you on the edge of your seat.Now what makes me say that this movie is truly remarkable? This movie story progressed in a very detailed (Basically you can't be confuse in any scenes nor the ending) Unlike other horror movies out there that I can name 10+ of them which's not good at story progressing and leave the viewer dead confused.Over all "The Haunting in Connecticut" is definitely worth a watch. 8/10 for me!

thelastblogontheleft It's got a basic premise that many of us could describe in our sleep. Family with a sick kid is forced to relocate and ends up renting a haunted house that used to be a funeral home. Turns out the people who worked at said funeral home did some really messed up things (necromancy, etc) and there's now a bunch of spirits attached to the house (on purpose) and chaos ensues. Sick kid has visions and sightings of said spirits that are chalked up to his cancer treatments initially but then all hell breaks loose.I have to say, when this movie started up I had high hopes. As repetitive and unoriginal as they can be, I tend to really like haunted house movies. And as bland and unemotional as the mother, Sara (played by Virginia Madsen) was, the son, Matt (played by Kyle Gallner) was actually pretty great. Beyond that… I don't have many good things to say about it.It's supposedly loosely based on a true story, a haunting that Ed and Lorraine Warren investigated at the home of Allen and Carmen Snedeker and their four children. There have been several people who have tried to discredit this story, so who knows if it's true or not. Plus the movie tended to take quite a few liberties so it's not all that accurate either.I thought that the special effects were super cheesy — every vision of carved up people just made me giggle. Most of Matt's "nightmares" were predictable. The parents' grief over his cancer was SO forced and stereotypical it hurt — there is literally a scene where the mom is clutching a rosary while screaming "YOU CAN'T TAKE MY SON!" and the dad is swigging vodka and smashing an electric guitar against an amp. The ectoplasm scene I think COULD have been cool but the overdone effects just made it comical.An unfortunate miss, since I think something more interesting could have been done with the plot.

Coventry I made a deal with myself a long time ago that, whenever I would watch a horror movie of which I know from beforehand that I probably end up hating it, I would try to keep an open mind and avidly search for at least one positive aspect! This can be almost anything, except for gratuitous boobs on display (too easy), but I'm primarily hoping for at least one innovative plot aspect or surprising story twist. My expectations for "The Haunting in Connecticut" were set very low, because this production clearly features a number of clichéd elements that I dislike the most: paranormal entities in an abandoned house, supposedly based on a true story (yeah, right…), probably copious amounts fake scares and predictable "boo!"-moments and an overload of irritating PG-13 approved digital effects. Yes, the film does feature all the above mentioned stuff, but to my surprise it was still relatively easy to find the innovative plot aspect! To my knowledge and unless if I'm overlooking a certain title – which is always possible with more than 3.500 reviewed horror movies - "The Haunting in Connecticut" is the first movie I've seen that makes a connection between terminal illness and being a paranormal medium. The protagonist, teenager Matt Campbell, suffers from a deadly form of metastatic cancer, and the fact that he continuously balances on the edge of life and death apparently makes him more receptive for paranormal activities. It's definitely not a world- shocking new twist to the ghost-movie sub-genre, but at least I found it acceptable. Since Matt can't physically handle the long car trips between their house and the specialized cancer clinic, his devoted mother Sara rents an extra house in Connecticut. The family can hardly finance this, but they stumble upon a large house that is very cheap due to its past as a funeral home with a macabre history. Matt immediately begins to see nightmarish things, like corpses with strange carvings all over and their eyelids cut off. Together with his older sister and a local priest, also a cancer patient, they dig up the house's history and discover that the original mortician – Mr. Aickman – also used the basement to organize séances. His young assistant Jonah was an exceptional medium who even produced ectoplasm, but one of the séances went horribly wrong and killed all participants including Aickman. Jonah's restless soul, as well as those of hundred others, are still inside the house and now manifest themselves through Matt. Poor kid… As if dying from cancer and struggling through sickening special treatments isn't miserable enough already, he also has to face malevolent Connecticut ghosts! I didn't make any efforts to find out elements of the script are truthful and what others are fictionalized (the latter probably counts for 99%), but at least I can honestly state that this was one of the least annoying haunted-houses/paranormal entities movies that I watched since the new Millennium. I admit I'm a sucker for spooky old photographs and atmospheric black/white flashbacks set in the 1920s/1930s period, so "The Haunting in Connecticut" gains a couple of extra points for featuring this, and the special effects were adequate too. The film has a more than decent cast, with the lovely Virginia Madsen ("Candyman") as the concerned mother and Elias Koteas as the helpful priest. There's a sequel already, set in Georgia this time, and another one upcoming set in New York. After that I assume there will be 47 more of these movies, one for each state.