The Gallows tried a viral marketing campaign to promote itself. One day I came onto Facebook to find everyone talking about some YouTube video of teenagers using an ouija board to supposedly summon the spirit of a Mexican boy named "Charlie". Amidst all the hand-wringing of "concerned adults" horrified at what they thought of as a "how-to" guide to selling your soul, a few astute people pointed out that "Charlie" wasn't really a Hispanic name. I was just reminded of the time at school when some classmates came to me terrified because they had made their own ouija board out of jotter paper and were now too afraid to get rid of it because of the "curse" that would fall on whoever disposed of it. So I ate it. I've never been very impressed by ouija boards or seances.
In 1993 a high school puts on a play called "The Gallows", but something goes wrong and a student called Charlie is hanged for real. 20 years later (making this film set in 2013), the school decides to put on the play again. An incredibly obnoxious high school jock, his girlfriend and their conflicted friend who has a crush on the female lead decide to sabotage the set the night before the curtain goes up; they break into the school at night to do the deed. Also, the obnoxious one is videoing all of this. Once there, however, they find themselves locked in, tormented and hunted by a supernatural force that seems intent on inflicting Charlie's fate on all of them...
What the hell kind of school board goes, "Well, it's been 20 years since we executed a student on stage and it's not like actors are a superstitious lot or anything; why not perform this play with a body count again?" Seriously, that point alone was enough to blow my suspension of disbelief for this film right out of the water. Then again, seeing how crappy the school's security was as well - there's no alarm system, no CCTV, and a broken door is left unlocked at night with no-one caring about it - I suspect the school board were blowing the budget on lead paint tasting parties.
Then again, the entire premise of The Gallows relies on a huge set of coincidences, of which the school's exceedingly lax security and health and safety practices are just a small part of. The whole sinister plan here hinges on a very specific set of circumstances happening in a very specific order and with no deviation from any of them. If just one of those things hadn't happened then the whole plan would have been blown to hell. What if they hadn't made the spur of the moment decision to break in and trash the set? What if supposed protagonist Reece (who had all the charisma of a stunned herring) hadn't decided to audition for the play to impress a girl? What if he hadn't even had a crush on this girl to begin with? Everything seems to not only have been planned for in advance, but assumed as some form of predestination as well, and the chances of all of that happening wholly by chance are just too high. Really, the whole Rube Goldberg-esque plot left me annoyed and maybe a little confused.
The eventual reason that the trailer for The Gallows caught my attention was because of the music playing during it. It's a melodic, almost a cappella version of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit and it's really quite haunting. Of course, it's not in the actual film - in fact there's no background or scene-setting music at all in the film, which is good because it's found-footage and that would completely destroy the film's conceit. That is one good thing about The Gallows - it uses silence well to enhance its atmosphere, as well as making good use of ambient noise.
The film also touts itself as "so scary... it's hard to watch" (actual quote on the DVD box) and even the shop assistant when I bought it told me how he'd been planning to see it because "it's supposed to be one of the scariest films of last year". Well, I'm sadly going to have to disappoint a lot of people here, because The Gallows is not scary. Well, maybe a little bit, if you imagine yourself in a dark, silent, empty auditorium as the cast are - but not for any other reason. It's predictable, both in (jump) scares and in plot - I figured out everything that was happening long before it was revealed in the film, even if the film's own timeline made certain revelations impossible. And really, if a film can't keep its own internal timeline straight, what hope does it have of actually being a scary or unnerving horror film?
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