The Hollow (Canada, 2015)

Talk about a surprise. Released on DVD as The Burning Curse, this movie proves that sometimes contemporary TV horror movies can easily hold their own as decent flicks. In another time, in the days back when TV horror movies always faded into black when the horror hits, or let it happen off-screen, this movie would have probably never have been aired on TV. Instead, it would probably have hit the screens, without prior publicity, as part of a double or triple bill at your local grindhouse or struggling mall theatre, and it would have stood out as the unexpected discovery amidst the grime: a well-made, low-budget horror movie with dread and scares to spare — but no nudity — that keeps you enthralled until the obligatory final scare. It's the type of contemporary TV movie that restores one's faith in low-budget genre films — the movie proves that such films don't need to pander for cheap laughs or be bad-on-purpose, as so many contemporary genre films do and are. 

Trailer to

The Hollow:

Like many horror movies today, The Burning Curse opens with a "name" actor, the familiar face whose name you may or may not know who, for whatever reason (i.e., friendship, rent, new car, lack of better offers, etc.), shows up long enough to solidly register onscreen before — well, you know. (It's been a horror movie trope since Psycho [1960 / trailer], at the latest, and riffed upon with diminishing returns in the Scream franchise ever since the first one [1996 / trailer] directed by Wes Craven.) In The Burning Cross, the familiar face is Deborah Kara Unger, who was once found in movies like The Hurricane (1999 / trailer), The Game (1997 / trailer) and Payback (1999 / trailer) but now is entering her MILF character actor phase. She plays Aunt Cora, who lives on the secluded island known as Shelter Island — a misnomer, to say the least, as the island ends up offering little shelter but a lot of death.

The three main characters of the movie, the dysfunctional trio of sisters (with varying acting talent) consisting of Sarah (Stephanie Hunt of April Apocalypse [2013 / trailer]), Marley (Sarah Dugdale of In the Shadow of the Moon [2019 / trailer] and There's Someone inside Your House [2021 / trailer]) and Emma (Alisha Newton of Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters [2013 / trailer] and Scorched Earth [2018 / trailer]), are already living a horror story of their own — if an emotional one — when we are introduced to them. Bickering and seething with emotional instability and pain, they are on their way to Aunt Cora's, broke and with nowhere else to go after having spent all the life insurance money paid out after the fiery death of their parents on the treatment of the troubled youngest, Emma, who survived the car crash that killed their parents. 

Thus, they are oblivious to the portentous warnings to stay away from the island, which is due to be hit by a major, once-a-century storm, and catch the last ferry over — only to be met first by an empty town and, soon thereafter, an unstoppable unnatural entity out to kill everyone on the island.* It seems that some hundred years ago, the town burnt three witches at the stake, who promptly placed a curse and massacred most of the town during a major thunderstorm; now, a century later, on Halloween, the curse is revived as the next storm of a century rolls in...

* A tried-and-true narrative MacGuffin found in many a movie in a variety of forms — the first to come to our mind (though surely not the first to use the idea) is Mario Bava's gothic Black Sunday (1960 / trailer), though there the witch returns (as a vampire) to fulfill the curse herself, and instead of an entire town she has her sights set on a single family (though she is hardly loath to an occasional non-family member). Bava's other gothic masterpiece, Kill Baby Kill (1966 / trailer), is likewise a variant, in this case the curse of but a singular, wronged child upon an entire town.

The narrative of The Burning Curse a.k.a. The Hollow is straight and narrow and only pauses to take the time to introduce characters and their backgrounds. Some plot points seem rather extraneous — Emma's presaging dreams indicate a supernatural connection that never goes anywhere, the whole it-happens-on-Halloween aspect is rather opportune but unnecessary, and the disappearing car is less logical than a convenient excuse for having the two older sisters deal with the horror of moving a body from another vehicle* — but in general the movie is an effective and linear run-from-a-supernatural-monster movie.

* It would seem that, though never explicitly stated, one of the demon's talents is driving cars, for much like the car of the three sisters gets driven off, Aunt Cora's RV also shows up somewhere it logically shouldn't be.

As such, The Hollow manages to offer some pretty decent shocks and scares as the sisters try to escape or at least survive an extremely mobile creature that cannot be killed. Okay, the CGI of the creature is a bit too CGI at times, but the superhuman creature itself is an interesting mixture of earth and ember, attacking and killing with quickly growing, rooty vine-like tendrils and/or burning fire. (A combination derived, one might conjecture, from the wood and fire used to execute the three evil witches a century previously.)

Director Sheldon Wilson, a capable if still unsung genre-movie specialist (who has made a lot of movies set on Halloween night, some with monsters that look suspiciously like the one in this movie), milks a lot of atmosphere from his island setting, more so within the deserted, body-strewn small town and the fecund but dreary oppressiveness of the old forest than within the oddly in-shape tunnels and rooms of the deserted power plant where the three sisters face their final battle(s). Wilson also stages a variety of good shock scenes, the most memorable being the totally unexpected woman being literally blasting out through the front door of a house and the demise of a likeable (if not too bright) young man (Jonathan Whitesell of The Unspoken [2015 / trailer] and Bad Times at the El Royale [2018 / trailer]) who looks too closely at a map. Wilson and his co-scriptwriter, Rick Suvalle — the latter seems to swing between scripting kiddy films and TV horror like this move, Roadkill [2011 / trailer], and Sheldon Wilson's Scarecrow [2013 / trailer]* — also mine a lot of tension by keeping the demon's appearance irregular and unexpected, but always threatened. At least, that is, until the final scenes in the deserted power station, at which point the demon is pretty much fixated on getting the last three survivors on the island and becomes a bit more omnipresent.

* Which basically reuses the monster from this movie, but without the fire-power.

Lastly, The Hollow is also solidly anchored by the three young sisters around whom the narrative revolves. A dysfunctional and emotionally damaged trio, they all have clear-cut personalities and act and react realistically (if perhaps too loudly) throughout the movie. A bit more time than normal is given to both their introduction and their family dynamic, and it only helps to make the viewer feel and root for them in face of a situation with apparently no way out. (In general, actually, the movie manages to make almost every character that has more than two lines a relatively well-delineated personality with clear motivation.) 

Still, in regard to the sisters, one really begins to wonder why they don't frigging get it through their heads to stop screaming and shouting all the time. Indeed, one of the movie's unintentional funny moments involves a no-name, half-dead minor character telling two of them to stop shouting because it'll draw the monster, only for the monster to show up and kill that no-name character as the sisters run away in panic.

In short, The Hollow might not really offer up anything truly novel in the narrative department, and it does have a few WTF moments — the sisters really make too much noise all the time, and people separate a bit too much — but it is a good example of a good-looking, atmospheric movie that manages to overcome both its low budget and its arguably old-chestnut plot to deliver a solidly and effectively crafted horror story.

Has nothing to do with the movie, but

 Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves: