The Thousands

I’m pretty hopeless in horror movies. I screamed the second time I saw The Sixth Sense, and in The Orphanage I moaned so piteously that another cinema patron hissed at me, “You’re not helping!” So yeah, I was anxious about seeing The Unborn.

College student Casey (bargain-basement Jessica Alba, Odette Yustman) keeps seeing foetuses and evil ghost kids, then the boy she babysits bashes her with a mirror before intoning, “Jumby wants to be born now”. Eventually, Casey learns her family is tormented by a dybbuk – a Kabbalistic demon – and her last hope is an exorcism by Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman).**Oldman appears bewildered to be in this increasingly preposterous movie. Writer/director David Goyer (The Dark Knight) has tried to be original, but dialogue such as: “It has fallen on you to finish what began in Auschwitz” blends high camp and moral glibness. But the scares – mostly of the ‘creepy-crawly’ and ‘boo!’ flavours – still got to me.

The young preview audience thought it was a riot. They laughed when Casey’s sassy best friend Romy (Meagan Good) told our demonic child, “F#!k off, you little shit!” And they laughed at me when I screamed in terror.