Stephen Cognetti made a name for himself on the horror scene the old-fashioned way, as his “Hell House LLC” movies became a legitimate word-of-mouth phenomenon. A case study in how to do the found-footage thing in a way that feels fresh and new, the “Hell House” franchise grows in popularity every year (and we have a feature about the series running next week, by the way). And so, Cognetti’s first traditional horror film, Shudder’s “825 Forest Road,” arrives with hope and expectation. As a fan of horror auteurs who carve their path outside of the studio system, it brings me no joy to slam the door on this genre address. “825 Forest Road” is an outright failure, a movie that Shudder seems to be even foreclosing on, barely promoting its existence. Cognetti’s skill with found footage does him no favors here, as this flick is laden with awful dialogue, worse performances, dumb plotting, and a truly inane ending. Set your horror GPS to a different location.
After an effective prologue in which a young woman is on a video chat when there’s a knock on her bedroom door when no one else is home, “825 Forest Road” almost immediately loses momentum. It begins when Chuck Wilson (Joe Falcone) relocates to the small town of Ashland Falls with his wife, Maria (Elizabeth Vermilyea), and his sister, Isabelle (Kathryn Miller), following the death of his mother. After a few bumps in the night, Chuck discovers that the whole town is terrified of a ghost named Helen Foster. In a laughably ridiculous exposition dump that takes place at a covert meeting—most of the town is afraid to even talk about Helen—Chuck learns that Helen’s daughter was bullied, leading to her suicide, and eventually Helen’s as well. Suicide is used like an exploitative cudgel in this script, giving the whole thing an unintended icky feeling that takes it from just bad to borderline offensive. Suffice to say, people who have looked into the ghost of Helen Foster end up dead, and the ones who don’t have figured out that they need to find her house, the titular address, to stop her, but it doesn’t exist on any maps (although anyone who has ever seen a movie knows where it is).
“825 Forest Road” comes at the tail end of a trend in the genre that people have called Traumacore or Griefcore, wherein writers essentially use real-life issues like suicide and other avenues to trauma to terrorize their characters. It’s one of the most egregious examples of how this trend fails, even opening with a C.S. Lewis quote: “No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.” There are so many variations on “stop blaming yourself for what happened to mom” that it almost approaches parody of the Griefcore genre.
The shallow script might be forgivable if Cognetti produced some legitimate scares, but it feels like the found-footage genre suited his visual sensibilities more. Worst of all, there’s a dress mannequin (see photo above) that becomes the main source of jump scares, and it looks absolutely ridiculous. Never mind why anyone would have a dress mannequin that looks as terrifying as The Nun, the figure is used in such ridiculous ways, including a livestream sequence that had me literally laughing out loud.
There’s a bit of J-horror influence in “825 Forest Road”—so many films that followed in the footsteps of “Ringu” and “Ju-On” were built on trauma manifesting dark-haired figures intent on vengeance—that made me want to revisit my 2000s obsession with films that truly terrified and fueled my love for horror. When a movie that’s supposed to be getting under your skin only has you thinking of better ones, it’s time to move on.
