The Hallow (2015)

Creature Feature: Bojana Novakovic tries to escape "The Hallow."

The gently rolling hills and lush forests of Ireland aren't as placid and picturesque as they seem in “The Hallow,” a messy and derivative but effectively grim and darkly atmospheric horror yarn that premiered at Sundance last year.

Mysterious busted windows and strange noises coming from deep in the forest force a young couple (Joseph Mawle and Bojana Novakovic) living with their infant son and a dog in a remote, decaying country house to call local authorities. But their concerns go unresolved. Out here, the policeman says, “things go bump in the night.” That line could have been read for cheap, easy laughs, but credit goes to first time director and co-screenwriter, Colin Hardy, for playing it straight and keeping the tone eerily serious.

Later, another character will talk ominously about the Hallow, a legend that has something to do with malevolent banshees and demonic fairies that live in the woods, kidnap babies, and don't like it when strangers move in. Eventually, the protagonists are stalked and terrorized by the forest creatures—hissing, shrieking, hideously deformed beings that suggest a cross between the Whomping Willow of “Harry Potter” and Gollum of “The Lord of the Rings.”

Hardy is an unapologetic fanboy of sci-fi and horror and “The Hallow” is peppered with allusions to popular films of the genre—the leathery book full of creepy illustrations evokes the flesh-bound volume from Sam Raimi’s wildly inventive “The Evil Dead”; the inky, black ooze that portends the monsters suggests “Aliens”; and the ability of the creatures to take over human hosts hints at “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Hardy also lovingly mentions Ray Harryhausen (“made me believe in monsters”) in the closing credits. It’s hard not to think of Ymir—the stop-motion animated, outer space creature who crash lands on Earth in Harryhausen’s dazzling, enduring “20 Million Miles to Earth”—as another inspiration for “The Hallow.”

It’s far from perfect—the noisy, chaotic second half undermines the measured sense of a growing, sinister tension in the first—but “The Hallow” has enough subtle creepiness and legitimate scares to be worth a look.