The Haunting Of Borley Rectory

Boring Rectory

The Haunting Of Borley Rectory
UK 2019 Directed by Steven M. Smith
Greenway Entertainment DVD Region 2

A few weeks ago, my mother was 80 years old.

She was born on the same night that Borley Rectory burned down in 1939, before being demolished in 1944.

A couple of weeks ago my dad found this new DVD release, The Haunting Of Borley Rectory, in a local supermarket and because of its commemoration of my mother’s birthday, in some respects, he bought it for us all to watch.

I somehow wish he hadn’t because... well... I guess in some way the film is amazing. Not amazing as it’s anything like a great (or even halfway decent) film but just amazing that this film actually managed to get a professional, commercial release at all. I’d never heard of it and when I checked it out on IMDB I found that it was released this year. So the ‘straight to DVD’ status should have at least warned me but, you know, there are a fair few straight to home video movies which are really quite good.

Alas, this isn’t one of them.

Now when I was a kid, Borley Rectory was (and probably still is) known as 'the most haunted house in England' but, rather than shoot a story prior to 1939, this film is set in 1944, after the Rectory itself had already been half destroyed by the famous fire. Also, if I’m understanding the story here rightly, this actually isn’t set in the Rectory itself but in an undamaged house somewhere in the same grounds. But I guess The Haunting Of Some House and Surrounding Grounds In The Vicinity Of Borley Rectory wouldn’t have made for the best title. Unless I got that totally wrong. It’s kind of hard to tell.

After two extended pre-credits sequences and a kind of draining opening credits sequence, we get a story of a US World War Two soldier stationed at this house because it’s somehow a good place to listen out for Nazi radio signals. Every now and again the caretaker or a woman who brings him food enters the scenes to chat with him and the rest of the time he’s left on his own with both visions of his war experiences... which turn out to be a complete red herring in terms of having any impact on the narrative at all, as far as I could tell... and visions of a creepy nun who sometimes has glowing eyes. He then finds out about the local history and calls on real life paranormal investigator Harry Price who was famed for his populist research on the house (and who died four years later) to help him solve the mystery of the place.

And it’s a truly terrible, unremarkable and completely non-scary film with a bizarre lack of production value (at least it seemed so to these tired eyes) and some awful performances. Almost everyone is wooden in this one except for Rad Brown who plays Harry Price... and even he has his moments but he also has some screen presence, at least... and a supporting role for an actress called Kit Pascoe, who does at least seem like a naturally gifted actress with some talent but who also seems to drop out of the picture without rhyme or reason and who seems not to have any kind of significant story contribution to the narrative at all (as most characters in this don’t). She’s definitely the best thing in this movie though and I hope her career isn’t hampered by appearing in films like this.

Um... what else? Well, I was watching this with people who lived through that time so... the bed heads were modern and certainly not of that 1940s period, the crosses on the windows to stop them from shattering during bombing raids were merely crosses in the centre of the windows rather than going around the edges and completely re-enforcing the panes, as best people could in those times and really, soldiers in the army weren’t allowed beards, as far as I can remember. So, yeah, there seems to be a lot of anachronism and bad historical judgement from what we could see.

Also, most of the ‘played for scares’ part of the movie seemed to be consisting of dreams which the lead protagonist, played by Zach Clifford, would then wake up from. Okay for the first couple of times but I think I must have seen this guy wake up more times in this movie than I’ve eaten hot meals over the past few weeks. This seemed like constant use of an absolutely lazy ploy to get as much attempted scares in the movie... and I use the word ‘attempted’ deliberately.... as possible. And it really doesn’t work.

There was one attempt in one shot where I noticed the director was trying to be creative... where only a top left square of lit up screen, approximately one tenth of the overall image, is used with everything else blacked out but... it wasn’t a long shot and didn’t lead into anything else in a creative manner, it has to be said. And Darren Wonnacott’s synthesiser based score seemed bizarrely wishy washily toothless but somehow also managed to overpower the images with something that seemed a little unsuited to the visuals... although it may (or may not) work as a stand alone listen away from the production (not that I really want to find out and I’m pretty sure I won’t get the chance to do that anyway).

And there you have it. I have nothing further to say about this mess. As a family unit we collectively found The Haunting Of Borley Rectory a somewhat underwhelming attempt at a horror movie and I must admit I was struggling to stay focused, even through the 92 minute running time. It’s been a while since I had this much negative stuff to say about a film and so I apologise to anybody involved in the production for doing so here but, you know, I have to call them as I see them and I really didn’t find all that much to shout out about here. Not one I’d recommend and I’m glad I personally didn’t pay out for this one as it’s something I’ll never need to watch again.