I go to horror movies so I can have nightmares. Seriously. I love being scared. The Apparition isn’t scary at all. Though I was scared at the very beginning, towards the end I started laughing at all moments that were attempting to be horrific.

Unfortunately, the whole idea of it is just completely hollow. What happens is three friends channel a demon/poltergeist/spirit/lord-y thing from purgatory or somewhere equally unpleasant. Once you believe in this demon, it’s there; trying to haunt you to death. This process of function doesn’t carry throughout the movie.

At the beginning we meet young couple Kelly (Ashley Greene) and Ben (Sebastian Stan). They’re moving in to one of Kelly’s parents’ houses in a desert suburb that they’re trying to sell. If movies have taught us anything it’s that you, 1. shouldn’t move into a suburb because there are way too many white people in one place at once, and 2. also because a Poltergeist might just so happen to be haunting it. Yet, this being movieland, Kelly and Ben do their best to settle in.

Right away, Kelly starts seeing strange things. A potted cactus dies instantly when brought into the house. She’s putting clothes away in a chest of drawers, and the chest of drawers moves on its own while she’s looking away. The neighbor’s dog comes into the house and dies. Ben suggests moving, but Kelly insists “No, I can’t tell my parents their house is haunted,” to which I immediately responded, ‘Why not? I would.’

As things start to get weirder, Ben feels compelled to tell Kelly the truth and explains to her that while he was in college he and some friends (including Tom Felton) tried to replicate an experiment done in the seventies, where a demon/poltergeist/spirit/lord-y thing was summoned from purgatory but it was too strong for them and is now trapped within their world. And “as soon as you believe in it” then it starts messing with you. Which doesn’t make sense, because the demon thing was messing with Kelly before she even knew what it was.

This movie relies on a lot of coattail riding. All of the scary moments were almost like shout outs to the Paranormal Activity movies. As soon as things get strange, Ben installs cameras everywhere, which the demon promptly dismounts. Of course “horror” movies being made within the same time range are bound to be somewhat similar, but not this similar.

This movie isn’t scary at all and is horribly written. The only kind of nightmares this movie is going to cause is ones for directors and actors. I can just imagine Shia LaBeouf waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and turning to his girlfriend and saying “I just had the most horrible nightmare that my newest movie performed worse than The Apparition!” It was that bad.

Luckily,

this movie is also short. So if you do for some reason end up paying hard earned cash for it, the pain will only last about 90 minutes.

Synopsis:

A couple are haunted by a supernatural presence that is unleashed during a college experiment.