Horror, just like comedy, is subjective. I have a few friends whose spirits leave their body after watching that scene in Mulholland Drive, but as someone who grew up on a heart diet of The Mighty Boosh and vinegar, the Old Greg vibes were too pronounced for it muster anything in me apart from a titter.
Modern movie marketing is a strange beast, one that relies on buzz and coverage from publications as it much as it does gigantic billboards and flashy trailers. With just a couple of hyperbolic headlines and wild proclamations, even the most distinctly average of movies can be brought into the spotlight.
Which brings me to Veronica, the Spanish horror film from Paco Plaza that recently dropped on Netflix. After reading a few articles that claimed people were calling it “the scariest movie ever”, I followed the paper trail and found out it was just referencing a couple of scattered and random tweets, as if this was grounds enough to start billing Veronica as the next best thing in horror.
The truth is, Veronica is fine. It has a couple of tense moments, but by and large it’s just another ouija movie.
Veronica follows its titular character after she accidentally summons a dark spirit during a seance she organised with a couple of friends to speak with their loved ones. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but the spirit isn’t keen on becoming her lifecoach — it wants to consume her and her family.
What follows is a by-the-numbers sequence of events that you will have seen on countless occasions before. Over a brief period of time, Veronica becomes more and more disturbed by the strange things going on around her, which first come to prominence during an admittedly pretty unsettling eating scene. From there, expect flickering lights, creepy shadows, and things mysteriously moving around as the film stumbles towards its predictably ho-hum finale. Oh, and dad penis.
The lack of originality is what scared me the most about Veronica, as if Plaza had a novel take on the worn subgenre of horror but found himself creatively stifled somewhere along the way. Veronica also makes the egregious misjudgement of presenting itself as a true story when it’s actually just “inspired” by the tragic tale of Estefania Gutierrez Lazaro.
For one of the directors of the zenith of the found footage craze in REC, Veronica’s a strange backwards move. It seldom offers anything to help it stand out from the crowd. Surely, it can be viewed as a metaphor for female adolescence, but there are far better movies out there which tread similar ground with better conviction — Veronica seems to limp through its lightweight themes out of obligation.
As mentioned, horror and the scares it produces are entirely dependent on the person watching them. I’ve discovered over the years that the scariest horror movies are the ones you know nothing about, those you go in blind to without any knowledge of its synopsis or the praise surrounding it. In fact, I think Veronica’s buzz could have played such a big part in my wildly differing views on it and another new horror addition on Netflix, Ravenous.
Before going into the Quebecoise Ravenous (also known as Les Affamés), I knew nothing about it. Without any expectations of what was to come or any pedestal for it to climb up to, it became one of my favourite zombie movies in recent memory. In the case of Veronica, I simply shouldn’t have believed the engineered hype.
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