Teenager Katie Embry dies under strange circumstances, but not before monologuing about seeing a spooky VHS tape that kills you seven days after watching it. At her funeral, her mom asks her aunt Rachel (a journalist) to investigate Katie’s death. Rachel begins her search and eventually stumbles on the cursed VHS. She watches it and begins to see supernatural phenomenon, leading her believe that she, too, only has seven days to live. Rachel recruits the help of Noah, an ex-boyfriend (and multimedia expert?) to study the tape. A skeptic, Noah watches the tape. Even worse, Rachel’s son Aiden also watches the tape. With the urgency of knowing that all three will die without a resolution of some kind, Rachel and Noah study the monotonous, creepy imagery on the tape to find clues of the film’s origin. They dig up an evil, traumatic past and try to bring peace to a spirit that, quite frankly, doesn’t want any.
I wanted to like this film so much. And there were parts that I did. The detective mystery story was fun. It was like “Zodiac” meeting what I imagine “Twilight” looks like. And found the film sufficiently creepy through atmosphere and terrifying imagery. And there’s a real character story there. The most impressive “reveal” of the film was regarding Rachel and her relationship with someone around her.
But I was ultimately disappointed that the film sacrificed its impactful character story for cheap shock-scares. For me, the supernatural horror plot wasn’t strong enough to carry my interest and I only hung in there because I thought the film was trying to say something. At first I thought it explored the suggestion that modern media influences teenagers to do bad things. Then, after a beautiful voyeuristic shot of apartment dwellers watching TV, perhaps it was about the disconnecting and zombifying aspects of TV. Or perhaps about how we fail to give our children attention and simply place them in front of the TV, driving them to strange places. But by the false ending, it seemed clear—the film was about how children deserve our love no matter what and you can’t just hide your problems away.
But the real ending completely tossed out that wonderful notion and instead landed back on the crappy supernatural plot. I can imagine how fun it would be to see some of those moments in a theatre, with people writhing and reacting. But from my couch, 19 years later, I felt like ditching a human story for a cheap scare wasn’t worth it.