“Here After” (2024) Review – Horror Facts

I’m all about those classic horror joints – give me some “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or the OG “Halloween” any day. Hell, even “Dawn of the Dead” from ’78 still gets my blood pumping. But this new shit? Man, it’s like they’re not even trying anymore.

So here’s the deal: we’ve got Connie Britton playing this divorced mom named Claire. She’s living in Rome, teaching at some fancy-ass girls’ school. Her kid, Robin, is this mute piano prodigy who communicates through sign language. Sounds interesting, right? Wrong. It’s about as exciting as watching paint dry on a corpse.

Now, here’s where shit gets weird. The kid has a bike accident and boom – she’s pronounced dead for 20 minutes. But wait! She comes back to life, and suddenly she can talk. But she’s all messed up in the head, watching cartoons and blasting rock music like she’s possessed by the ghost of Kurt Cobain or something.

You’d think this would be the part where things get interesting, but nah. It’s like the director, Robert Salerno, got scared of his own movie and decided to play it safer than a nun in a convent. He’s worked on some killer indie flicks before, so what the hell happened here? It’s like he forgot everything he learned and decided to make a movie by following “Horror for Dummies.”

The whole time I’m watching this, I’m thinking about fear. Real fear, you know? The kind that makes your balls shrink and your heart try to crawl out your throat. That comes from the unknown, from shit we can’t understand or control. But “Here After”? It’s about as scary as a kitten in a Halloween costume.

You want to know what’s really terrifying? The fact that people keep making these half-assed horror flicks and expecting us to lap it up like it’s the best thing since sliced brains. It’s insulting, that’s what it is. We deserve better, dammit!

Now, I gotta give props where they’re due. Connie Britton, she’s trying her damndest to make this shit work. She’s acting her ass off, bringing some real emotion to a character flatter than week-old beer. But it’s like putting premium gas in a broken-down jalopy – it ain’t gonna make that piece of crap run any better.

The movie tries to get all deep with some Catholic mumbo-jumbo, like throwing a cross around someone’s neck is gonna make us believe they’re all holy and shit. Please. I’ve seen more convincing faith in a dollar store Bible.

There’s this one part near the end, some kind of dream sequence, where it feels like Salerno finally grew a pair and tried something different. But by then, I was so bored I was considering performing an exorcism on myself just to feel something.

You know what really grinds my gears? The wasted potential. Rome is a cool-ass city with centuries of creepy history, but all we get are some generic aerial shots. It’s like going to a five-star restaurant and ordering a Big Mac.

Look, I’m not asking for much. Just give me a horror movie that doesn’t insult my intelligence. Give me characters I give a shit about. Give me scares that’ll make me sleep with the lights on for a week. Is that too much to ask?

Instead, we get “Here After,” a movie so bland it makes vanilla look spicy. It’s the kind of film that makes you want to grab a ouija board and try to contact actually scary ghosts, just to wash the taste out of your mouth.

You want my advice? Skip this snooze-fest. Go rewatch “The Shining” or something. Hell, even playing with one of those ghost-hunting apps on your phone would be more thrilling than sitting through this cinematic equivalent of watching grass grow in a graveyard.

“Here After (IMDB)” is just another nail in the coffin of modern horror. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but damn if it isn’t trying hard to get there. If this is the future of horror, maybe it’s time to pull the plug and let the genre die with some dignity. At least then we’d have something to actually be scared about.