Brendan Muldowney
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The film definitely borrows liberally from haunted house lore, but the two most obvious sources are Fulci’s House By the Cemetery and The Beyond, and since those are two of my favorites, those aspects really worked for me.
There’s a touch of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond in writer/director Brendan Muldowney’s film.
Writer/director Brendan Muldowney’s “The Cellar” builds upon the corpses of other memorable basement films like “The Amityville Horror,” The “Silence of the Lambs,” and “The Evil Dead” but adds elements of a new mythology that combines mystical numeracy with your average “Devil in the basement” arcana.
There are some other narrative beats similar to Sam Raimi‘s The Evil Dead .
It moves the story from being an evil house as in The Haunting (1963, 1999) or Burnt Offerings (1976) to something else.
It moves the story from being an evil house as in The Haunting (1963, 1999) or Burnt Offerings (1976) to something else.
There’s an identity crisis at the heart of The Cellar , caught between the grounded supernatural elements of A Dark Song (2016) and the propulsive, pulpy horror of Insidious (2010), without committing to either.
The plot treads the same water that superior films like House, The Conjuring and Insidious have treaded but without a clever screenplay or developing its characters in a way that brings them to life.
Brendan Muldowney's "The Cellar" is an adventurously melancholic representation of Irish horror much like Corin Hardy's "The Hallow" or Lee Cronin's "The Hole in the Ground."
Fans of The Woman in Black (2012) would easily find this enjoyable.
Remember how loud the cacophony of voices got when the monolith appeared in 2001: A Space Odyssey ?
It’s not one of the great Middle Ages movies, not on a par with “The Name of the Rose,” “The Advocate,” “The Reckoning” or “The Secret of Kells.”
Muldowney shows real flair for establishing a scary atmosphere without feeling the need to overplay his hand, the camera crawling along the floor and lingering on seemingly innocuous dark spaces until we start questioning what we’re looking at, Blair Witch style.
The plot treads the same water that superior films like House, The Conjuring and Insidious have treaded but without a clever screenplay or developing its characters in a way that brings them to life.