31 Days of Night: The Bye Bye Man – 4.5/10

“Don’t say it, don’t think it…”

I’d never heard of The Bye Bye Man until a 14-year-old girl that I teach assured me that it’s ‘proper scary’. This will be the last time that I accept any kind of recommendation from a child…

Elliot (Douglas Smith) and John (Lucien Laviscount) are a pair of jock shitheads who, along with Elliot’s girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas), move into a creepy house at the start of their inaugural college semester. Things soon turn weird when a cloak that they inexplicably keep hanging up in their bedroom comes to life, and strange coins begin to appear around the house.

Let’s begin with all the things that are wrong with this movie. The characters are thinly drawn and the direction is tired and predictable. The acting ranges from competent (Leigh Whannell as the crazy reporter Larry Redmon) to the downright insulting. I’ve never heard of Cressida Bonas but her lifeless non-performance here makes me hope beyond hope that I never see her again. Having said that, she is given very little beyond ‘hot girl’ to work with in terms of character development. Elsewhere, Carrie-Anne Moss and Oscar winner Faye Dunaway look faintly embarrassed to be involved at all, and the whole thing eventually sinks under the weight of its own incompetence.

And this is a shame because somewhere underneath all the nonsense, there is the semblance of good movie here. The concept of all the world’s great inexplicable tragedies (school shootings etc) all being the fault of some kind of supernatural entity who causes people to hallucinate so much that they snap and go on a murderous rampage is a solid one. That this idea is explored for about thirty seconds and then never mentioned again is testament to the lack of imagination that occurs throughout The Bye Bye Man. Further to this, the hallucinations themselves are also solid, the unreliable narrator is always a compelling cinematic function, and these moments are undoubtedly the highlight of a film that is occasionally creepy.

The Bye Bye Man was inexplicably a financial success, which just confirms how much horror is having a ‘moment’ right now, but in reality, Stacy Title’s film is a tired rehash of much better executed horror films. Skip this, and just revisit A Nightmare on Elm Street or Hellraiser instead.