The Unholy is an adaption of the late James Herbert’s 1983 novel Shrine and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the film version was made shortly after the book’s publication and has been sitting on a shelf ever since. This is an unashamedly old-school horror chiller in the style of The Exorcist and The Omen (but obviously without the gut punch of either classic) and despite the fact that it’s outlandishly generic and its story the stuff of a hundred other lowbrow, low ambition horrors, it’s actually an enjoyable, hokey throwback to the less explicit and blood-obsessed days of horror cinema.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Gerry Fenn, a disgraced and disillusioned journalist who travels to a small Boston community to investigate reports of inexpicable goings-on that turns out to be teenage pranks. He is about to leave when he finds a corn doll inscribed with an impossible date hidden at the base of a burnt-out tree (the same tree on which, in the film’s prologue, we see a young woman accused of witchcraft in 1845 and burned alive). Fenn casually crushes the doll underfoot but in doing so he unleashes something vengeful and malevolent and the tree quickly becomes a shrine when a local deaf-mute girl gravitates towards it and begins to talk.
Not unnaturally, Fenn senses a big story developing in the town, especially when Alice, who claims that she had been communicating with ‘Mary’, starts to display extraordinary healing abilities. However, her miracles are attracting attention and suspicion and slowly the truth about Mary begins to emerge and strange powers are intent on keeping her secret before invoking a satannic ritual requiring the townsfolk to pledge themselves to Mary three times, an act that will condemn their souls to Hell.
The Unholy attempts to marry the slow, smouldering atmosphere of classic horror with the jump-scares and CGI manifestations of contemporary horror. By and large, it’s an agreeable combination even as it abandons its occasionally dreary and slightly sluggish pace to accommodate a fiery, demonic climax in which a fully-realised CGI creature materialises and starts to wreak havoc at the satanic ritual. This is all clearly destined for the ‘seen this before, thanks’ box, a creative product from another time perhaps, but it’s powered by strong performances (Jeffrey Dean Morgan is excellent as the washed-up journalist) and a narrative that feels like an old friend, offering few surprises but plenty of atmosphere and a few nicely-judged jump scares.
The Unholy is in cinemas now.
