What is it about kids in horror movies? Ever since those skin-crawlingly scary twins in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, nothing unnerves me more than children chanting eerie lines of dialogue. So, if this latest trailer for Hammer Horror’s upcoming demonic possession flick The Quiet Ones is any indication, I’ll be better off staying far away from the film when it opens next week.
There’s not much new information in this third official trailer for The Quiet Ones, but it’s clear that there is going to be some freaky stuff going down in the isolated country estate where college professor James Coupland (Jared Harris, who recently played another professor – the villainous James Moriarty – in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows) retires with several of his most devoted students to study the case of a young girl named Jane (Olivia Cooke), who is exhibiting symptoms of demonic possession. As they probe the corners of her twisted subconscious, Coupland and his students begin to realize that they’re meddling with an ancient force far more powerful than themselves. Check it out below:
Maybe it’s the cutesy rhyming scheme, or the added creepiness of an antique music box playing in the background, but this trailer definitely does the trick for me. In addition to Harris, The Quiet Ones stars Sam Claflin, Erin Richards and Rory Fleck-Byrne as the three teens Coupland brings with him to experiment on Jane. Judging by some of the footage on display (as well as basic horror logic), it looks like not all of them make it out of that eerie country house alive.
Hammer Horror has enjoyed a revival in recent years, thanks to the success of modern horror classic Let Me In (a remake of the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In) and Daniel Radcliffe starrer The Woman in Black. Whether director-writer John Pogue (Quarantine 2: Terminal) is the right man to deliver a horror film capable of measuring up to either of those two remains to be seen, but we won’t have to wait long to find out. The Quiet Ones opens April 25th.