Spookt
**Seen at the 2023 Renegade Film Festival.
There was one film that played Out of Competition at Renegade, and it was one produced by the festival’s founder, Vanessa Ionta Wright. But “Spookt” fits right in with the festival’s aesthetic of rich female characters, taking relatable human experiences and turning them into creepy cinema. In the film by Tony Reames, we follow a supernatural skeptic and a supernatural seeker whom explore an old house in Greenville, Pennsylvania. The results might actually proving both correct, which might be the most terrifying prospect of all.
Torey Haas’s screenplay breaks down the film into four sections. The first one follows Rachel (Christen Sharice) as she journeys to the house in question. She is a live-streamer whom is skeptical about supernatural events being real. We see her go to Greenville, and when she first arrives, she’s immediately beset by strange things, including a creepy-looking Amish doll where she is doing her lead-in video. When she takes it to a local, they say, “That’s not an Amish doll,” and that’s the first screw turned towards believing. But with skepticism comes a deeply-abiding danger of being proven wrong, which is where Claire (Haley Leary) comes in. She is someone whom is familiar to the community, and going at the beset of Anne (Erin Brown), the mother of a girl who disappeared there years ago. Claire is a relative novice, however, but even that can’t explain why her protective measures don’t work. Claire’s journey to the house is the second section.
The bulk of the film focuses on the house, and right away, we see that “Spookt” sets up two familiar elements for horror- creepy dolls, and creepy houses- both of which are deployed effectively throughout the film. The other element we’ve seen many times before is creepy doctors, but what about when the doctor in question, played by Eric Roberts, is supposed to be dead? (The doctor makes up the final section of the script.) That is the twist. We have several sources of horror, two women trying to figure out what is real and what is fake (if anything is), and multiple levels of horror for Reames to play with. The film feels like a Scooby-Doo episode in a lot of ways, but that’s part of why it entertains us as much as it does. Sharice and Leary are good at playing the two sides of the investigation, and Brown makes for a good third, someone who wants to believe that her daughter can be helped, even if it’s just released into the afterlife. Oh yeah, creepy kids is another horror trope we get here, and I’m for it. There are surprises abound in “Spookt,” so it’s well worth seeking out when it starts making the rounds.
