Column: 'Molly Hartley' is just a horror movie
Nov. 3, 2008
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To be a horror movie on Halloween weekend is to be a girl at an all-boys college - the issue is not how fine a specimen you are so much as whether or not you fulfill the loosely defined guidelines of the genre.
"The Haunting of Molly Hartley," then, is really more deserving of an inspection than a review. Are there jump cuts? Yes, over and over. Is something vaguely demented and demonic occurring, slowly at first and then increasing in intensity? Yes. But if this were a cow, and our venue the State Fair, this would not be a Blue Ribbon contestant or even an honorable mention - it would just be a mention. "Molly Hartley" is a horror movie. That's about all that can be said for it.
The story will be familiar if you have ever seen a horror movie, or even a horror movie commercial. Molly, the titular hauntee, is a vaguely angsty teenager at a prep school with a dark secret, if you can believe it. What's haunting her is that, some undisclosed amount of time ago, her otherwise sane mother attempted to stab her to death with a pair of scissors. When we join the story things are just getting creepy, of course - Molly has begun to hear and, conveniently, given that this is a horror movie, see the spirit of her mother.
This mother-spirit mostly stabs her or talks about stabbing her, but aside from the moments in which she is being haunted Molly seems entirely too detached about this; she refuses help from a counselor, she worries about her place in the school pecking order and she generally seems far less frightened by the things that are happening on screen than we are supposed to be.
This dissonance extends to the horror conventions, which seem more tacked on than usual. The tense atmosphere and the jump cuts have the impression of cold filmmaker duty more than thematic necessity, and for the most part amount to nothing; Molly opens the medicine cabinet, which is played out even ironically at this point, and closes the mirror to find...nothing. A being appears in her peripheral vision and it's...a guy she likes at school.
At times it seems like a parody of horror movie conventions, but the movie's sincerity cannot be doubted, particularly when it reaches its absurd climax. It's as though the movie was half-completed as a mediocre thriller before the Halloween slot became available, and CG corpses and would-be suspenseful camerawork was added at the last second.
Now that it's November and we're in the long charge toward Christmas and, theatrically, fish-out-of-water family comedies, there's something sad about "Molly Hartley." Being a horror movie, simply existing was enough for it last week, but now it's the Christmas tree wilting in our collective living room, and there's nothing to be done for it except to stare down at the ground whenever you have to walk past it.
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