January is a month notorious for releasing the worst horror films of the year, but as amateurs viewers, our horror movie experiences had previously been limited to the confines of our homes. That said, watching “The Boy” without the freedom to pause the movie at any time filled us with a palpable sense of dread as we walked into AMC 14 last month. Fortunately for us and unfortunately for “The Boy,” this horror movie failed to scare us as much as we expected.
As seen from the trailer, Greta, played by “Walking Dead” star Lauren Cohan is hired to take care of a “boy” who lives in an isolated mansion with his delirious parents. To Greta’s surprise, the boy is actually a life-sized porcelain doll, and she is asked to take care of it as if it were an actual human being.
For the parents, the doll is a mechanism for coping with their actual son’s death 20 years prior.
From the trailer alone, we felt confident enough that “The Boy” would give us the horror movie adrenaline rush we both enjoyed; after all, inanimate objects that end up being alive has every horror element a fan could possibly ask for, right?
Oddly enough, though, the beginning of the movie was less thrilling than we expected, starting off as a typical slasher movie that relied solely on jump scares to elicit screams. And although we would be lying if we said we weren’t more or less creeped out by the super white, realistic face of the doll, the movie dragged on so slowly that we were comfortable enough to Snapchat the entire first half without dropping all of our curly fries out of fear.
It isn’t until the last quarter of the movie when things really begin to pick up. A sudden twist in the movie sends the plot spiraling into a climatic game of cat and mouse that finally gives the movie its appropriately horrific element.
We both had to watch the flashing screen between our fingers to block out the gruesome moments that surely would have induced seizures for both of us. At one point, we shut our eyes for so long that we can’t describe some parts of the movie because we genuinely didn’t watch them.
Without spoiling too much, our need for a true scare was finally satisfied at the end of the movie with creepy attic shots featuring old Valencia photos of a seemingly happy family and our worst nightmare crawling out of walls; basically, the movie had all the cliché moments in every horror movie.
As we left the theater, we were disappointed by the lack of depth and originality in “The Boy”; the movie only managed to give us the expected chills of any horror film related with dolls. If amateurs like us were able to stomach “The Boy,” rest assured that true horror movie fanatics will be able to watch with no problem.