At the end of Nicholas McCarthy’s The Pact, Annie (Caity Lotz) killed the Judas Killer, her crazed uncle responsible for the decapitation of several women over several decades. Annie was ready to move on, but Evil (or, more accurately, film studio economic interest) wasn’t done with her. McCarthy bailed on making a sequel, leaving Dallas Richard Hallam and Patrick Horvath to take over writing and directing duties. Hallam and Horvath aren’t a bad choice; their first film Entrance is a bit of a misfire, but its stubborn dedication to low-key horror made it an admirable failure. That restrained form of filmmaking falls in line with the slow burn quality of McCarthy’s film, except Hallam and Horvath fail to replicate anything close to what made its predecessor effective.

Lotz, doing her best take on Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, doesn’t show up until the halfway mark. The main character this time around is June (Camilla Luddington), a crime scene cleaner, and her police officer boyfriend Daniel (Scott Michael Foster, seen mostly entering or leaving their house). Daniel works on a homicide matching the Judas Killer’s MO, while June suffers from nightmares looking awfully similar to the crime scene. It isn’t until FBI profiler Ballard (Patrick Fischler, unsure whether to ham it up or go method) explains what’s going on that the pieces begin falling into place. June’s biological mother was one of Judas’ victims, making June fearful that the killer’s spirit has latched on to her. June begins experiencing hauntings, and as her nightmares grow in intensity more bodies pile up.

The film’s first half is loosely connected to The Pact, making this story feel retrofitted into a clear attempt at building a VOD franchise. Swap the Judas Killer with any other made up serial psychopath, and no one would notice. That wouldn’t be a bad thing if the storyline had any vitality in it. The murky, ugly cinematography goes well with the film’s plodding narrative, setting up a boring mystery none of the characters look particularly interested in solving. For a brief moment it looks like Hallam and Horvath introduce the idea of June committing these murders in her sleep, but that possibility slowly fades away, acting like a half-assed red herring. It’s lazy writing, giving off the impression that Hallam and Horvath have no clue what they’re trying to do. McCarthy’s script for The Pact, while full of its own issues, looks masterful next to this messy attempt at a sequel.

Once Annie comes back into the picture, The Pact 2 shows a brief flicker of life, the kind of fun familiarity from seeing old characters pop up again. That flicker vanishes once it’s apparent that Hallam and Horvath just want to remake The Pact in 45 minutes. The exact same story beats and plot twists as the first film happen here, only this time applied to June instead of Annie. And by lazily slapping a newer, weaker coat of paint over the old one, The Pact 2 devolves into complete nonsense by its climax, throwing in plot twists just for the sake of it. It’s bad enough that Hallam and Horvath can’t do a good job with their own original story in the sequel; even when directly copying the first film, they still screw it up.

Scares are mostly absent here. Carl Sondrol’s score throws screeching strings and booming percussion over scenes in an attempt to freak viewers out. The score actually hurts the effectiveness of the horror, especially during one sequence involving a shadow. If anything the music signals overcompensation on the filmmakers’ part, that they aren’t confident enough in their abilities to unnerve. That lack of confidence runs throughout The Pact 2. McCarthy’s film certainly showed confidence through its direction; the same can’t be said for Hallam and Horvath. The Pact 2 is an amateur, stale follow-up, an attempt to start another low rent, low quality series of horror films to profit from bored Netflix subscribers. The film’s ending, a warning from one character that “it’s starting again,” all but confirms a third Pact will be on its way if The Pact 2 proves successful enough. That thought alone is scarier than anything in this film.

The Pact 2 trailer

The long road between the small screen and the silver screen is littered with the corpses of wonderfully talented individuals who knew nothing but success when beamed into millions of homes each week, but many failed to bring those millions of viewers into the box office. Oh, there are those who successfully navigated that road: Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks, Johnny Depp, Bruce Willis, Ron Howard. Even Jennifer Aniston, who many think is box office poison, but is actually a success if you study the numbers carefully.

The rest of Aniston’s Friends cast mates? Roadside litter. Sure, they’ve all found work and even Courtney Cox had the Scream franchise, but those five Central Perk denizens who didn’t play Rachel just haven’t made it happen on the big screen. The same might someday be said for the cast of Glee. It’s still a little too soon to tell, but early indications aren’t promising. Chris Colfer had some indie success with Struck By Lightning, but Lea Michelle’s New Year’s Eve and Dianna Agron’s I Am Number Four and The Family failed to dazzle. Next up, Glee alum Naya Rivera takes on her first lead in IFC Midnight’s At the Devil’s Door.

Somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the late 1980s, a young man convinces his young lover to sell her soul to the devil for a stack of cash. She does it but regrets it – and regrets it doubly so after the devil has his way with her. Fast-forward to the present day and a middle-aged couple whose daughter is missing needs to sell their house to make ends meet in a tough economy. Their real estate agent is Leigh (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who, walking through the house after it has been all but emptied, finds the exact same cash from decades before – the devil’s money. When things take a dark turn, Leigh’s sister Vera (Naya Rivera), a rising artist, does some investigating that leads her back to the story of that first young girl. What you get with writer/director Nicholas McCarthy‘s At the Devil’s Door is a little win, a little lose, and a little draw.

In the win column is the most important thing you want from a horror film: scares … and plenty of them. McCarthy (The Pact) kicks off the film with an intense prologue about the girl and her deal with the devil, and every scary scene that follows maintains a high level of intensity. And it is intensity, not simply a series of jump scares shoddily designed and recklessly inserted for cheap thrills. There are one or two effective (and acceptable) false-fright moments, but every other shock is earned by doing something shocking.

Also in the win column is some very good cinematography from Bridger Nielson, who is at his best in the prologue scenes. Speaking of those prologue scenes, they also appear as flashbacks, deftly inserted throughout the film and creating a non-linear story that keeps you interested.

Well … their deft insertion keeps you interested in the flashback scenes, at least.

And herein lies the first half of the one-two punch in the loss column for At the Devil’s Door: the story – the modern-day story – isn’t so much a house of cards as it is a couple of flimsy deuces and fours hastily thrown together to resemble something that wants to be a structure. The entire plot feels like it was written around a few key scary scenes. That makes every non-scary moment that takes place onscreen the moment that brings the film to a grinding halt with unnecessary tedium. It is so frustrating. You know the film can’t be 90 minutes of scares, so you want those downtimes, those heart-calming rests, to at least be interesting or advance a plot. There is no advancement here. There are only moments that move you from Point A to Point B like a dull city bus ride.

The back-end of that bad combination are the poorly developed characters, namely sisters Leigh and Vera. The only things I can tell you about them are this: their occupations, that they’re relationship is tenuous for reasons unknown, that Leigh is a Christian because one day she goes to church to pray (in one of those scenes that serves no purpose other than for McCarthy to suggest that, hey, God is here too), and that Vera’s latest boy toy is a doofus. And when I say “the only thing I can tell you,” I don’t mean because of spoilers. I mean because the women are never developed beyond that. These aren’t characters, they’re characteristics, but that’s all they’ve got. Even by the film’s end, I had no grasp of what kind of people these women were.

What’s so funny is that the prologue parts that were woven into the story were so compelling that I want to know more about those people than I do Leigh and Vera. How did they get there? Why did they need the money? Who is the mysterious man who runs the shell game? Prequel, please.

That leaves the draw: Rivera. The jury is still out on the Glee actress as a movie star because of the losses above. Without a developed character to lose herself into or a decent story to get lost in, she never has a chance to show if she has any range at all. It looks like her direction from McCarthy consisted of either brood or pout, because when the devil isn’t lurking, that’s about all her character does.

At the Devil’s Door makes the case for Nicholas McCarthy’s potential as a horror director. There is plenty to like in this film in terms of atmosphere and fright, but his director half needs to demand more from his writer half. Every horror film released today stands in the shadows of films like The Conjuring and Oculus. That doesn’t mean they need A-list stars or directors; that means they must remember that a horror story isn’t just about the horror; it’s about the story, too.

At the Devil’s Door trailer

After getting a warm reception at Sundance in 2011 with his short film of the same title, Nicholas McCarthy was able to get funding for a feature-length expansion of his short. One year later McCarthy came back to Sundance to premiere The Pact in their midnight line-up. I wouldn’t know how the two versions compare to each other (the short doesn’t look like it’s available to watch anywhere) but it feels like The Pact might have worked better as a short.

The film opens with a woman (Agnes Bruckner) arguing with her sister Annie (Caity Lotz) on the phone over their recently deceased mother. Annie refuses to help because of their abusive upbringing, forcing her sister to take care of everything at their mother’s house. Eventually Annie makes her way down to help out, but when she arrives her sister has disappeared without a trace. It doesn’t take long before weird things start happening at the mother’s house, but soon Annie’s cousin and niece come and visit. At this point Annie realizes something’s terrible going on when her cousin vanishes and she is literally thrown around the house by some sort of entity. Annie teams up with a cop (Casper Van Dien, sounding like Batman) and start to discover the true history behind her family and the house while looking for her sister and cousin.

It’s evident from the beginning that McCarthy’s strengths lie behind the camera instead of on the page. The house, an ordinary looking bungalow in California, feels like the kind of place anyone’s been in when visiting an old relative and McCarthy milks this feeling for all its worth. There are plenty of scenes in the first act where the camera follows characters around the house that, when someone pulls out the floor plan of the house in a later scene, it’s as familiar to us as it is to Annie.

The movie’s murky look, reminiscent of the kind of low-budget horror movies you would find at the video store, is one of The Pact’s strongest qualities. There’s an uneasy mood that comes from it, and it helps build up the slow burning quality to a lot of scenes in the first half (The fact that McCarthy builds certain scenes around cell phones, laptops and other pieces of technology is one of the more interesting parts of the movie. If you took those elements away, I wouldn’t be surprised if people thought this was made in the 1990s).

It’s unfortunate then that, with the good directorial talent on hand, the script comes up short. Almost everything in The Pact has been seen before, from the violent ghost that might actually be trying to help to the kooky medium and running across town to pick up clues. There’s a sequence where Annie contacts a girl she knew from high school (Haley Hudson) who might be able to talk to the dead that’s completely baffling from its after-school special setting of what looks like a crack house to the girl’s boyfriend/assistant who acts like he’s about to rip off someone’s head at any second. Once a surprising reveal is shown off in the final act (and the simplicity of this reveal is probably the movie’s scariest moment) things began looking up again until it dished out another set of clichés.

If Nicholas McCarthy is able to work on his writing a little more and try to avoid genre conventions as much as possible, he could be a horror director to look out for in the future. There is a lot of potential shown in The Pact, but the clunky writing and bombardment of clichés end up overshadowing the better qualities of the film.