The Others (2001)

It is hard to make a PG-13 rated horror film effective. Films that have done this before include The Last Exorcism, The Ring, The Sixth Sense, and Drag Me to Hell. The third film listed, M. Night Shaymalamadingdong’s The Sixth Sense, has a lot in common with The Others, a film that was released only two years earlier. Both of the films won the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film, as did all the horror films listed earlier, except for The Last Exorcism, which was nominated, but lost to the drama/horror Let Me In. Anyway, both The Sixth Sense and The Others have that sense of creepy, subtle, demonic rage that works so great and is scary, without having to load up on blood and gore. Anyway, The Others stars Nicole Kidman (in a Golden-Globe nominated role) as a woman in 1945 who begins to experience strange happenings in her house with her two kids and brand new housekeepers. The house is very low on light, as the kids are extremely photosensitive, and if they go out in the daytime, they will have allergic reactions, and basically die. These kids are the closest we’re gonna get to real-life vampires. Sorry, Twilight fans. Anyway, due to her childrens’ disease and her husband still being away in the war even though it is months after WWII ended, this woman has slowly gone from a prestigious British housewife to Crazy McNutjob. And Nicole Kidman is great. She is a great actress, and she pulls out all the chops for this film. You can see her lose her mind more than she already has. The other actors in the film aren’t terrible, they’re not even bad at all, they’re just overpowered by Kidman and the suspense the film brings. And the suspense is high, almost from the very beginning. As most people know, it’s hard to scare me. And this movie didn’t scare me. It was thrilling, and suspenseful, but it didn’t scare me. Well, neither did The Ring, so I guess it’s okay.
8.5/10