Be Afraid (2017) Review

 

Be Afraid (2017)

Be Afraid follows Dr. John Chambers, who after moving to a small town with his family, begins to experience sleep paralysis and see dark entities, a horror that is intensified when he learns that the beings plan to abduct his 7-year-old son.

There’s something to be said about ambitious B-horror movies because they can either be super cool or flat out bad, there’s usually not much of a middle ground. Which is why Be Afraid caught my attention because it seemed just that, very ambitious, perhaps a little too much. This one is a hard movie to categorize too because it tries so much with so little explanation, leaving most of the film darkly ambiguous but leaving you with this—this town has monsters that like to take kids, with a little sleep paralysis element thrown in for good measure. If that sounds cool, at times it is. Most of the time however, it’s a slow, jumbled, mish-mash of horror that sadly tries to tackle too much, leaving many elements to feel out of place, despite their obvious narrative subservience. 

For a low budget horror though, on a technical level, this film is a beauty. The camera work is impressive and doesn’t rely on static shots, but ever moving ones that give it a professional quality and at times add to the shifting horror of scenes. I was also impressed with their ability to utilize background horror as a story element, as it creates a tense quality that is hard to replicate when characters can see the danger. 

We get some decent but iffy performances in this, starring Michelle Hurd, Kevin Grevioux, Callie Thorne, Noell Coet, Louis Herthum, Michael Leone, Jaimi Paige, Jared Abrahamson, and Brian Krause. I felt Leone stood out rather nicely and probed himself a more the competent child actor who can really pull of the creep factor. Krause was also quite good, just wish we got more fleshed out end for him instead of an off screen death. 

Be Afraid, directed by Drew Gabreski, is a competent but deeply flawed horror that, in the end, suffers from being too ambitious to work, though it excels on a technical and visual level, to provide for a passable picture with some neat scares. 

5.2/10