Looking for help, Nicole (Bruckner) calls her younger sister Annie to see when she will be arriving. But Annie has no intention of attending the funeral or ever returning to the house they grew up in with their abusive mother. Just like their father not long after she was born, when Annie cut-out she never looked back.
Now, there’s a lot of family baggage unpacked in this heated exchange; like how Annie is surprised Nicole is even there, given her history of disappearing on a bender when things got difficult. But Nicole counters, saying things have been different since the birth of her daughter, Eva, and how she’s been clean and sober for nearly five years running.
But a lot is left unspoken, too, as just the mere mention of what their mother used to do to them in terms of corporal punishment is enough to end the phone call before they get into too many details about what happened to them in a certain closet back in the day.
With that, an agitated Nicole opens her laptop and starts a video Skype session with her cousin, Liz (Perkins), who is babysitting Eva (Bright), hoping to say goodnight to her daughter. But the unsecured Wi-Fi she’s pirating off a neighbor isn’t very strong and Nicole starts to move around the house with the laptop, trying to find a few more bars.
The electricity seems to be on the fritz, too, as the lights constantly flicker on and off as she wanders throughout the house. And when Nicole finally finds a hot spot and reconnects, Eva only manages to ask who is that standing behind her mommy before the signal craps out again.
Startled as something brushes up against the back of her neck, Nicole turns around but no one is there. However, there’s a door now open that was closed before.
Putting the laptop down, Nicole slowly inches toward this door and opens it further, which reveals nothing but darkness. Darkness that seems to swallow her whole when she steps inside.
Cut to a few days later, where a girl on a motorcycle pulls into the driveway of the Barlow house. Removing her helmet, Annie Barlow (Lotz) notes her sister’s car is still in the driveway before entering the two bedroom bungalow, where nothing has changed since about 1978, furnishings, avocado tones, wall paper, carpet, and nautical-themed decor wise.
No one answers when she shouts for her sister. Also, her voicemail is full of frantic messages from Liz, worrying about Nicole. (Odds are good Liz’s prodding is the only reason Annie’s even here.)
Taking in the scene, Annie calls Liz, assuring her this is just what Nicole always does: runs off, and she will eventually turn up, like she always did. But when she speed dials Nicole next, Annie hears her sister's cell phone ringing and traces the sound to what turns out to be the dreaded closet alluded to earlier -- which turns out to be the same doorway Nicole disappeared into. But now, in the light of day, the closet is empty, except for the buzzing phone.
Then, more noises lead Annie into their old shared bedroom, where a jewelry box has fallen to the floor dislodging a set of keys.
And later that night, as she fitfully sleeps, a strange presence seems to move throughout the house, audibly breathing and murmuring as it goes. A clatter in the kitchen awakens Annie, who finds the fridge open and several food items scattered on the floor; and then a picture of her mother falls from the wall and cracks open on the hallway floor, which reveals it was folded in half and was actually a picture of her mother and another woman in a bright floral dress.
Well. So much for getting any sleep tonight.
The next day, Annie attends her mother’s funeral but can barely bring herself to look at the body resting in the casket. Nicole fails to show up. When the services conclude, she meets up with Liz and Eva and they adjourn back to the house.
As the evening wears on Annie unearths an old pack of smokes, which taste like she’s still fifteen; but quickly stubs it out -- still fearful of what her mother would do if she caught her smoking in the house.
When Liz asks if it was really that bad growing up here, Annie says whatever you’re thinking on a scale of 1 to 10, double it, and then add 30. And the only reason Annie is even here, so they’re clear, is to find Nicole.
Later that night, Annie’s sleep is once more interrupted by bad dreams of a man weeping in her old room -- could this be a repressed memory of some kind? Meanwhile, someone or something is prowling around the house again and eventually wakes up Liz, who startles at a ghostly shadow filling her door frame.
Then, Annie is awoken by her phone chiming, which shows a new location has been pinned in Google maps. And as the lights start flickering, some thumping draws her to the bedroom where Liz was sleeping -- only she’s not there.
Suddenly, the dreaded closet door blows wide open and an unseen, ghostly force violently seizes Annie and drags her kicking and screaming right toward it!
But after some fierce struggling, Annie is able to fend off this phantom attacker, breaks free, and flees outside. And she would probably still be running, too, if not for the sound of Eva crying from inside.
Circling back in through the kitchen, Annie arms herself with a knife and heads for Eva’s room when that malevolent force seizes her again, tossing her around as if in a tantrum, and then slams her into a hallway wall, knife first, which remains embedded in the drywall as she struggles to reach Eva, whom her aunt scoops up and holds tight as she fights her way back outside, where they run off into the night, away from whatever evil haunts the Barlow house -- be it a ghost, or something even worse…
As a kid growing up in the 1970s, Nicholas McCarthy started making films with his Super-8 camera at the age of 10, imitating the monster movies he watched religiously on syndicated TV.
“Though I don’t remember the very first horror movie I ever saw, as a kid, I was addicted to a TV programming block coming out of Boston called Creature Double Feature,” McCarthy recalled in an interview with John Llewellyn Probert for This is Horror (August 19, 2012).
“It was where this channel would dump all its old horror, science fiction and monster movies, most of them being from the 1950s. The one that made the deepest impression on me was a 1958 Universal B-picture called The Thing That Couldn’t Die, about a severed head that hypnotizes people (!). It scared and fascinated me and I still carry a lot of its images in my head today.”
Thus, a lifelong horror and offbeat genre film fan already, as McCarthy got older he was then drawn to the films of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg and George Romero, as well as European directors like Dario Argento and Sergio Martino. He then started incorporating their styles into the short films he produced after graduating with a degree in filmmaking from State University of New York at Purchase (SUNY).
“I suppose if I was to psychoanalyze, it was because I was raised a Catholic,” said McCarthy (Probert, 2012), explaining his fascination with the macabre and grotesque. “I was the youngest and probably left in front of the television more, and the mixture of the blood and gore of the story of Christ with the hours spent watching movies about things like giant ants eating people kind of hard-wired my brain.”
But, “As I got older and started to make films, I realized how cinematic the genre was. Atmosphere is so important to horror films, no matter how big or small the movie, and that really comes from a director versus anything else.”
Moving to Los Angeles around 2000, McCarthy, while still producing his own short films, worked briefly for a video company that produced “Making of” documentaries for feature films released on DVD, where he worked on featurettes for Robocop (1987), The Princess Bride (1987), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Starship Troopers (1997). He also helped form the Alpha 60 Film Collective with several other ardent cinephiles, who then collaborated on making more short films to be featured at the Echo Park Film Center.
Here, McArthy’s short film Maid (2004) -- a “Spanish language documentary that evolves into a Korean musical in less than six minutes” -- drew the attention of a scout from the Sundance Film Festival, who invited the filmmaker to submit his work to the prestigious showcase.
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Nicholas McCarthy.
Thus, after crowd-sourcing a budget of around $15,000, McArthy’s next film, Cry for Help (2005), where a dead drug dealer meets a zombified Jesus, premiered at Sundance in 2005. And while McCarthy had hoped this would draw enough interest to land him a feature, it did not. Neither did his next submission, Chinese Box (2009). But his third attempt, The Pact (2011), was something different and finally struck a chord.
“[That] short film came out of being frustrated,” McCarthy told Matt Barone for Complex (July 6, 2012). “I’d been writing screenplays for a few years, and making short film after short film, and I had just a tiny bit of success with both of those things. As a screenwriter, I had a couple of tiny jobs, but I could never justify, at the end of the year, calling myself a ‘screenwriter’ as an occupation. Some shorts I’d made had played at Sundance and some other good festivals, but it was hard to get to the place where I wanted to be, which, of course, was making feature films.
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“So I decided to make a little 10-minute ghost story, and it was really inspired by the way people told ghost stories in real life,” McCarthy continued. “And essentially the first half of that short is someone telling a story, about feeling the presence of this ghost, and the second half of the short is this ghost kind of appearing, though it’s unclear whether it’s real or not, or whether this woman had invented it.”
Thus, "The Pact short was more the way people told ghost stories in real life, and that was something that always creeped the [expletive deleted] out of me as a little kid, and still does. It’s when you sit down with someone and they tell you something happened, and everyone has those stories, whether it’s something that happened to them or that happened to a friend of theirs.
“Tone is really everything in horror movies, I think. You can tell the bad ones from the good ones for that reason, and, as a filmmaker, that’s maybe why they interest me more than other genres. Horror movies are just so cinematic, and there are so many things you can do that you could never get away with if you were making some other kind of movie.”
For his whole life those around him, family and friends, openly wondered when McCarthy would ever get around to making such a horror movie. Thus far, his shorts had been experimental character studies that teetered toward the avant garde. And The Pact short appears to start out as yet another one of those moody character studies as two estranged siblings, Adrian and Anna (Sam Ball, Jewel Staite), work to settle the estate of their dead mother. But as the film unfolds, the narrative takes a sharp left turn after the brother leaves and a ghostly unseen hand brushes up against the back of Anna’s neck.
From there, the short pretty much echoes what happened to Nicole as Anna is drawn deeper into the house by the flickering lights and odd noises before opening a door and disappearing into the darkness.
McCarthy took it as a good omen when numerous people sought him out after the short’s Sundance premiere and commented on how much it “scared the shit out of them." And sure enough, three days later McCarthy was contacted by Jamie Carmichael, a representative of Content Media -- Willow Creek (2013), Starry Eyes (2014), Escape Room (2017) -- who wanted to expand the unsettling short into a feature film.
“I didn’t have any plans for the thing, other than me wanting to make this movie that I had in my head, but the short got into Sundance,” said McCarthy (Barone, 2012). “I finished it, a couple of weeks later it premiered at the festival; and a few days after that I had a meeting with [Content Media], and they said, ‘We want to turn this into a feature.’”
Apparently, Carmichael figured the short was just a teaser, a proof of concept, and assumed there was already a full script ready to go. But! McCarthy had told the story he wanted to tell and, well, that was it. “The short was a contained movie, but it was all about not explaining everything. That extended itself into what the feature film became, but I think the people who saw the short from Content Media just assumed that I had a bigger story. There was so much that seemed to be left out. That was on purpose and was one of the things that, I think, aided the film’s atmosphere and made it really creepy.”
When asked about this phantom script by his potential suitors, McCarthy, not wanting to bork the opportunity, freely admitted later that “I lied to them and said yes [there was]. I told them that I had this whole big plan for a feature script, but that I had to go and do another draft of it.”
Luckily, the studio bought this fib and agreed to finance the film for $400,000. However, McCarthy would use the short as the opening salvo to set his hooks into the audience, telling Adam Lowes of Hey-U-Guys (June 7, 2012), “The short is similar to the opening of the feature film, but different in tone -- it's sort of a poetic character study and the horror in it is all implied. I’ve been a lifelong fan of the genre so when I got the opportunity to make a feature version I went and wrote an all-new movie. I didn’t want to repeat the ideas of the short, I wanted to explore a totally different side of my interests and do a full-throttle horror movie.”
Thus and so, McCarthy spent the next month banging his head against a wall, trying to figure out how he could expand his short to feature length. “A mistake some people make when preparing horror films is that they choose to make their movie in some kind of fantastical place. It can be much more effective if it’s in the world that most of us know and the kind we don’t get to see much of in movies,” said McCarthy (Lowes, 2012).
“I did research for the short film on the things some people believe in about how ghosts operate. In the short it’s quite explicit what the ghost can do. For the feature, I continued along those same lines but elaborated with my own inventions to serve the story.” And what he came up with for The Pact (2012) was a ghost story wrapped up inside a grisly murder mystery.
McCarthy would bring back nearly everyone who had worked on the short -- cinematographer Bridger Nielson, production designer Walter Barnett, composer Ronen Landa, and editor Adriaan van Zyl, but the tone of the feature would be completely different. For while the short dealt with metaphorical dread, McCarthy wanted the feature to deal with the literal and physical fright as several family skeletons are shaken loose out of the Barlow house as things unravel like a peeled onion.
As McCarthy told Lowes, “When I grew up I would read some critics talk about how high class directors like Alfred Hitchcock relied on suggestion versus actually showing violence. But then I looked at Hitchcock’s later films, and they have some of the most disturbing, graphically violent moments in movies from that time because he was finally able to show these things without fear of censorship. That taught me that graphic violence should be there when your story demands it. The Pact has graphic violence in small doses, which makes you really feel the full power of it.”
And to get to the center of this malediction of a mystery to find out what happened to Nicole, and now Liz, will involve some massive spoilers on the righteous plot-twists to come, as McCarthy wears those cinematic inspirations I mentioned earlier on his sleeve as these events unfold, drawing from the industrial horror of Carpenter and the Italian gialli of Argento especially (-- there’s even a bottle of J 'n' B scotch hidden in plain sight, let me know if you find it).
According to McCarthy, Argento probably had the biggest influence on his first feature, telling Barone, “I showed Suspiria (1977) to my director of photography, and we talked about how the camera in that film is this kind of third-person voice that wanders away from the characters and explores things. I really wanted to capture that; it was really important to set that tone.”
But not just for their protracted murder set-pieces, as the film takes its own sweet time and is very deliberate as reality and memory collide, leading to an eerie unreality, where it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins at times thanks to some preternatural shenanigans as Annie reports what happened at the house to the police.
Now, given the strange and somewhat unusual circumstances surrounding her statement, Detective Bill Creek (Van Dien) would like the witness to go over it all again for the umpteenth time.
This pisses Annie off, of course, but he asks for patience. Taken from his perspective, after reading the report of the officers who responded to the scene, with the signs of struggle, the knife embedded in the wall, ghosts or no ghosts, he asks Annie what that sounded like to her; because it sure looks like a garden variety domestic dispute to him.
Thus, suspected of foul play, as she storms out of the police station, Creek warns Annie not to leave town until he sorts this all out.
After checking in on Eva, who's been turned over to Child Protective Services until they can locate her mother, Annie checks into a hotel, where her attention is once more drawn to her phone, which still shows the pinned address on a map.
Typing this info into her sister’s laptop, she toggles to street-view which shows a snapshot of an open field surrounded by several trees. But in the middle of the blurry photo stands the mystery woman in the floral dress from the photo, looking and pointing toward something out of frame. And after zooming in, the woman is now looking directly at her which causes Annie to slam the laptop shut.
Later, after dreaming of the weeping man in her room again, Annie goes for a soda, returns to her room from the vending machines, only to see the woman in the floral dress lying on one of the beds, her decapitated head hanging from a lamp by the tethered hair! Frozen, as if trapped in amber, Annie suddenly wakes up.
I honestly don’t know how far this dream goes back but neither does Annie, really. And after an absurdly comedic interlude which short-circuits her efforts to just skip town, Annie gets proactive and starts digging through Nicole’s stuff for any clues.
This includes papers and documents concerning her mother’s estate, complete with a blueprint of the house that reveals a small third bedroom she had no idea existed. And stranger still, the knife left embedded in the wall marks exactly where the door should be.
And with this clue, which she feels solidifies her case for supernatural malfeasance, Annie brings Creek to the house, removes the knife and breaks away the drywall revealing a locked door, which is remedied with those keys she found earlier.
Inside, the room is barren except for a lonely bed frame and a bare box spring. However, they do discover several peepholes that allow access to observe every other room in the house.
Now, at this point, Annie feels the ghost of her mother is behind all of this: the lights, the noises, the keys, the knife, as if leaving breadcrumbs, and is trying to show her something. Something about the woman in the floral dress. But Creek doesn’t buy this, saying it’s weird, sure, but proves nothing.
Thus, with no help coming from the police, and needing answers from the beyond, Annie seeks out a blind girl she knew in high school named Stevie (Hudson), a clairvoyant, to try and contact her mother.
Stevie agrees to help, and with her overly protective brother Giles (Ball), they return to the house. And while Stevie picks up nothing from the mother, she feels a terrible presence in the closet, someone “taking in all the light.” She then bursts into tears, “seeing” what used to go on in there with the Barlow girls.
Next, they move into the secret bedroom where Stevie is overwhelmed by whatever lurks in there, saying it’s trying to hide something; something it didn’t want anyone to know before collapsing on the floor, where she starts gibbering the word Judas over and over. And then the ghost tries to pull Stevie under the bed!
Then, as Giles and Annie struggle to break her free, Annie sees the woman in the floral dress floating in the air above them. Stevie senses her, too, but has no answer when asked who this woman is.
With that, and with the malignant house taking a terrible toll on his sister, Giles violently pushes Annie away, fist to face, and they leave her behind with more questions than answers.
Undaunted, Annie starts plugging those questions into online search engines, starting with Judas. And after sorting through all the biblical stuff she finds a more relevant and local entry about an unidentified serial killer who went by the handle of Judas, who was active between 1975 and 1989, with seven victims attributed to him before he up and vanished.
Digging further, Annie finds a list of victims and recognizes the last one, Jennifer Glick (Wright), as the woman in the floral dress.
And with this being the internet, of course there are crime scene photos, which show the decapitated victim wearing the very same dress, her head hanging from a drain pipe by the hair, lucidly echoing her dream at the hotel.
Thus, Annie realizes it’s not her mother who is haunting the Barlow house but the murder victim. And the ghost of Jennifer Glick wasn’t attacking her but trying to show her something. Now to find out what, and why.
Meanwhile, Creek goes over the photos he took at the Barlow house; and one in particular, which shows a ghostly hand pointing toward the closet. And in a really cool scene, he returns to the house, where he can’t see the hand with the naked eye but it’s still visible through the camera’s viewfinder!
And stranger still, as he circles around it, he gets a full, 360-degree view of the partial apparition.
Moving to the closet, he finds what looks like a loose board on the wall, starts to pry it open, but leaves it be when he hears someone else moving around the house.
Drawn into the girl’s old bedroom, Creek is ambushed by an unseen assailant, stabbed in the neck, severing his carotid, and quickly bleeds out.
Meanwhile, Annie is slowly piecing things together and will at last get to the truth, starting at the address the ghost left on her phone. Here, she quickly deduces Glick's "spirit" was pointing toward her mother’s church.
Inside, she is drawn to the photographs of the annual church picnic, which always took place in the sa,e meadow indicated by the map, where the folded photo was taken -- most notably the one from 1989, where her mother is standing by Jennifer, who is not only wearing the familiar dress but also wears a cross on a chain. The exact same cross and chain Annie’s mom gifted her when she was a child, and who still wears it to this very day!
Also lurking in the photo is a man by the name of Charles Barlow. Unsure of who this is, more digging reveals Charles was her uncle, a longshoreman, who also disappeared around 1989.
And as it all starts to fall together, Annie calls Stevie to confirm a few things. Her mother did something awful that she kept hidden for decades. And now, the ghost of Jennifer Glick is trying to show Annie what that was. And until she figures out what that is exactly, Annie will never be rid of the pestering presence. And to do that, Stevie instructs Annie to hold a seance in the house.
Using a homemade Ouija board scrawled on the floor of the hidden room and the cross as a planchette, Annie confirms the ghost is Jennifer Glick and that she was killed by Judas. When asked what she wants Annie to know, the possessed board just finished spelling out the word “below” when a trapdoor suddenly pops open underneath the bed!
And as she scrambles for cover behind some ripped up curtains still hanging over the sealed windows, the living skeleton that was once Charles Barlow emerges from the crawlspace.
Unaware Annie is there, he opens a secret panel and crawls out of the room, through the dreaded closet, and into the house proper.
Obviously, this is the final piece to the puzzle: Charles Barlow was the Judas killer. And as the old criminal axiom goes, don’t shit where you eat unless you wanna get caught. But Barlow couldn’t help himself and killed a close family acquaintance, Jennifer Glick. His sister, Annie’s mother, most likely knew he was a killer all along and, to protect him from getting caught, walled up the room, meaning Barlow spent the last twenty plus years hiding in plain sight.
But with his deceased sister no longer there to take care of him, Barlow was left unsupervised and the killings started anew. And all the while, the ghost of Jennifer Glick was trying to show anyone who ventured into the house the danger lurking all around them.
This is all confirmed when Annie shines her flashlight into Barlow’s spider-hole, revealing Creek’s body. Spotting his holstered gun, Annie lowers herself into the crawlspace, where she also makes the grisly discovery of Nicole’s severed head hanging by the hair (-- and though we never see her, Liz most likely met the same fate.) And the implication here is pretty horrible, too, if you think about it, as Jennifer was trying but ultimately failed to save Liz earlier when pulling Annie toward the closet.
After retrieving the gun, she returns to the bedroom but makes too much noise, drawing Barlow back into the room. And while she does manage to get a shot off it goes wide, allowing Barlow to knock her out.
When she awakens in the closet, Annie is bound hand and foot and her hair is knotted around a drain pipe (-- I’m assuming the same way dear old mom used to do it).
As she struggles to free herself, Annie manages to weaponize a wire coat hanger and gets the door open, which reveals Barlow coming for her with his trusty decapitating knife.
A violent struggle follows, where Annie manages to stab Barlow with the wire, who falls back and drops his knife.
Using this to hack her hair loose, once free, the ghost of Jennifer Glick seizes the girl and pulls her back into the hidden bedroom near the discarded gun.
Grabbing it, Annie once more fires at Barlow and this time the bullet catches him right between the eyes. Then, with her spectral covenant fulfilled at last, after a triumphant whoop, the ghost of Jennifer Glick vacates the house at long last and heads toward the light.
In the aftermath, Annie settles the estate and sells off the house. And as she leaves for the last time, Annie finally breaks down and grieves for her sister and cousin.
Then, in her efforts to move on and put the past behind her, Annie reaches out and takes custody of Eva. What the future holds for them, well, they’ll just have to figure that out as they go.
Still, these past events have left their mark, and the house and its new resident ghost still haunts her dreams as we fade out to the end.
Back in 1973 author Jack Vance published his novel Bad Ronald, which tells the tale of Ronald Wilby, a proto-incel teenager who lives alone with his divorced mother. Confused by his burgeoning sexual urges, after being rejected by a classmate, Wilby rapes a younger girl in retaliation for this, killing her in the process.
Leaving evidence behind that can identify him, Ronald confesses what he did to his over-protective mother, who takes it upon herself to hide him in a walled off room inside their house, where he remains during the day and comes out at night through a trapdoor.
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This works until his mother unexpectedly dies. And then things get even more complicated when a family with three daughters move into what they think is a vacant house. More murders follow.
Vance’s novel was adapted a year later into a fairly intense and slightly disturbing Made for TV Movie of the same name. But even though they considerably toned down the more squicky elements from the source novel, to make it more standards and practices friendly, the telefilm went on to scar many adolescents of the era who tuned in for it -- and I’m pretty sure one of them was Nicholas McCarthy.
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Yeah, I failed to mention this earlier because that would’ve been way too big a spoiler for anyone aware of Vance’s novel or film adaptation. Well, that, and another huge influence on The Pact I failed to mention was Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as it’s really easy to draw a line between the characters and plot:
Marion Crane and Nicole enter a strange place and disappear; their sisters, Lila Crane and Annie come looking for them and run into a mystery; two detectives, Arbogast and Creek get too close to the truth and wind up stabbed in the face; and turns out it wasn’t really the mother all along in either.
But when combining all of these influences -- some of them painfully obvious at times, and we’ll get to a few more in a sec -- McCarthy manages to spin them into something truly unique. I love his patience as he lays out the puzzle pieces; and I love how even then nothing is completely spelled out for the audience, challenging us to keep up:
“We only cut one scene out of the feature film, and it was the one that explained the ‘rules’ of the ghost,” McCarthy revealed (Lowes, 2012). “The reason I did that was because I felt the more the rules were explained the less interesting the film would be. Everyone who has written articles on the film use words like ghost, paranormal, spirit, entity, haunting, but none of those words are ever spoken in the movie. An audience’s assumption is a powerful thing.”
Now, one of the hardest things to do in a horror movie these days is to stay ahead of the audience and keep them guessing. But as The Pact unfolded before me on first viewing, I honestly had no idea what was really going on or where it was headed until McCarthy wanted me to. And I don’t think people realize how rare that is, or how hard that is, cinematically speaking. And what makes this all tick is an arresting performance by Caity Lotz as Annie Barlow.
Lotz started her career as a dancer, touring with Avril Lavigne and Lady Gaga. She was also an experienced martial artist familiar with Taekwondo and Krav Maga, as well as being a practitioner of Parkour. Thus, when she moved to acting, she performed her own fights and stunts. In fact, I discovered her while watching the TV-series Arrow (2012-2020), where she played the original Black Canary and later the White Canary, instantly fell in love, and started tracking down everything else she’d been in, which is what initially led me to The Pact.
“It was definitely a demanding role, especially because you don’t have any downtime when you’re shooting, and my character is in every scene in the movie,” said Lotz (Lowes, 2012). “It would be a quick wardrobe change then straight on to the next scene. It was also exhausting to be in that constantly terrified state of mind for long periods of time. It’s very high energy to act that way and it gets really tiring.”
One can understand why, given some of the stunts and gags pulled off for the film, especially the scenes where she’s being rag-dolled around the house by the ghost, even though it turns out their intentions were noble.
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“That was inspired by a movie called The Entity (1982),” said McCarthy (Barone, 2012). Oh, yeah. THAT movie. Long and the short, The Entity was based on the notorious paranormal case study of Doris Bither, whose claims she was being allegedly molested repeatedly by some preternatural presence were scientifically verified. Sort of. We reviewed it earlier this year for those curious to know more. Fair warning, it's very graphic and a lot to absorb and parse between the multiple sexual assaults and the efforts of some ersatz ghost-busters trying to capture the degenerate presence with a glorified snow-blower.
Said McCarthy of the notorious film, “I’m kind of scared to say that I like that movie, because it’s such a despicable film and has a terrible taste. That was a studio film, and back then it was like, ‘Oh, let’s go to the movie theater and either see the new Woody Allen film or this movie about an invisible person who serial-rapes this woman for hours!’ But that feeling of being terrorized was what we were going for with that sequence.
“Technically, it was hard on Caity, but we were also game for it. We just choreographed it as a little fight scene, which is what I think they did for The Entity; I went back and studied what they did, and they blocked it like a fight scene, except one of the people who’s fighting isn’t there.”
Said Lotz (Lowes, 2012), “The stunt side was OK, though. I’m from a dancing background and I’ve done stunts before so that, to me, was the easy part. I didn’t mind being hooked up to wires and thrown around the house. That was really fun.”
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“It required a lot of wire-work,” added McCarthy (Barone, 2012). “We got this guy who usually requires a [expletive deleted]-load of money to come in and do that stuff for really cheap; he came down and did the movie for pretty much nothing. What I discovered was, with wire-work on a movie like The Matrix (1999), you’re on a sound stage and it’s all set up in this classy way; for our way, wire-work was basically tying ropes around our actress and throwing her to the floor. It’s one of the few digital effects in the whole movie, but we then gave that footage to a digital effects artist and he removed the ropes.”
Also, Lotz appreciated McCarthy’s willingness to adapt as she found the character. “You get so much more creative freedom when your character is the lead, just because the story revolves around you,” Lotz explained to Karen Moul for SciFi Vision (June 10, 2012). “You get a lot of creative freedom to explore different things because you’re not trying to fit into another character’s story. [We] both didn’t want Annie to be dumb. We don’t want it to be where someone in the theater is like ‘Pick up the knife, you idiot!’ We wanted it to be where the girl is doing what you think she should be doing, and even with all of that she’s still facing all these challenges and it’s still extremely difficult.”
Apparently, Lotz was only the second person to audition for the role but McCarthy knew right away that he had found his Annie. He sure did. However, while her physicality was definitely a boon to the production, Lotz’s performance shines well beyond that. She’s a damned pitbull, but the truth is in her facial expressions and reactions, which are near perfect -- especially at the end, when she notices Barlow suffers from Heterochromia (two different colored eyes) just like she does.
Here, with her reaction, it sinks in that he was not only her uncle but was most likely she and Nicole’s father as well. This adds a whole ‘nother layer of icky on her family dynamic and this forbidden love and incest is probably what drove her mother to do what she did.
But as good as Lotz was, Haley Hudson might’ve been even better as the psychic Stevie, who got into her blind character so much people had to lead her around the sets. Petra Wright adds a lot of punch to a pretty thankless role as the ghost; and Mark Stegler really puts the creep into Barlow. And I am never, ever, disappointed when Johnny f@cking Rico, Casper Van Dien, shows up in a movie.
With such a low budget the majority of the special effects were pulled off practically. The production got lucky when they found a house and a church that were about to be torn down, giving them a makeshift studio as the church was converted into many sets. This also allowed them to do whatever they wanted during the production -- from drilling holes to knocking out walls.
“When we made the short film, it was actually shot inside the house of a woman who had recently passed away,” said McCarthy (Lowes, 2012). “It was extremely cramped and we had to be careful of all of her things, but it lent the film an incredible atmosphere. For the feature we wanted to recreate the same feeling of that house from the short, but have enough room to pull off some of the camera moves we wanted.
“When people make ghost story movies, they often make the mistake of setting the films in fantastical or Gothic places, but I think it’s much more interesting if it’s set in a very familiar place.” And McCarthy found exactly what he was looking for in San Pedro, California.
“This house was loaded with this shag carpet and really weird ’70s décor, and it immediately struck a chord with my childhood. We [then] found [another] house that was totally empty and soon to be torn down and went in and created new walls, a hidden room, put up lots of horrendous vintage wallpaper and furnished the place from top to bottom. When you stepped on the set, it really felt like you were in the house of an old woman. We decorated it from top to bottom to look like that. My production designer and I were really hung up on this idea of a house that was built in the ’60s or ’70s and hadn’t changed. And that’s when I realized the house was going to be a major character in the movie.”
It truly is, and to great effect. Props to production designer Barnett on his work decorating the house, which is, along with the memories associated with it, an essential character indeed to the production, turning something so mundane and grounded into something outright unsettling -- somewhere out of time and place. Also, kudos to sound designer Chris Terhune, who wasn’t afraid to let silence speak volumes and really tuned the audience in to the characters surroundings
I also love the invasive use of modern technology in these settings to unlock the secrets of the past hidden inside it. Another nod to the Japanese techno-horror boom of films like Pulse (alias Kairo, 2001) and the Thai film Shutter (alias Kot Tit Winyan, 2004), which featured similar ectoplasmic shenanigans. And setting all of this morosity at Christmas time makes for a nice juxtaposition of cheer and gloom.
Thus, The Pact is not a traditional haunted house movie but McCarthy uses it as a framing device to tell his story, which is yet another character study as Annie Barlow unravels the present to deal with her past, resulting in a great no-budget thriller I couldn't outguess.
The film was eventually picked up and released by IFC but barely caused a ripple and kinda quietly disappeared. Too slow, and too deliberate for the Paranormal Activity (2007) crowd, nor loud and gruesome enough to match-up with Insidious (2010) or The Conjuring (2013) franchises. This, was too bad.
For in my eyes, The Pact is one of the greatest horror murder mystery ghost stories ever put to film that you’ve probably never even heard of. Until now.
Originally posted on October 21, 2019, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.
The Pact (2012) Preferred Content :: IFC Midnight / EP: Jamie Carmichael / P: Ross M. Dinerstein / CP: Jaime Burke / AP: Sam Zuckerman / D: Nicholas McCarthy / W: Nicholas McCarthy / C: Bridger Nielson / E: Adriaan van Zyl / M: Ronen Landa / S: Caity Lotz, Casper Van Dien, Haley Hudson, Kathleen Rose Perkins, Agnes Bruckner, Sam Ball, Dakota Bright, Petra Wright, Mark Steger
