The Paranormal Diaries: Clophill.

What's that behind him? Don't worry, the music tells you.
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If you pass by the Darkside blog from time to time, you are well aware that I devote many a review to the paranormal horror subgenre. You get some decent found footage/document entries that have their moments. Often or not, though, I wind up more than a bit disappointed or underwhelmed. I guess you could even call it the surreality horror genre…where reality in front of a recording camera reveals things quite alien to the norms of what we believe, or take in with our senses. The Paranormal Activity films piggybacked off of the Blair Witch Project and Cannibal Holocausts in documenting the horrors of both what we can’t see and what we do. A little bit of both under the right presentation and direction can be quite successful. I always pimp the critically panned Lake Mungo which has been considered the worst of its years “8 Films to Die For” because I felt it did just that. It focused on the inability to shake the death of a family’s daughter/sister, and through a document recording of their somber intake of this loss, the spooky images of her presence (both doctored and authentic) on photographs and cam-recorder, and secrets involving her that weren’t altogether angelic. I have seen paranormal films (like the Grave Encounters films) that are not all that earth-shattering but not the worst while a few gems come out of the woodwork from time to time (The Borderlands; The Last Exorcism).

I so wished “The Paranormal Diaries: Clophill” was in the gem category. I do. It has a really nifty location. It just doesn’t do a lot with it. I loved the whole back story of the place, how it has this dark history attached to it, including witches’ ceremonies, devil worship, and the digging up of bones from a grave near Clophill, used in a fire ritual. But when the lead documentary team spends three days/nights at the place to do paranormal research, the film really never takes the location and does anything spectacular with it. You have faint figures and music accompaniment to spook the audience, some loud footsteps through branches in the woods, and emphasis on a particular headstone on the grave of a girl named Sophia.

When the film focuses on Clophill, making it sinister and exploiting its ruin, this was right up my alley, but it just kind of carries the same type of Ghost Hunters vibe that kills its momentum. A few filmmaking tricks aside, this could be just another paranormal show on SyFy. I guess we have kind of reached that point, though. This was in 2013, and the bulge of paranormal flicks and shows has perhaps tapped out the well, so to speak.

The gist of this has a small number of British paranormal researchers (a husband-and-wife team of amateurs joins up with researchers that is) decide to study, interview locals of, and focus photographically a few night at Clophill in England. It was once a church: this has since been gutted and represents little more than a reminder of a church that once operated and now is just ruins, calling to mind a skeletal structure of brick and stone. I also enjoyed the interviews of locals who live in the town that exists a distance away. There’s a road that leads to the ruins, and so it takes a spell to get there. But there’s a history of human traffic that keeps research of the place a hazard due to noises that could be caused by natural instead of unnatural reasons.

At the end, the married couple are under a distress because it is quite possible “an attachment” followed them from Clophill and now threatens their daughter who is *susceptible to spirit sight*.


This plays like a collection of paranormal show clichés. You get the black mass folks in robes carrying lighted torches (not flashlights, but literal torches), as a “sacrifice”, naked, is tied to a tree, a séance, toying with a Ouija board, and the tools (EMF meter, spirit box, etc) of the paranormal used one night hoping to catch something at Clophill. It doesn’t offer anything we haven’t seen. I’m repeating myself a lot when talking shop about this subgenre which has a lot of offerings for those looking for a cheap thrill or two. Few, though really give us any more than that, which is rather unfortunate.

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