The Paranormal Diaries: Clophill.
What's that behind him? Don't worry, the music tells you. |
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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