Altar (2014)

Filmed in early 2014 as Altar with at least one eye on a proper theatrical release (a Kickstarter campaign to raise $40,000 for a US theatrical release was completed by 4 October 2014), Nick Willing’s tedious haunted house film debuted in its native UK under a new title (The Haunting of Radcliffe House) on the most tawdry of Britain’s main TV channels, Channel Five over Christmas 2014.

Willing has a CV chock full of blandly efficient genre television (Alice in Wonderland (1999), Jason and the Argonauts (2000), Tin Man (2007), Alice (2009), Neverland (2011)) and a brace of fair-to-middling features (Photographing Fairies (1997) and Doctor Sleep (2002)). So indistinguishable from his small screen fare was Altar that when it got that first UK TV screening Channel Five’s announcer was quick to hail it as “their” new supernatural drama. It’s unlikely anyone watching would have any reason to believe that it wasn’t just another cheap, disposal TV movie.

Olivia Williams (clearly slumming it) plays interior designer and house renovator Meg who moves into the crumbling Radcliffe House on the Yorkshire Moors with her artist husband Alec (Matthew Modine), teenage daughter (Antonia Clarke, who should have been used to creepy goings-on having only recently appeared in TV’s Lightfields (2013) and The Thirteenth Tale (2013)) and son Harper (Adam Thomas Wright) with a view to restoring it for her wealthy American client. Before long the entire family and various passers-by are being haunted by every ghost story of the past two decades or more (it’s tempting to believe that the name of the house came from Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe who appeared in Hammer’s hugely successful remake of The Woman in Black (2012)).

Superstitious locals mutterer dire warnings, a Rosicrucian altar is uncovered in an attic room, an amateur “ghost whisperer” comes over all peculiar when he visits the house and a ghostly figure stalks the family. All this may run the risk of making Altar sound a lot more interesting than it really is but if you’ve seen even a couple of the best known ghost films (anything from Ringu (1998) to the aforementioned Woman in Black, from The Shining (1980) to The Amityville Horror (1979)) you’ve seen everything that Altar has to offer. It shamelessly pilfers ideas and images and whips them all together in a tasteless soufflé that resolutely fails to rise. Things happen for no reason other than Willing seems to have seen them in some other film and liked them, characters come and go as and when the script needs them and anything even remotely resembling an atmosphere fails to put in an appearance.

Not only is the film dull, derivative and devoid of atmosphere it looks terrible. Like too many modern films it’s been colour-graded to within an inch of its life and has a soft, grey look that rapidly becomes distancing, giving the film a distinctly unreal look that does nothing to make anything happening on screen seem even remotely believable.

In the film’s press kit, Willing states that “I had always wanted to write a ghost story, having been studying the art of scaring people since I was 7 years old.” One has to wonder why he wasted his time. Judging by his mishandling of the doggedly unscary Altar he still has an awful lot to learn. Incidentally, that Kickstarter campaign may have raised the money needed for a US theatrical release but it did no good at all – the film made its Stateside debut on DVD in February 2015.