The Wretched, directed by Brett and Drew T. Pierce, who sign their films The Pierce Brothers, was hailed as the surprise summer horror hit of 2020 when it became the first film since James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) to hit the number one spot at the box office for six weeks running. Of course the fact that this was the summer of the COVID-19 pandemic and most cinemas in America were closed and very few films were actually being released somewhat takes the shine off that claim to fame, but to be fair the film really doesn’t need that kind of silly hype. It’s a solidly entertaining horror film, an unambitious one but one that still manages to entertain well enough.

It begins with arresting sequence set 25 years before the rest of the story in which a teenage babysitter happens upon a witch eating a child in a basement. From there we jump forward to the modern day where we meet Ben (John-Paul Howard), a mixed-up teen reeling from his parents’ separation, who is en route to stay with his father Liam (Jamison Jones) for the summer. He befriends Mallory (Piper Curda), a co-worker at the marina where his father has arranged for him to work, and the young Dillon (Blane Crockarell), the young son of Liam’s neighbours Abbie (Zarah Mahler) and Ty (Kevin Bigley). Dillon has already had a strange encounter in the woods and it soon becomes clear that all is not well in the house next door. Ben takes to spying on the family, becoming increasingly convinced that Abbie is not what she appears to be. When Dillon goes missing and Ty claims never to have had a son, the race is on to protect Mallory’s sister Lilly (Ja’layah Washington) from a witch (Madelynn Stuenkel) who lives in a hollow beneath an old tree and who “feeds on the forgotten.”

There’s not much we haven’t seen here several times before but the Pierces handle the suspense and horror with real aplomb. There are the requisite jump scares of course, particularly in the closing stages, but the brothers are more intent on creeping us out that simply making us jump. They bring bags of atmosphere to the story and the standard issue race-against-time climax is given a new twist when Ben recovers a seemingly lost memory that adds a clever and unforeseen twist to the story.

Ben is an interesting character. He tries his best but keeps screwing up, giving people every cause to doubt him while just trying to save the lives of innocents. He could have been immensely unlikable, a resentful, clumsy and rather hopeless teen but thanks to John-Paul Howard’s performance he always comes across as sympathetic and personable. He’s matched beat for beat by Piper Curda who is very good as the love interest, a usually thankless role that Curda and the Pierces incest with rather more spark than she really needs. The adults mainly wander around the edges of the story but hats off to Zarah Mahler who manages the transition from unorthodox but loving mum to possessed monster with real ease.

The Pierces’ father, Bart, was one of the effects crew on Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) which suggests perhaps where their love of creepy goings on in the woods and gross-out physical effects came from. But the grisly make-up effects, supervised by Erik Porn – good though they are – aren’t the be all and end all of The Wretched. They’re used sparingly, the brothers preferring instead that highly effective old stand-by of things lurking at the edge of frame, things being where they have no right to be, to get under our skins the way the witch got under Abbie’s.

The witch is a nicely creepy creation, first seen in the basement chowing down on innocent youth before re-emerging years later, literally clawing her way out of a roadkill deer and finding a new body in the unsuspecting Abbie. She could have been just another “scary-lady-in-the-woods” and there are certain stereotypes and clichés that the Pierces are reluctant to slough off. But it’s the new wrinkles they add that make this witch stand out from the pack. Her ability to make the parents of her young victims forget that they ever had children at all is chilling and heart-breaking.

Equal parts Rear Window (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Stepford Wives (1975), The Wretched doesn’t bring much else new to the table but one suspects that the Pierces weren’t really trying to do that, just to make an effectively nasty little chiller and to that end they succeed very well. It’s not the once-in-a-decade-or-so game changer that the genre was still waiting for in 2019, when it played that the Fantastia Film Festival in Montreal and FrightFest in London. But it has the feel of a solid franchise-starter and given its box-office success, albeit under unusual circumstances, it may well become one.