The Pact

Written & Directed by Nicholas McCarthy
Full credits at IMDb

The first scene boasts one of the best-conceived scares I've seen in years: a woman, home alone, wanders her house, holding a laptop, trying to get an Internet connection so she can video-chat with her young daughter. Finally, she gets a clear signal. "Mommy," the kid asks, "who's that behind you?" And the connection cuts out. It's a lot like the classic look-into-the-mirror-and-see-somebody's-behind-you scare, updated to exploit recent technological advancements. It ought to be lifted by every other horror movie this year until it becomes an insufferable cliché.

Writer-director McCarthy shows quite the command of horror-form in this haunted house-serial killer genre mash-up, his feature debut, particularly a facility with Shining-esque tracking shots down hallways. (He also makes the effort to put a clever spin on clichés; a Ouija board scene works much better when the board is scrawled on the floor of a closet.) The whole movie's creepy as fuck. When the first real jolt arrived 20 minutes in, I literally got goosebumps—and I couldn't even tell what I was looking at. It's that well-crafted.

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