Veronica

I’m sure you’ve seen the news articles about Veronica making the rounds on the Facebook and on the Twitter and the Linkedin about this little import movie and about how unbelievably scary it’s supposed to be, right?   Well, it’s time to give it a look and put it to the test.

Now, keep in mind… there’s been a lot of blowback from movie nerds such as myself about this movie with many people calling it the worst trash they’ve ever seen.  It’s the double-edged sword of hype horror… the better you are at what you do, the more people feel the need to prove that they are better than your product.   It’s idiocy, really… the same kind of idiocy that makes an uneducated high school kid proclaim that It wasn’t scary or The Conjuring wasn’t scary.   Sure, I understand that fear is subjective, but to just dismiss obvious quality because you think it puts hair on your manly chest is just stupid.

Personally, I go into every horror movie I see hoping it will make me piss myself or, at the very least, go to sleep with a lamp on.   I will never understand the grotesque need to prove yourself better than a movie.

Now, is Veronica really as scary as the hype lets on?   Of course not… that’s why it’s called hype.

But, it is respectable, it does have scares, and I liked the main character enough to care about what was happening to her.

She is Veronica, a 15 year old student from Spain who, after participating in a seance with her friends, finds herself accosted by a very rude satanic demon from Hell who targets not only her, but her younger siblings she cares for while her mother is out working.

Already, the premise has got it right.   When I first started watching this movie, I was under the impression that it was going to be about a group of teenage girls and, by Grabthar’s Hammer, I hate teenage girls.   Instead, we’re presented with an all-too-familiar but rarely documented single-parent household where the mom works and the eldest is the caregiver.   Instead of getting a story about some teenage idiot trying to save herself, we get a much more interesting story of a teenage idiot trying to protect those she loves.   That gets me… right here.   I’m indicating my heart.  It’s hard to tell if you can’t see me.

The movie really doesn’t do anything new, but the stuff is does do is done well.  The gags when the demon manifests itself are all sinister and spooky and disturbing though, I don’t understand why a girl who goes to Catholic school with a bunch of nuns never once actively seeks out the church’s help.   The gags that involve the kids are probably the most effective and, let me tell you, during the climax at the end, those kids really sell the terror. 

So, is Veronica the scariest movie ever made according to social media?   No, but it is still a very well-done and effective horror movie that has enough chilling imagery and taught direction, not to mention a cast you actually care for, that it will more than deliver for a couple of hours if you’re in the mood for something frightening.