Fear Itself: Episode 11 The Spirit Box

(I've officially decided to reverse my stance from last-year's Christmas Review.  Going forward regular reviews will be moved to the day before, so that holiday reviews can go on the correct day.)

To start out, new rule: If you start a ghost story on Halloween, most of the story should take place on Halloween. Somehow the writer of The Spirit Box thought it would be a good idea to place the first few minutes at Halloween, and then spend most of the episode in November.

I like the idea of two girls making a Spirit Board from a pizza box. The idea of seances and mysticism has been so commercialized that it's pretty cool to see some teenagers who just make do with what they have. It's not the main point of the episode, but it is probably the most interesting thing that happens. I can imagine the Producers of Ouija freaking out at the suggestion that teenagers don't need their board game to talk to the dead.

That said, the rest of the episode is...passable. There's nothing especially scary about it, but the actors mostly do decently. I enjoyed it reasonably well my first time through, but was bored for most of my second viewing, already knowing the twist.

That's not to say the twist is bad, just that most of the episode lacks a strong sense of tension. The episode could have been great with better atmosphere for the scares, but as it is it's merely adequate. Alternatively, it could have worked if it had been presented as a mystery without the ghost story trappings, rather than trying to be a mystery where a ghost occasionally pops up. Or, it could have tried to go full-on ghost story, and limit the setting entirely to Halloween.

Shelby and Becca (Anna Kendrick and Jessica Parker Kennedy) are bored on a Halloween, and want to do something special before Becca leaves for Taiwan. They decide to make a Spirit Box to contact a suicidal classmate, Emily (Samantha Hill). I'm pretty sure everyone reading this review already knows that the spirit box reveals that Emily was murdered, or we wouldn't have a story.

After the initial séance, we vary between scenes of mysterious ghost-things happening (a ghost reaching out of the water, Becca throwing up a necklace that belonged to Emily, etc), and scenes of the girls being suspicious. A mysterious masked individual follows Shelby around the school pool in the wee hours of the morning while she's training. Shelby's father (Martin Donovan) is a police officer, and she's able to sneak into his office and find evidence in his files that Emily was drugged before apparently driving her care into a lake.

After enough of the episode's runtime has passed, they hold another séance, going to Emily's grave for a better “signal” as Becca calls it. This time Emily fingers their gym teacher Mr. Drake (Mark Pellegrino). The guy is a fairly creepy individual, and Becca recalls him constantly flirting with Emily. So, Becca talks Shelby into breaking into his house, leading to a confrontation that leaves him dead.

And so, with Becca off to Taiwan, we get the final twist (or two): Shelby discovers that Emily's grave was fake, and realizes that Becca killed Emily (Becca admitting this over the phone, since Taiwan has no extradition treaties with the US), because Emily had stolen Mr. Drake from her. Becca had pushed the Spirit Box to give the answers she wanted, to lead Shelby to kill Mr. Drake in a completion of her revenge. Becca had also been the masked individual, and faked some of the paranormal events, while assuming the rest were Shelby's mind playing tricks on her. Even if the twist isn't anything special, it works because Becca's portrayal for most of the episode is subdued enough to be read either way.

But, those few remaining events were completely real. Emily's ghost comes back and kills Becca by locking her in her car and turning on the carbon monoxide. The episode ends to Becca screaming. The final scene is easily the worst part of the episode, with Kennedy under-acting badly in response to the situation. Ironically, the very downplayed portrayal that makes the rest of the episode works ruins it here. She sounds, at worst, annoyed.

A 40-minute long episode really has no excuse to feel this slow. None of the scares really hit home, and while I can understand the lack of passion coming from Kennedy, Kendrick should really show more emotion. Even if this show had been a success, I don't think anyone involved in production intended this to be the episode people remembered, just one more story to get them to 13.