John’s Horror Corner: The Hatred (2017), a mediocre, horror-LITE “haunted house” movie.

MY CALL: So yeah, this is mediocre PG-13 horror—(I know it’s actually somehow rated R). I’d recommend it to early teens who scare easily. No one else. Really. It’s that mediocre. MORE MOVIES LIKE The Hatred: For more horror for beginners, consider The Wretched (2019), Séance (2021), Fresh (2022), Monstrous (2022) or the classic Silver Bullet (1985).

When Regan (Sarah Davenport; Deadly Detention, Bodysnatch), Samantha (Bayley Corman), Betaine (Alisha Wainwright; There’s Something Wrong with the Children) and Layan (Gabrielle Bourne) stay the weekend at a countryside house while babysitting the owner’s girl Irene (Shae Smolik; The Sandman, D-Railed), they come to find the house has a dark history.

The house has a basement full of Nazi paraphernalia and a long-undisturbed room that once belonged to a teenage girl (Alice) who was murdered in the 60s by her ex-patriated Nazi father. Irene thinks that Alice is responsible when strange things begin to happen to the other girls. The background story of the cursed Nazi house is complemented with small roles by Andrew Divoff (Wishmaster 1-2, Graveyard Shift, Faust: Love of the Damned) and Tim DeZarn (The Cabin in the Woods, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, Wrong Turn).

It takes this movie a long time to take us… not very far. The girls begin their weekend, they find clues linking the house to its Nazi past, and ghostly things start appearing. An out of focus figure in the background, something moving under the bedsheets, whispers from the ether, aaaaaand cue the screaming CGI lady ghost.

The scare tactics and special effects are weak. It’s very PG-13 and rather budget-limited… but it’s also vision-limited—i.e., in inexperienced director. The movie has one decent part, and it’s from the trailer. It’s the “look under the bed” scene. Sadly, it’s squandered by a CGI-filtered demon-wench crab-walking on the bed.

I’m not sure how this got an R-rating, it’s clearly (in my opinion, at least) a PG-13 movie. There are no swears, nudity, intense scares, gore or disturbing imagery or content outside of a drowning murder scene. The horror itself is really rather soft. So yeah, this is mediocre PG-13 horror at best. I’d recommend it to teenage girls who watch very little horror and scare very easily.