BEEZEL (2024)

New On Demand, digital download, and select theaters from DREAD!
Directed by Aaron Fradkin.
Written by Aaron Fradkin, Victoria Fratz Fradkin
Check out the trailer here!!

A simple house in a typical suburban neighborhood is the site of numerous horrifying events which begins in 1966 and continues until present day. The origins of these evil phenomena seem to come from a blind witch who haunts the dark basement of this home.

Because it takes place in the winter for most of the film and there is a tendency to flip between film stocks from celluloid to VHS to digital cameras, BEEZEL felt like a low budget cousin of LONGLEGS. There is definitely a creepy vibe immediately as the drone shot scans over a cold and barren landscape filled with bare trees and snow covered back yards. Tone is something I’m going to be referring to a lot in this review because BEEZEL excels in capturing a dire and dangerous tone over and over again in this multi-structural story. Without giving away too much backstory other than roughly edited footage of what looks to be home movies, spliced with what appears to be a murder scene, BEEZEL opens with a cameraman (LeJon Woods) being lured into the home of the homeowner (Bob Gallagher) and then after a brief introduction to the two characters, the same cameraman is lured into the basement. Immediately, there is a sense that none of this should be happening and something terrifying is lurking around the next corner. It’s a feeling that continues pretty much for the entire runtime of BEEZEL. Maintaining that tone is no easy feat and while the film does take some beats to allow your heart to normalize, it rarely shakes that ominous feeling of dread that something even worse is coming.

Split into four timelines, the story basically functions as an anthology with each story building off of the next as time goes on. We jump from 1966 to 1987 then to 2003 and finally 2013 through the course of the film, each segment referring to the one before it, but telling an altogether different story all occurring within the same house. It is a testament to the writers to come up with so many creepy and tension laden scenes, all different from one another, yet focusing basically on the same monster, this blind witch.

The acting is hit or miss as none of these actors are household names, but for the most part, they play the roles well. Standout include the aforementioned LeJon Woods and Bob Gallagher, who star in the first and one of the most unsettling segments.

BEEZEL also reminded me of an underseen film released in 2022 called TWO WITCHES, which not only had a great dark tone, but utilized the anthology format to tell one story, and of course, all of the witchery going on. BEEZEL is a highly enjoyable film. It feels dark and wrong, but also has a sort of playful sense of humor, knowing that it isn’t above making one dart back in their seats with a well timed jump scare with a horrifying payoff. In the end, this is a movie about the ongoing story of a haunted house that terrorizes its occupants every generation and will do so seemingly forever.