The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

The latest low-budget Blumhouse Productions horror production, Jessabelle; a voodoo-worshipping Louisiana-bayou set thriller that is sadly, not as scary nor as ghostly as it wants itself to be.

Set in a misty Louisiana, Jessabelle follows Jessie (Snook); a woman dealing with the loss of her fiancé and unborn child to a car accident that has also put her in a wheelchair. With her life seemingly in ruins, Jessie is left with no choice but to move back into her family home with her estranged, alcoholic father, Leon (Andrews).

Uncertain of what the future holds, Jessie finds it difficult to adjust to her new life, not least because she has to spend her nights sleeping in her deceased mother’s bed. Soon after, though, her life takes on a new route of mystery when Jessie discovers a secret box – labelled Jessabelle, packed with seemingly worn-out VHS tapes.  Filled with mysterious recordings of her mother’s tarot-reading to her unborn child – whom Jessie assumes is her – she finds comfort in seeing her mother, though Leon insists that she dispose of the tapes.

Intrigued by the cryptic messages and her father’s strange reaction to her findings, Jessie decides to dig deeper and along with old-friend, Preston (Webber).

The atmosphere and air around Jessabelle could be described as relatively eerie and the film maintains a degree of plausibility – at least more so than many of its peers. When you dig deeper to the heart of the story, however, the film comes up short and is rather timid for a horror film. This is made all the more obvious by the fact that the film almost insists on using every clichéd horror trick in the book.

Despite the plot’s lack of edge originality, Snook – previously seen in movies such as Sisters of War and Not Suitable for Children – manages to command the screen relatively well, while Webber was equally pleasing as Jessie’s Knight in Shining Armour.

Despite a reasonably promising build-up and a commendable attempt to bring a certain verity to a genre that requires more suspension of disbelief than most, the pay-off just isn’t satisfying.