Blumhouse Presents: Discount “Hereditary” with a Coupon for Mediocrity
If there’s one thing Blumhouse knows how to do, it’s make horror movies cheap. But sometimes, cheap isn’t clever — it’s just cheap. Enter Totem (2017), a film that feels like it was made from spare parts found behind the set of Paranormal Activity 3 and stitched together by someone who once Googled “How to make a spooky necklace.”
Directed by Marcel Sarmiento, Totem is the kind of supernatural horror that tries very hard to be deep but ends up feeling like the final project from a high school film club that just discovered trauma as a theme. It wants to be a ghost story, a family drama, a psychological thriller, and maybe even a Lifetime Original Movie — but in the end, it’s mostly a movie about people yelling at a necklace.
Plot: “The Necklace Did It” — A Horror Mystery No One Asked For
The film begins with Kellie (Kerris Dorsey), a moody teen still mourning her dead mother Lexy. Her father James (James Tupper, doing his best “I regret this script” face) has moved on with a new girlfriend, Robin (Ahna O’Reilly), who’s just moved in and instantly earns the coveted title of “Most Likely to Be Blamed for Everything.”
Kellie finds her late mother’s necklace — the titular totem — and realizes it can move objects. Instead of, say, questioning her own sanity, she decides her mom’s ghost must be behind it. Soon, the house is plagued by strange occurrences, like trophies flying off shelves and cats being crushed by bookcases. (Totem, by the way, has no idea that animal death is supposed to be tragic — it treats the cat’s demise like a mild inconvenience, somewhere between a flat tire and a burnt Pop-Tart.)
Things escalate when Robin starts gagging up blonde hair, which is either a haunting symptom or the world’s worst allergy attack. Meanwhile, Grandpa Bernard shows up to add “unnecessary old man exposition” to the mix. Apparently, he’s the father of the dead mom, but he’s also too busy not believing anyone to be useful.
From there, Totem devolves into a teen melodrama wrapped in a ghost story, duct-taped to a murder mystery. Kellie begins to think the necklace is protecting her — which is a bold interpretation considering everyone around her starts dying in increasingly stupid ways.
By the end, Kellie goes full Norman Bates, killing her boyfriend, her grandpa, and nearly her stepmom before getting impaled on an avant-garde art sculpture. It’s poetic, in the way that getting hit by a bus is poetic — abrupt, violent, and oddly satisfying if you’ve made it this far.
Characters: People You Root For Only Because Death Is Preferable
Let’s be honest: there are no heroes in Totem. There’s just a house full of confused people and one murderous teenager who treats emotional trauma like a sport.
Kerris Dorsey plays Kellie as if she’s perpetually on the verge of starting a Tumblr about witchcraft. Her transformation from grieving daughter to unhinged murderer happens so suddenly it feels like the script skipped a few pages. One minute she’s setting up motion detectors, the next she’s killing her grandfather with an inhaler. Maybe grief is a hell of a drug — or maybe the director just forgot to direct.
Ahna O’Reilly’s Robin spends most of the movie looking bewildered, which makes sense, because her character’s only function is to stand there while furniture attacks her. She’s supposed to be the “other woman” who tries to earn the stepdaughter’s approval, but in a movie this poorly written, she might as well be named Plot Device #2.
James Tupper, as the dad, plays the classic Horror Movie Father: vaguely sympathetic, vaguely clueless, and entirely useless. His main contributions are gaslighting his daughters and looking tired, which, to be fair, is also what the audience is doing by this point.
And poor Grandpa Bernard — the man shows up halfway through the film just to die via asthma attack. It’s the kind of role actors take when their agent promises, “Don’t worry, it’s Blumhouse, it’ll be good exposure.”
Tone: Paranormal Activity Meets Lifetime Melodrama
Totem can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be. One minute it’s going for supernatural dread — lights flickering, doors creaking, the usual dollar-store horror toolkit. The next minute, it’s a domestic drama about blended families and grief.
Unfortunately, it fails at both. The horror is about as frightening as a scented candle flickering in a gentle breeze. The family drama feels like it escaped from a Hallmark movie that took a dark turn halfway through production.
There’s a recurring motif of Christmas decorations — twinkling lights, ornaments, general “holiday cheer” — which is either an attempt at visual irony or just a desperate ploy to fill the frame with something interesting. It’s the cinematic equivalent of putting tinsel on a corpse.
Visuals: The Ghost of Low Budget Present
Cinematically, Totem looks fine — in the same way a grocery store looks fine under fluorescent lighting. It’s competently shot, which makes sense, because director Marcel Sarmiento has a background in cinematography. Unfortunately, “competent” is about as far as it gets. Every scene looks like it was filmed in one of those rental houses they use for toothpaste commercials.
The visual effects are minimal — probably because there was no money for them — which leaves the film to rely on sound design to sell its scares. But even the sound design sounds tired. The “creepy whisper” effect appears so often it becomes less “menacing spirit” and more “winded intern.”
The titular totem, by the way, looks like something you’d buy at a Hot Topic clearance sale. For a movie built around an evil artifact, it’s shockingly unmemorable — like if The Conjuring’s Annabelle doll had been replaced by a keychain.
Writing: A Cursed Screenplay
Screenwriter Evan Dickson deserves some kind of award — not for excellence, but for managing to stretch a 20-minute premise into a full-length feature. The dialogue feels like it was written by an AI trained on horror trailers. Every line is either exposition, yelling, or vague mumbling about “the energy in this house.”
There’s a moment where Kellie accuses her stepmom of being weak, declaring that her father “needs someone stronger.” It’s supposed to be a chilling reveal of her descent into madness, but it lands with the emotional punch of a badly written Facebook post.
By the time Kellie’s killing spree begins, the film’s internal logic has evaporated entirely. Is the totem controlling her? Is her mom’s ghost real? Is this all a metaphor for grief? The movie shrugs and says, “Why not all three?”
The Ending: One Spike Too Many
The finale tries for tragedy but ends in unintentional comedy. Kellie, after murdering half the cast, is finally confronted by her mother’s ghost — who scares her so hard she falls onto a piece of modern art and impales herself.
It’s the kind of death that’s supposed to be poetic, but feels more like divine intervention from the god of bad screenwriting. When the credits roll and the surviving family drives off to a new life, the audience is left with one thought: “So that’s it?”
Yes. That’s it. No closure, no twist, just the vague sense that you’ve been emotionally mugged by a screenplay that should’ve stayed buried.
Final Thoughts: The Horror of Wasting 89 Minutes
Totem is proof that Blumhouse sometimes confuses “minimalist horror” with “nothing happens.” It’s a movie that wants to explore grief, family, and the supernatural, but instead delivers a chaotic blend of clichés, underwritten characters, and a body count that feels like it happened by accident.
There’s no tension, no real scares, and certainly no reason to wear jewelry again. Even the ghost seems bored — haunting this movie feels like an eternity worse than hell.
In the grand pantheon of horror films, Totem sits comfortably at the bottom, somewhere between The Bye Bye Man and a particularly spooky episode of Full House.
Final Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
(One out of five haunted necklaces — because the only spirit truly present here is disappointment.)
