When Guidance Counselors Meet the Undead
There are movies that make you question your faith in cinema. Then there are movies that make you question your faith in the afterlife. A Resurrection—also known as The Sibling, for reasons that sound like they came from a late-night focus group—manages to do both while still being oddly entertaining.
Written and directed by Matt Orlando, this 2013 horror-thriller stars Mischa Barton, Devon Sawa, and the late, great Michael Clarke Duncan. On paper, that’s a cast strong enough to handle a haunted high school and a resurrected corpse. In practice, it’s like watching an R-rated after-school special produced by the Syfy Channel after six espressos.
And yet… somehow, it works. Not because it’s perfect—far from it—but because it’s so wonderfully committed to its own absurd premise. A Resurrection is a film that looks you dead in the eye and says, “What if a witch helped a high school kid resurrect his dead brother to get revenge on bullies?” Then it hands you a cafeteria tray full of melodrama, blood, and black magic, and dares you not to have fun.
Mischa Barton: From The O.C. to the Afterlife Crisis
Mischa Barton, once the poster girl for teenage angst in The O.C., plays Jessie Parker, a guidance counselor who spends most of the movie looking like she’s one meeting away from quitting education altogether. Jessie is the only adult in the building who seems remotely aware that something is terribly wrong, which in horror movie terms makes her the designated “reasonable person doomed to suffer.”
Barton brings a surprising warmth to the role, balancing sympathy for her disturbed student Eli with the kind of world-weary exhaustion that says, “I didn’t go to grad school for this.” Watching her try to reason with teenagers, a police officer, and possibly the undead is like watching someone try to mediate a therapy session between Satan and the PTA.
Devon Sawa: Officer Broken Cop Reporting for Duty
Devon Sawa—who’s carved out a niche as horror’s favorite tragic everyman—plays Travis, the small-town cop investigating a string of increasingly suspicious murders. He’s got that haunted look of a man who’s seen too much Final Destination fan mail. Sawa’s Travis spends most of the film alternating between skepticism and mild panic, like a man trying to decide if the killer is a vengeful ghost or just a really angry substitute teacher.
There’s something endearing about his performance. He’s the only character who seems aware of how insane the plot is, but he still shows up and does the work. You can almost hear his inner monologue: “Dead kids, witches, possession… yeah, this is above my pay grade, but fine.”
Michael Clarke Duncan: The Voice of Authority (and Sanity)
Then there’s Michael Clarke Duncan as Addison, the high school principal whose voice alone could make the devil apologize for bad behavior. Duncan brings gravitas to a movie that otherwise runs on teenage hormones and necromancy. Whenever he appears, you feel like you’re watching a better film—one where adults might actually prevent the apocalypse instead of causing it through negligence.
Sadly, this was one of Duncan’s final roles before his passing, and it’s a reminder of just how magnetic he was. Even when surrounded by chaos, he projects calm authority, like a man who could fix both the school system and the undead problem with a single staff meeting.
The Plot: Six Murders, One Very Busy Ghost
The story unfolds over a single day and night—because apparently, that’s all it takes for witchcraft to go horribly wrong. Eli (played with twitchy, haunted intensity by J. Michael Trautmann) is the kind of student who’d make Stephen King proud. His brother was killed by a group of bullies in a hit-and-run, and instead of, say, writing a sad poem about it, Eli decides to dig up the body, visit a local witch, and request a full-scale resurrection spell.
The witch (Annie Kitral, chewing scenery like it’s the last supper) tells him his brother’s spirit will rise after six days to kill six people. Because that’s how you handle grief in this town.
Naturally, chaos ensues. The high school becomes a locked-down nightmare, students start disappearing, and the guidance counselor, the cop, and the principal find themselves knee-deep in a supernatural murder mystery that somehow feels both over-the-top and charmingly old-fashioned.
It’s part slasher, part ghost story, and part cautionary tale about why you shouldn’t trust anyone who lives in a shack full of candles.
The Witching Hour, High School Edition
The film’s tone is gloriously schizophrenic. One minute it’s pure Law & Order: Teen Spirit, and the next, it’s a full-blown occult horror show. There’s blood, there’s Latin chanting, and there’s enough fog machine action to suggest the school’s janitor moonlights as a stagehand for Phantom of the Opera.
But beneath all the chaos, there’s a strange sincerity. Orlando doesn’t treat the premise like a joke. He plays it straight, and that’s exactly what makes it fun. The movie knows it’s ridiculous, but it never winks at you. It just invites you to buckle up and enjoy the undead roller coaster.
There’s even a weirdly touching undercurrent about trauma, bullying, and the cost of revenge. Sure, it’s buried under a pile of corpses and witch dust, but it’s there. Like a goth-themed Breakfast Club, except instead of detention, everyone’s trying not to die.
Style Points for the Apocalypse
Visually, A Resurrection punches above its weight. The lighting is moody and claustrophobic, turning the high school into a haunted house of fluorescent doom. The sound design goes hard on eerie whispers and distant screams, and the score hums with that late-night cable movie vibe that makes you nostalgic for 3 a.m. horror marathons.
And when the kills start happening, they’re handled with just enough restraint to be fun without tipping into parody. This isn’t a splatterfest—it’s more of a ghostly revenge mystery wrapped in small-town paranoia. Think Carrie meets The Craft, only everyone forgot to study witchcraft safety protocols.
The Joy of Taking It Too Seriously
What makes A Resurrection unexpectedly delightful is how completely it commits to its own weirdness. It’s not ironic. It’s not “so bad it’s good.” It’s just earnest. It really wants to tell a story about love, loss, and demonic vengeance—and it does so with the conviction of a straight-A student turning in a science project titled “How to Raise the Dead.”
Mischa Barton gives it heart, Devon Sawa gives it grit, and Michael Clarke Duncan gives it dignity. Together, they elevate what could have been a forgettable B-movie into something oddly memorable—a supernatural high school drama that’s both ridiculous and weirdly poignant.
Final Bell: A Class Act in Camp Horror
In a just world, A Resurrection would have become a cult classic—the kind of movie midnight audiences cheer for, quoting lines like “The witch said six must die!” while throwing fake blood packets at the screen.
Instead, it slipped under the radar, which feels like a shame. Because for all its quirks, it’s a film with soul. It may be about raising the dead, but it has more life than half the polished horror franchises that followed.
If you like your scares served with a wink, a heart, and a side of dark absurdity, this is your ticket to detention with the undead.
★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)
A high school horror film that dares to mix The Breakfast Club with Pet Sematary, A Resurrection is weird, earnest, and endlessly entertaining. It’s a B-movie that dreams of being an A, and by sheer undead willpower, it almost gets there. Bring popcorn—and maybe a crucifix.
