Some movies are bad because they try too hard. Others are bad because they don’t try at all. Then there are films like Beneath, which seem to exist purely to make you question whether Paramount and MTV really thought horror fans were clamoring for a movie that feels like a Lifetime melodrama staged inside a Halloween haunted house attraction. Spoiler: we weren’t.
This was MTV Films’ first attempt at a horror movie. You’d think a company built on teenage rebellion, pop-punk angst, and Jackass might give us something loud, bloody, and ridiculous. Instead, they gave us a gothic sleep aid about buried sisters, family secrets, and tunnels that make less sense than the lyrics of a Fall Out Boy song.
The Crash Heard Around Nobody’s Career
The movie kicks off with a fiery car crash. Our protagonist Christy crashes her vehicle, gets thrown free, and watches as her sister Vanessa is trapped inside when the car explodes. Normally, this is the sort of setup that makes an audience lean forward. But in Beneath, it makes you lean back, sigh, and check how much runtime is left.
Vanessa survives, though horribly disfigured—translation: the makeup department smeared her with barbecue sauce and gave her a melted Halloween mask. Christy, meanwhile, gets shipped off to a psychiatric center because she won’t stop screaming “My sister is alive!” at inappropriate moments. Like funerals. Weddings. Probably PTA meetings.
This is supposed to be eerie, but it plays like an over-caffeinated soap opera. Even the ashes in the urn look like they’re tired of this plot.
Six Years Later: Still Haunted, Still Boring
We flash forward six years, because apparently Christy had to squeeze in a degree in pre-med before returning to Edgemont to scream at coffins again. She’s still haunted by visions of her crispy sister clawing at lids, which is basically the film’s way of reminding us that it had a budget for exactly one recurring nightmare sequence and damn it, they’re going to use it.
Christy reconnects with her niece Amy, who is scared of “dark things behind the walls.” Translation: she’s scared of this movie. Same, Amy. Same.
The Lockes: The World’s Worst Family
Vanessa’s husband John Locke (not the philosopher, not the Lost character, just a really bad doctor with the personality of oatmeal) is shady from the start. He’s helped by his creepy nurse lover Claire and his domineering mother, Mrs. Locke, who looks like she’s been training for the “Evil Mother-in-Law of the Year” award.
This is where Beneath thinks it’s being clever: setting up a tangled web of lies, affairs, and cover-ups. But instead of gripping tension, it feels like an extended episode of Days of Our Lives where someone occasionally remembers it’s supposed to be a horror movie and throws in a burnt hand clawing at a door.
The Detective Work of an Amateur Nancy Drew
Christy starts digging into her sister’s death. Unfortunately, she has the investigative skills of a damp sponge. She wanders around town asking locals if they believe she has borderline personality disorder (because subtlety isn’t in this script’s vocabulary), and pokes through family wardrobes that connect to tunnels leading to the basement.
Wardrobe-to-basement tunnels. Yes, you heard that right. Apparently, this house was built by a sadistic Narnia enthusiast who decided instead of a faun with hot chocolate, you get disfigured relatives crawling out of the darkness.
The Affair Nobody Cared About
Christy discovers a love letter from John to Claire, revealing their affair and their “plan” to let Vanessa conveniently die. Shocking? Not really. The actors have about as much chemistry as wet cardboard, so when the affair is revealed, it lands with the emotional weight of a dropped grocery receipt.
Also, John Locke is such a bland character that his big twist could’ve been “secretly a werewolf” or “actually three toddlers in a trench coat” and it would’ve been more believable than “cheating husband.”
The Big Twist: Who’s in the Box?
The movie tries to pull a gotcha! moment by suggesting the body buried wasn’t Vanessa’s, but Claire’s. John is exposed as a murderous jerk, Christy shoots him, and we’re led to the “shocking” revelation: Vanessa is alive in an underground cellar, horribly disfigured, feral, and occasionally attacking people.
This should be the emotional climax—two sisters reunited after years of torment. Instead, it looks like Christy wandered onto the wrong set of The Hills Have Eyes. Vanessa recognizes her sister only after spotting a necklace, which feels less like pathos and more like a badly written jewelry commercial.
Amy the Child Psychopath
Just when you think the movie can’t sink any deeper, it throws in a child murder twist. Christy’s niece Amy, terrified of the “monster,” stabs Vanessa to death. Yes. After dragging us through ninety minutes of gothic wallpaper and suspicious side-eyes, the movie decides to let an eight-year-old handle the climax.
This could’ve been horrifying, but instead it’s laughable. Amy stabs her own mother, not realizing who she is, and Christy is left holding the ashes like, “Well, that was a waste of time.”
The film ends with Christy scattering Vanessa’s ashes into a lake while Amy takes a picture. Somewhere in the heavens, Vanessa’s ghost is probably filing a complaint against the screenwriters.
Performances: Actors Trapped in Their Own Coffins
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Nora Zehetner (Christy): She spends the entire movie with an expression that screams, “How did I go from Brickto this?”
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Matthew Settle (John): He delivers every line as if he’s narrating an instructional video about carpet installation.
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Jessica Amlee (Amy): Creepy kid trope dialed up to 11, though she looks more annoyed than terrified.
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Carly Pope (Vanessa): Reduced to a charred cameo, she spends most of her screen time grunting like a budget Gollum.
Everyone else floats in and out like NPCs in a video game, their only job being to dump exposition or glare suspiciously.
Scares: None. Nada. Zero.
For a horror movie, Beneath is shockingly uninterested in being scary. The “visions” are repetitive. The tunnel sequences are confusing rather than claustrophobic. The monster reveal is supposed to be chilling, but the makeup effects are so bad it looks like Vanessa survived a marshmallow roast gone wrong.
The only terrifying thing about this movie is realizing it was greenlit by two major companies who thought this would kickstart a new horror brand. Instead, it killed the mood faster than a Nickelback ballad at a funeral.
Final Verdict: Stay Buried
Beneath (2007) is what happens when MTV and Paramount Classics say, “Hey, let’s do horror,” and then forget to include horror, suspense, or even basic entertainment. It’s slow, clunky, over-plotted, and insultingly dull. The title is accurate, though—it belongs beneath your expectations, beneath your DVD shelf, and ideally beneath six feet of dirt where no one will dig it up again.
Final Score: 1 coffin lid out of 10.
Because even Vanessa scratching at her box was more committed to drama than this entire film.
