Welcome to the Woods, We Hope You Get Lost
There are horror movies that haunt you. There are horror movies that scar you. And then there’s Haunted Forest, a movie that mostly just irritates you until you start rooting for the ghost. Directed by Ian Loreños and billed as a supernatural horror film “with a heart,” it’s more like a telenovela that got lost in a fog machine.
The film opens with a father and daughter trying to reconnect, but within minutes, you’ll be begging them to stay estranged. Aris (Raymart Santiago) is a policeman reassigned to the province, and Nica (Jane Oineza) is his sulky teen daughter who reacts to supernatural trauma the same way most people react to a weak Wi-Fi signal. Together, they stumble into a town cursed by the sitsit, a mythical creature that preys on women at night. The creature is supposed to be terrifying, but it mostly looks like the result of a low-budget Photoshop tutorial titled “Ethereal but Unconvincing.”
The Sitsit: Predator or PowerPoint Transition?
Let’s talk about the monster—because, really, the monster deserves better. The sitsit has potential as folklore: a creature that seduces and kills its victims, a symbol of female vulnerability in a patriarchal society. But Haunted Forest treats it like an afterthought, tossing it into scenes like an uninvited extra. The sitsit doesn’t stalk or seduce; it simply appears whenever the plot feels sluggish—which is often—and then vanishes like a bad special effect from an early 2000s music video.
There’s no suspense, no buildup, no dread. The scares arrive on cue like a malfunctioning cuckoo clock. Bang! Flash! Screech!—then nothing. The movie claims to offer “organic horror,” but the only thing organic about it is how naturally it puts you to sleep.
Daddy Issues and Dim Lighting
At its emotional core, Haunted Forest is supposed to be a story of reconciliation between a father and daughter. Unfortunately, both characters are written with all the depth of a parking ticket. Raymart Santiago plays Aris as if he’s permanently jet-lagged, while Jane Oineza’s Nica alternates between pouting and screaming—sometimes both at once. Their emotional reunion feels about as heartfelt as a tax audit.
Meanwhile, the lighting seems to have been inspired by a broken flashlight. Scenes are so murky you’ll wonder if your television brightness settings are broken. Maybe that’s the real horror—the slow realization that you’ve been staring at black blobs for ten minutes and calling it “cinematography.”
Friends Don’t Let Friends Go on Forest Trips
Because no horror movie is complete without a group of doomed teenagers, Nica’s local friends tag along to pad the runtime and body count. There’s RJ (Jameson Blake), Mich (Maris Racal), and Andre (Jon Lucas)—three people you will forget exist until the credits roll. They go on an outing that quickly devolves into paranormal nonsense and teenage melodrama, featuring the sort of dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone who’s never actually met a teenager.
At one point, a character looks into the haunted woods and mutters something ominous about “dark forces.” That’s also what I called my motivation to finish this movie.
The Editing: Jump Scares by Random Chance
Editing in horror films is supposed to create tension—here, it creates confusion. The pacing is so erratic that entire scenes seem to evaporate mid-sentence. One moment someone’s terrified, the next they’re calmly having a picnic. If the goal was to make the audience feel disoriented, congratulations—it worked, but only because we have no idea what’s happening.
Jump scares are deployed with all the grace of a car alarm at 3 A.M. Every time you start to feel mildly invested, the movie interrupts itself with a loud noise and a blurry face. By the fifth time, you start laughing. By the tenth, you begin to wonder if the sitsit is just a metaphor for the sound editor’s frustration.
A Forest Full of Subplots (and Regret)
Director Ian Loreños described the film as an “all-in-one” experience—a mix of horror, family drama, and romance. What it ends up being is a cinematic buffet where none of the dishes go together. We have ghosts, family secrets, love triangles, dead friends, and police investigations, all swirling around like leaves in a typhoon. Every five minutes the tone shifts—sometimes sentimental, sometimes spooky, sometimes unintentionally funny.
It’s as if the film couldn’t decide whether it wanted to make you cry, scream, or check your watch, so it tried all three at once. Spoiler: only one of them works, and it’s the watch-checking.
The “Message”: Family Values and Folklore Fumbles
Loreños insisted the movie has “lessons.” Maybe he meant “warnings.” If there’s a message buried under all the fog and fake blood, it’s something about facing your past and respecting your loved ones. But the storytelling is so incoherent that you’re more likely to come away with a different moral: never follow anyone into a forest in a Regal Films production.
Even the folklore angle, which could have given the film some cultural richness, gets reduced to lazy exposition. Instead of exploring the mythology of the sitsit—a genuinely chilling creature from Filipino legend—we get a few muttered lines about ancient curses and forbidden places. It’s like using a priceless myth as a jump-scare delivery system.
When Horror Becomes Hilarious
There are moments in Haunted Forest so clumsy they transcend badness and become comedy. A character gets dragged into the woods in slow motion while the others scream her name like they’re ordering fast food. A supposedly terrifying chase sequence ends with what looks like interpretive dance. And the final confrontation plays out like an overlong episode of Shake, Rattle & Roll that someone forgot to edit.
By the climax, when the sitsit finally takes center stage, you’re half expecting someone to throw a silver bullet made of bad dialogue. Instead, you get melodramatic speeches about love and destiny while the monster hovers nearby, possibly waiting for its cue to quit.
Haunted Forest, Unhaunted Audience
It’s one thing for a horror movie to fail at scaring you. It’s another for it to fail at making you feel anything. Haunted Forest tries so hard to be a crowd-pleasing mix of thrills and tears that it ends up emotionally tone-deaf. The scares are predictable, the drama forced, and the characters flatter than the movie’s lighting.
The result isn’t a horror film—it’s a haunted soap opera with a ghost internship program. Even the sitsit looks like it’s trying to escape the production and haunt a better movie.
Final Thoughts: This Forest Needs an Exorcism
If you go into Haunted Forest hoping for terror, atmosphere, or even basic coherence, you’ll come out feeling like you’ve been mugged by a fog machine. It’s not the worst horror movie ever made, but it might be the most aggressively mediocre. Every creative choice feels haunted by indecision.
There’s a good movie buried somewhere deep in the woods—a story about grief, myth, and family—but Haunted Forestnever finds it. Instead, it gets lost wandering in circles, tripping over clichés and dialogue that should have been left behind at the script stage.
In the end, the only truly frightening thing about Haunted Forest is realizing you sat through the whole thing and the credits aren’t followed by an apology.
If the sitsit is real, it can have my soul—just please, spare me the sequel.
