When You Wish the Characters Didn’t Breathe
If you ever find yourself passing a cemetery and someone tells you to “hold your breath or evil spirits will get you,” take their advice—but not because of ghosts. Take it because if you breathe anywhere near a copy of Hold Your Breath(stylized as #HoldYourBreath for maximum 2012 cringe), you might inhale pure cinematic rot.
Directed by Jared Cohn and starring Katrina Bowden and Randy Wayne, this supernatural slasher was released straight into the void—well, theaters, technically, but only because even hell refused delivery. The movie asks an important question: What if dumb teenagers could be possessed by dead serial killers for failing to obey urban legends? The answer, it turns out, is “ninety minutes of regret and Danny Trejo nowhere in sight.”
Plot Summary: The Dead Rise, the Audience Falls Asleep
The film opens in 1956 with Van Hausen, a German-accented serial killer being executed in the electric chair. Naturally, he breaks free mid-electrocution, because apparently the U.S. penal system is staffed entirely by butterfingers. After murdering a few guards, he’s finally fried, leaving behind a soul so evil it sticks around for decades waiting for a group of morons with a rental car and zero situational awareness.
Fast-forward to modern day. A group of friends—including Jerry (Katrina Bowden), Johnny (Randy Wayne), and a collection of human-shaped stereotypes—set off on a road trip. Jerry, the only one with a functioning brain cell, warns them to hold their breath while driving past a cemetery, citing the old superstition that you might inhale wandering spirits.
Everyone complies except Kyle, the weed-smoking comic relief whose every line sounds like it was written by a dad trying to sound “chill.” Naturally, this means Van Hausen’s evil spirit crawls up Kyle’s nostrils and takes the wheel, both metaphorically and literally.
From there, things spiral downward like a drunk bat. The gang makes an ill-advised stop at the prison where Van Hausen was executed—because who doesn’t love sightseeing at death row? One fake jump scare later (thanks to the obligatory prankster friend), lightning strikes, spirits rise, and before you can say “bad life choices,” the body count starts stacking like Jenga blocks.
Tony becomes possessed next and goes full psycho, killing Samantha in a scene so tasteless it feels like the movie is actively daring you to turn it off. The rest of the crew flees to a conveniently located caretaker’s house, where a man named McBride (Steve Hanks) delivers a lore dump so convoluted you’ll wish he’d just shot them all and saved time.
Then come more possessions, more stabbings, more people screaming each other’s names, and an ending twist so predictable that even the ghost looks bored. By the time the credits roll, the audience is the only true casualty.
The Cast: Dead Inside Before the Ghosts Arrive
Katrina Bowden (30 Rock, Tucker and Dale vs Evil) deserves better. She plays Jerry, the “final girl,” with an admirable attempt at sincerity—but she’s surrounded by co-stars who deliver their lines like they’re practicing for an amateur hostage video.
Randy Wayne as Johnny is the kind of boyfriend who looks perpetually confused, as though every scene is his first day on set. Erin Marie Hogan’s Natasha exists mostly to scream and make bad decisions, while Seth Cassell’s Kyle manages to make “stoner comic relief” feel like a war crime.
Meanwhile, Steve Hanks as McBride seems to think he’s in The Exorcist while the rest of the cast is filming a YouTube prank video. His grim seriousness would be impressive if it weren’t completely wasted on dialogue like:
“You didn’t hold your breath, did you?”
No, McBride. We didn’t. And now we’re all cursed—with this movie.
The Script: 90 Minutes of Gaslighting the Audience
Written by Geoff Meed, the screenplay is a masterpiece of narrative malpractice. The characters don’t talk like humans—they talk like ChatGPT circa 2012. Conversations are stitched together with clichés, bad exposition, and desperate attempts at humor that land flatter than the movie’s budget.
At one point, Jerry literally promises to perform oral sex on a guy if he sits in an electric chair. It’s supposed to be edgy, but it feels like something a 13-year-old would write after watching American Pie and Saw back-to-back.
Then there’s the lore—if you can call it that. Apparently, the killer’s spirit can jump from person to person via… breathing? Or electricity? Or maybe both? The rules change faster than the body count, and none of it matters because the movie can’t even commit to its own mythology.
By the third act, when ghosts are fighting each other in glowing CGI form, you realize you’ve stopped following the story and started bargaining with higher powers to make it end.
The Horror: Shockingly Unshocking
You’d think a film involving demonic possession, serial killers, and decapitations might be, you know, scary. But Hold Your Breath is about as frightening as an expired Twinkie.
The jump scares are telegraphed with all the subtlety of a car alarm, the gore looks like leftover Halloween store props, and the ghosts appear to have been rendered on a 2004 Dell laptop.
Even the kills are lazy. The camera often cuts away just before anything interesting happens—possibly because the special effects budget was spent on hashtags.
The movie’s one attempt at creative horror—a woman being cut in half by an electric cable attached to a car—is so cartoonishly absurd it feels like something out of Looney Tunes After Dark.
The Direction: Electric Chair, Meet Career Chair
Director Jared Cohn, whose filmography includes titles like Born Bad and 12/12/12, brings his signature style of “close enough” filmmaking. His camera lingers on every unnecessary detail while missing every opportunity for tension.
Scenes drag on with no rhythm, the editing looks like it was done on Windows Movie Maker, and the lighting fluctuates between “flashlight under chin” and “solar flare.”
There’s no atmosphere—just endless shots of people wandering through dark hallways, occasionally yelling each other’s names, as if that counts as suspense.
The cinematography is so muddy you can’t tell if you’re watching a horror film or a found-footage documentary about people losing their flashlights.
The Ending: Death by Dumbness
After several more possessions, eye gougings, and monologues about the power of breath control, the movie wraps up with McBride heroically sacrificing himself by letting the evil spirits possess him, resulting in an explosion. (Because nothing says “exorcism” like spontaneous combustion.)
But in true horror tradition, there’s a final twist: the supposedly surviving Johnny is now possessed, and he stabs Natasha in the eye before leering at Jerry and whispering, “Hello gorgeous.”
It’s meant to be chilling, but it lands with all the menace of a bad Tinder opener.
The credits roll, the audience exhales for the first time in 90 minutes, and somewhere in Hollywood, Jared Cohn writes #HoldYourBreath2: Electric Boogaloo on a napkin.
Final Thoughts: A Breath of Stale Air
Hold Your Breath is proof that not every urban legend deserves a movie. It’s the cinematic equivalent of inhaling paint fumes—confusing, nauseating, and likely to cause long-term damage.
The acting is wooden, the script is incoherent, the scares are nonexistent, and the direction has all the finesse of a ghost wielding a selfie stick. It’s so bad, even the evil spirits probably left halfway through.
If there’s any justice in the afterlife, Van Hausen’s ghost is haunting the editing room, whispering, “You should’ve held your breath, too.”
Verdict: ★☆☆☆☆ — Hold Your Breath should’ve taken its own advice and stopped breathing after the first draft.
