Fridae

Something between the worlds will cross over on 11:11, 11 November 2011, something supernatural that will change the world, and religion in particular, forever. This is what popular thriller writer Joseph Crone discovers through a combination of increasingly dangerous accidents all occurring on 11:11 and a series of prophetic hallucinations involving ominously evil-looking angels that send him back to his creepy childhood home in Spain, where his very estranged and very religious family live and preach. Will he unravel the mystery before he loses his mind and possibly his life? Will his family be his salvation or his doom?

There's something to be said about Spanish horror. From the bloody giallo masterpieces of Dario Argento and modern efforts like [·Rec], The Devil’s Backbone, and The Orphanage, Spanish directors have managed to distil the essence of fear and bottle it in a horror film – to greater effect than their bigger budget Hollywood counterparts.

Darren Lynn Bousman, one of the directors behind some of the Saw franchise instalments, has aims for this old Spanish scare magic with 11-11-11. It’s a mixture of The Number 23 and John Carpenter’s very harrowing The Prince of Darkness, combining the apocalypse with occult rituals, numerology, and modern day scares.

Surprisingly, the writing for 11-11-11 is decent. Bousman creates a fully developed mythology, serves it up to the audience in piecemeal fashion to heighten the sense of dread that lead to the prerequisite scares. While this sounds commonsensical, you’d be surprised at how half-baked contemporary American horror films are, and how forced their scares feel because the mythology isn’t all that synergistic with the visual horror.

11-11-11 has its moments to be sure, but it may be hampered by a very low budget that seems to have constrained just how scary the film can be.