Grace

Understated, character-based horror like they used to make in the 1970s, although with a fair share of visceral gore along the way, for sure.

A mother carries a miscarried baby to term, only to have it mysteriously revive... with a taste for blood. Now, better movies have been made with worse premises, and this does remarkably well with it, for a (reasonably, 2009) modern horror movie. It's a quieter, less ambitious, yet to me much more engaging movie than similarly-themed efforts such as the still-not-bad, reasonably watchable Michelle Monaghan supernatural drama/thriller "Blood".

I found the cast to be good, and the writing spends a little time developing the characters into real people, making some of their decisions after the gore starts a little more believable.

A lot of people I assume were born long after the advent of slasher horror and splatstick gore films really hated this movie for its slow and comparatively low-key approach, if you read IMDB's reviews, but many appreciate it for the same things others disliked it for, and some critics quoted on Rotten Tomatoes had some kind things to say about it, although there are a few predictable 1-star reviews. Not from me, though. This was a good watch. (Although in a world where friends have told me they hated "The Babadook", I've had to come to accept that I just don't understand what most people want in a horror movie, and maybe my enthusiasm shouldn't be considered a recommendation. I don't know.)

If this had come around as a TV movie during TV's unflinching 1974/75 horror movie trend, alongside weirdly-intense-for-TV movies like "Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark" or the cheap but disturbing "Bad Ronald", it would have sat comfortably alongside them in my generation's memories of deeply scarring stuff we saw in TV as little kids.

For that, I'm going to give this one an honorable mention. It doesn't aim that high, but it hits the target it does aim for square on, in a way a lot of first-time horror feature directors don't, and without a lot of the failures modern horror audiences seem to not mind putting up with.

It's a Canadian production, by the way, continuing a theme that pops up in these capsule reviews pretty frequently. There's just something about those Canadian horror films.