I watched a couple of films–neither great, neither bad–which grub in the troughs of contemporary horror scenarios but with some more high-falutin’ goals in mind. I could probably write an essay that excoriated the directors for not taking their slumming seriously enough; the films don’t really succeed as horror, and the pretensions swell up and occasionally burst the seams of the well-knit genre conventions. But I’ll assume they were serious fans of the genre conventions, and simply suffered from grand ambitions–in trying to make seriously scary and yet seriously serious flicks, both ends of that equation kind of suffer. We get middling melodramas, admittedly well-shot and showing promise.