THE MESSENGERS

This one seriously creeped me out when I watched it. Between the hostile crows (reminding me of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds) and the ashen faces and arms of the ghosts suddenly coming out of the walls, The Messengers was a true scary movie with plenty of "jump factor".

The setting is a run-down farm house where a man has moved his family so they can make a go of country life and sunflower farming. The family in the movie is a good one, but the daughter has been in some trouble in the city which means her veracity and intentions are often in question. When she, and her baby brother, begin seeing and hearing the ghostly inhabitants of the house, no one believes her. And the baby brother can't talk at all due to trauma from a car accident.

The arrival of the farm hand is heralded by shots from his shotgun as he frightens away the crows which are feeding on the sunflower seeds and a bit on the father of the family.

To me, this movie has everything needed to scare the soup out of you from the word "go". But it's not purely a fright-fest. We get to know the family members intimately and hope they'll all be ok as the movie progresses.

Starring Kristen Stewart, Dylan McDermott, Penelope Ann Miller, and John Corbett, this PG-13 movie was released in February of this year, 2007.