A family moves into a haunted mansion. This is the start of countless, mostly derivative horror films, and that’s how Nick Willing’s Altar begins. Willing may be familiar to those who frequently watch Syfy original miniseries, having directed the Wizard of Oz continuation Tin Man and the Peter Pan re-imagining Neverland. Altar, however, covers completely different subject matter – namely, Victorian Gothic. The Hamilton family has moved into a dilapidated manor on the Yorkshire Moors to begin the process of restoration. The catch is – and there was always going to be a catch – the manor may be haunted by an artist who murdered his wife and then fell to his death 150 years ago.
So, it’s the perfect place to bring your kids. Meg (Olivia Williams) is the renovation expert. Alec (Matthew Modine) is the artist. Penny (Antonia Clarke) and Harper (Adam Thomas Wright) may or may not be victims of this haunting/possession escapade that is about to unfold. The first indications the family have that there’s something not right with the house are a random lady that wanders the grounds, windows slamming shut and generically creepy shadows in photos of the manor. Williams plays Meg as the rational, level-headed woman with a task at hand who has no time for superstition. But it’s hard to ignore your husband ritually bleeding all over the house, eyes blackened by a possessed trance.
Penny, for her part, desperately wants the house to be spiritually cleansed, preferably by Nigel Lean, a home exorcist (played by Steve Oram, which is hilarious, given his murderous role in the black comedy Sightseers). From him – and the discovery of a boarded up room with an altar for human sacrifice – the family learn a bit more about their ghosts, or at least where in the house they died. The artist Radcliffe, it seems, had an unsettling obsession with his wife, Isabella (aka “Petal”). Once Meg finally decides to stop ignoring the signs (read: after Radcliffe appears in the flesh and asks to see his altar), she finds a portrait of Isabella lying prostrate on the occult mosaic, likely moments before her death.
The “scares” in this movie are almost exclusively limited to loud noises and innocuous surprises, like turning a corner and finding your creepy husband staring blankly. The trouble is that the entire aesthetic of this horror flick is a rehash of a rehash. The manor is satisfactorily bleak but not uniquely so. And the tensions between Alec and Meg will only make you think of better genre offerings. There are plenty moments reminiscent of The Shining, and Willing’s concept of restoring the ghosts to their living forms reads all-too much like Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.
Altar originally aired as a TV movie under the title The Haunting of Radcliffe House, and that context, which breeds these sorts of paint-by-numbers horror films, seems very fitting for a film that features respectable acting on the part of its leads but trots out genre tropes all too eagerly.