The night that I had watching this film was one of the best nights I’ve had with my friends. We spent it laughing…at the movie. Yes, we spent one hour and twenty minutes giggling at the disaster that was The Gallows. I brought myself a chocolate bar to get myself through it (also because I can’t really get through anything without chocolate) and it melted before I got a chance to eat it. That will be my intro to this review.

A quick synopsis about The Gallows: This film encompasses the typical high school experience: being forced to do something we don’t want to do for credit to graduate, so we somehow try to get out of it and end up doing more work being lazy.The characters include a jock, a football-player-turned-actor, a cheerleader, and a theater nerd. The essentials to make a cliche horror film, if you ask me. Cabin in the Woods did it tastefully and purposefully…The Gallows, I truly believe, did it as a cop-out.Anyway, these friends are inside their high school to dismantle the school play’s set so that the football player doesn’t have to be in the play, therefore giving him the credit to graduate without ever having to perform in the school play for the sake of his ego. While taking down the set, the ghost of a former student who died performing the play comes to haunt them.

It’s a found-footage-style film, told through the lens of a camera being carried by the jock. I truly had to look away quite a few times because the camera was so shaky and it was moving around so much that I was getting nauseous. Now, let me just tell you, I am so tired of these cop-out found footage films.

They are getting old and overdone, and typically they are not done well. This is no exception. The camera work is not good, and a lot of the “footage” in the movie is not necessary. The film would have been better had it been filmed like a “normal” film where it isn’t filmed in the perspective of a video camera.

Now let’s move on to the scares in the film: they, also, are cop-outs. Consisting only of loud noises and jump scares, there is nothing in this film that is truly terrifying. Some of the jump scares don’t even have anything to do with the film. They are actually useless. If you see the film, there is one in particular, and you’ll know EXACTLY which one it is. There are two scenes towards the end of the film that I considered “more scary than the rest of the film” that were not just totally brutal.

So on to the rating of the film:
Story/Concept: 1
Direction/Style: 0
Scares: 0
Atmosphere: 1
Rewatchability: 0
TOTAL: 2/10

I honestly don’t feel bad about rating this film so brutally. It was another cliche horror film that tried too hard to attract an audience that isn’t into true horror, they really just enjoy the crappy stuff. Sorry not sorry! The Gallows was awful!!

• Author
• Recent Posts

Taylor Krauss

Taylor has been a horror fan for as long as she can remember, begging her parents to let her see The Exorcist at the tender age of just five years old. Since then, she has developed a lifelong obsession with all things strange, paranormal, and creepy. If you find her doing something other than watching a horror film, she’s probably raging as a dwarf barbarian playing Dungeons and Dragons (obsessively…it’s a problem), quoting Lord of the Rings incessantly, or trying to become Dana Scully.

Latest posts by Taylor Krauss (see all)

• [Slamdance Review] MAJNUNI - January 26, 2020
• Panic Fest Short Film Review: BROWN FISH (2017) - February 4, 2019
• Short Film Review: GOOD GIRL (2018) - December 26, 2018