It seems this Dream House into which Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz have moved is actually anything but. The film follows a family who moves into a home where a brutal crime led to the untimely mortal eviction of its former residents. Trailers and TV spots are beginning to crawl out of the woodwork as the film’s release date looms. Yahoo! Movies has the latest clip, which shows Craig and Weisz making an unfortunate discovery about the home’s grisly past.
The trailer for the film seemed to carry trappings of The Amityville Horror with the young family menaced by the sins of their new home’s past. Now this clip, featuring a terrifying discovery via backwards writing seen through a mirror, is reminiscent of The Shining. Not to say the film is unoriginal; it’s actually fun to chart these influences. The scene is creepy without being ham-fisted or relying on over-the-top shock value. The end result is something quite intriguing. So the problem here is not the content of the clip, but the overall inundation of spoilers perpetrated by Dream House’s marketing.
If you’ve seen the trailer for Dream House that is making its rounds in theaters right now then you know what I mean. They eagerly spoil something in that trailer that seems like to pretty obviously be a third act reveal; a grave transgression for any trailer. In order to prevent anyone who hasn’t seen this trailer from also being spoiled to the film’s secrets, we will say no more on that. But given the existence of that trailer, all the TV spots, and now this clip, do we really need more foresight into Dream House? What ever happened to going into a film blind and experiencing the thrill of cinematic discovery for ourselves?
Dream House opens September 30th. Hopefully, there will still be some surprises left for us by then.
