After my eighth viewing I firmly believe this is the best horror film of the last 15 years. Admittedly competition in the last decade has hardly been stellar but that doesn’t stop this from not only being a fantastic horror film but a great film irrespective of genre. It isn't the scariest by any means but much like Rosemary's Baby it works on more than one level and takes you on a far greater emotional journey than most genre films do.

The Orphanage is, on the surface at least, a very old fashioned horror film. It exists in the same world as The Innocents: a world of large empty houses and fragile mental states. It relies on the suggested rather…

How often does a horror film provide hair rising scares along with a nail bitingly suspenseful and believable story? Even though I am a novice when it comes to the number of horror films watched, I can say with certain amount of confidence that such a brilliant combination of two of the most difficult genres to tackle is indeed a very rare breed. The orphanage is classic in its way of making, in its way of shocking and in its story line which paves the way for it to be deservedly called a modern horror masterpiece. This film is as perfect and as heady a mix of both these incredibly potent genres can ever get.

Every single shot in the…

Ingeniously weighing the elements of supernatural & psychological horror, The Orphanage is an expertly crafted horror film from Cinema of Spain which with its welcome absence of cheap scares & more emphasis on its plot turns out to be one of the finest examples of its genre. Cleverly plotted, it dares to take its time to create the required atmosphere rather than prematurely rushing into scaring its audience like so many horror films do nowadays.

The story concerns Laura; a former orphan who returns with her husband & son back to her childhood home which used to be an orphanage for handicapped children, which she hopes to reopen again. Things are set in motion when her son Simon, who claims to have invisible…