The Call

The killer from 'Saw' and the medium from 'Insidious', in the same film and married to each other. That's the big draw of 'The Call', an '80s style horror directed by Timothy Woodward Jr. and written by Patrick Stibbs, in which Lin Shaye and Tobin Bell play Edith and Edward Cranston, a couple with very bad intentions.

It's the autumn of 1987. Chris has just moved to a small town and quickly falls in with Tonya and her friends, who've spent years tormenting Edith, an old woman they believe is a witch and blame for the disappearance of Tonya's sister from the daycare she ran. After another of their night visits Edith dies, and her husband Edward invites the teenagers to the house.

His offer is simple and sinister: 100,000 dollars each if they ring a number and stay on the line for one minute. The line leads to Edith's coffin, and somebody picks up. From then on each of them has to face their own private hell, in nightmares that more than one critic compared with 'A Nightmare on Elm Street'.

The group is played by Chester Rushing, who'd been in 'Stranger Things', Erin Sanders, Quinn in 'Zoey 101', Mike Manning and Sloane Morgan Siegel. The '80s setting mainly means no mobiles and no internet, and besides the two stars, critics praised the Cranston house, a set packed with detail.

It opened in 195 American cinemas on 2 October 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and went to digital at the end of that month. UK viewers got it on digital on 11 January 2021, and it later joined Shudder. Reviews were lukewarm: almost everyone singled out Shaye and Bell, but plenty found the script a pile of clichés with few real scares.

• Horror
• Mystery
• Thriller