The Unborn

Good horror has gone the way of the dinosaur. Due to the importance of box office dollars, modern horror has morphed into a monster that lacks the metaphorical soul of it's predecessors. Because money is so important, studios have a greater hand in the finished product of a film. They want sleek, sexy, and thus marketable horror. The problem is that horror does not operate that way. That's like being afraid of a Ferrari. People are afraid of the dirty pickup truck with tinted windows. Why? Character.
The Unborn is a horror film about a young, sexy female who finds herself haunted by the evil ghost of her unborn twin. If anyone has spent even five second learning about how to write a script, they'd know that the first ten minutes set the scene, the characters, and the dramatic premise. Let's just cut to the chase and say The Unborn doesn't really do that. This is a problem with so many mainstream horror films nowadays. They feel the urge to get you in right away. It's the equivalent of fast food. You get it fast, you eat it fast, and it makes you regret it for a few hours after wards. We meet Casey. She's out jogging, looking sexy (why are they all sexy?), and she sees a dog wearing a mask. Spooky. Then she finds a baby in a jar. Spooky. It cuts to her sitting on a bed video messaging her pal, "So what do you think the dream meant?" Huh? How cheap an explanation is that? No jarring wake up? No sweaty, was-that-a-dream transition? Weak. The film offers very few scares and a number of inane plot point's that really defy common logic. Would you ever volunteer to help with an exorcism when it's explained that the spirit can possess anyone at any time? Not to mention, the sequence in which we learn what the evil spirit is lasts all of three to four minutes. Isn't it scarier to slowly peel away the layers until we find the rotten center?
Modern horror is not a genre that produces a lot of quality in film today. It's a genre that has always been supported by smart minds (Roman Polanski, George A. Romero) who understood how to create subtle unrest in a viewer so that every creek in the floor is significant. There appears to be no one around who understands that anymore. It's people who think that because CGI is such a powerful tool, the more of it that is used, the better. It's people who use large budgets yet put it all into how the film looks. Not how it feels. In the end, isn't that what horror is supposed to do?