31 Nights of Halloween: The Nun

 

Over the past couple years, filmmaker and writer Alex Magana has become something of a mainstay of the 31 Nights of Halloween celebrations. I'm a tremendous fan of his work, and I hope to feature his work here at least once every week until Halloween. As the title of this one might imply, Sunday is the perfect day to bring this film to you!

The Nun (2023)

Starring: Erin Sunisa, Shaun Holmes, and Eteri Sher

Director: Alex Magana

Rating: Six of Ten Stars

While "The Nun" may not be the best Magana has brought us so far, it's still an excellent little horror film. It's only flaw, in my opinion is that Magana let the film run for one jump scare too many. I feel like he had a chance to give us a perfect and extremely creepy ending, but he blew it. (It's not just my general dislike of jump-scares at play here... it's that this particular jump-scare undermines the film's story.)

That complaint aside, I like everything else about "The Nun", especially the fact that it's a thoroughly modern film, with a couple of YouTubers making content for their channel by testing an urban legend. I also continue to be amused by Magana's blatant product placement in his films by having actors wear shirts with his production company's logo on the front. It reminds me of how many independent filmmakers and even large studios during the early days of silent movies would put their company logos somewhere on the sets of their films in an effort to stop unauthorized distribution and theft of their films through retitling/rebranding. I wonder if something similar is motivating Magana here, what with the way some YouTube channels do nothing but "borrow" from filmmakers and repost their films without so much as a link back to the source.

Maybe I'll drop him a line and ask some day. Although, it's probably a fact that the simple answer is the right answer: Characters wear the ACM-branded shirts because Magana wants to move the stuff for sale in his YouTube channel's merch store.