Invoke – Short Horror Film Review

In horror, you get what you ask for. In writer/director Carlos Omar de Leon’s horror short Invoke, if you say a certain invocation, evil spirit Eliza Braum will come and rip you to shreds. The main premise of the film is that a young woman unleashes an evil spirit into her house.  

The horror short is only about 6 minutes long, so a lot has to be put in a small time frame. Looking at the horror short from a writing perspective, it was smart not to have too many characters. The character that had the most background story was Eliza Braum. Now, Eliza’s story was a cross between Bloody Mary and Lizzie Borden. The young man and woman are not named. I don’t know if this was the writer’s intention but it implies that this can happen to anyone and by naming them then they become more individualized and less personal.

One thing I noticed right away was that this story is quite similar to Ouija and The Ring, that of an evil entity is brought forth to terrorize an unsuspecting young woman. Another thing that I noticed was a missed opportunity to put Eliza’s claw-like fingernails into action. As in the example of Chekhov’s gun, if a pistol is shown in one scene then later on in the story, that pistil will go off.

Eliza’s claws are debuted but we don’t get to see the destruction that they can cause. One way I would go about using such a visual figure is showing the young woman’s eyes gouged out. In Invoke, there were no such indicators when the young women tried to flee that she had scratch marks. Now I can speculate that maybe the filmmakers did not want to be gory, but I feel that there could have been a balance established.

Overall, I enjoyed Invoke. It was a familiar story and I could see the influence of other films and characters. I look forward to see what will come from De Leon in the future. Check out Invoke on Vimeo here. [ads 2]