Metacritic reviews

Early scenes overplay the shock of these phantasms, but just as you expect Geoghegan to crank up the effects, the film mixes in some subtler scares.

The new chiller We Are Still Here is the latest iteration of people unwittingly stumbling upon an ancient menace, and it succeeds more than it fails, thanks largely to the nice work of first-time director Ted Geoghegan.

Once the viewer finds him or herself comfortable with the idea that it’s going for mildly-spine-tingling rather than gut-punching and eyeball-violating, all holy hell breaks loose. Which in this case turns out to be a pretty hellishly good thing.

Has its pacing problems, and the special effects are strictly of the cheesy variety, but it provides enough genuine scares to make it thoroughly enjoyable, especially if seen at a drive-in on a hot summer night.

Once We Are Still Here unsticks itself from hommage mode, it finds something cathartically funny inside the fearsome.

Of course, you can’t really make a movie that combines elements of the metaphysical, zombie and haunted-house genres without a few splatter-movie clichés, but Mr. Geoghegan makes them creepier and more unpredictable than I thought possible.

We Are Still Here will make you scream and make you laugh, and possibly leave you speechlessly gesticulating at a charred zombielike ghost in the background. But the peak moments are too few.