The Empty Man (2020)

Spooktober Challenge 2025

Premise: our guy is called James Lasombra. This is a pretty badass name for a private detective, specially because he’s the kind that smokes, drinks, has some trauma, blabla. Anyway, his neighbour’s dorter disappears after she and her friends followed some dumb urban legend thing and he’s decided to find her, no matter how many weird conspiracies he needs to uncover!
Under 90 minutes? Nope, over two hours!
Do they say the title?Yup, constantly!

One sentence review:

Okay, more: whoever edited the trailer for this movie deserves a good talking to, I completely skipped this back in the day because it sounded like this was Yet Another Slenderman Clone Thing (the trailer mostly focuses on the urban legend bit that’s important for like 10 minutes total. Oops, spoiler). What we have though is a really cool, really pulpy Weird Horror movie that could perfectly work as a Call of Cthulhu one-shot. It is creepy but it also knows how and when to be a bit funny, the detective is surprisingly competent for a horror movie character, dunno. This one was fun.
A simple way to improve it: The first 20 minutes of the movie would work as a short and maybe that would have been a great idea too.