’28 Days Haunted’ Review: Paranormal Activity Made Dumb

The paranormal is really the ultimate frontier. What happens after death is something that only those who go on that journey can tell, and yet, it is impossible for those living not to ask and be interested in it. Entire religions have been founded around the idea of knowing what happens after we die. Going to heaven, being reincarnated, and plenty of other options have been proposed as answers. However, none of them can be proven. 28 Days Haunted, the next paranormal reality television debuting on Netflix this week, is a show trying to answer those questions.

Answering those questions is a big task, and as you are probably thinking, the show doesn’t really succeed at anything it is trying to do. The series bases its entire premise on the concept of the 28 Days cycle, proposed by the Warren family, the most famous paranormal investigators in the USA, and in the world, thanks to The Conjuring franchise. The concept says investigators need 28 days to break through the veil that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead.

This means that if you really want to make contact with spirits at locations that are supposedly haunted, then you need to spend at least 28 days at the site. To prove this theory, the show brings three teams of experts to investigate three different sites that are famous for being haunted. It doesn’t matter if the audience believes or not in ghosts or spirits, the truth is that there are some really awful places out there, places where you can feel something wrong has happened in the past.

However, the way the show presents its participants, the cases, and the way these people conduct their investigations comes off not only as goofy but also deceiving and dumb. These so-called “experts” that we see as the participants in this reality show are the worst problem for the show itself. Their personalities are not really likable at all, and they are so convinced about what they are seeing and experiencing that basically everything they do comes off as exaggerated.

Even the most “skeptical” of the participants forget what his role is very early in the first episode. Science is thrown out of the window, and instead, we get a lot of “trust me, bro” moments. The participants and the producers are totally trying to make an entertaining product, but when presented as something that is happening in real life, then the show falls apart because nothing is really happening. The show tells you it is, but you are not seeing it. Everything feels very fake and staged, which is often the death of a reality TV show.

Reality TV is fast and cheap. You can really achieve a large output by creating a situation and then just letting people face that situation. That is why reality TV is so popular with networks; it allows them to create content in the cheapest of ways. Of course, since its conception, it has been proven that reality TV is all but a reality, with producers pushing storylines and characters to do things on camera. These shows present a vision of reality that is only a curated vision of reality, and not a very interesting one at that.

The series works very much like any other reality TV show out there. There are a bunch of cameras placed around the investigation sites, and they record everything. Most of the footage comes from these cameras, which means they are not precisely of the highest quality. There are also cameramen around the participants using handicams that are often quite inefficient in translating the fear that the participants are apparently experiencing. Every time something scary happens, it seems it happens only to the participants, with the cameramen standing there unfazed.

There is no sense of composition, intrigue, or discovery in the show. It is hard to create all these things within the frame of a reality show. However, they are elements that should be vital when creating something that is supposed to grab the audience and make them believe that yes, these people are in danger by being there. However, when you see the participants going to bed after an apparently really intense supernatural event, well, the bit of tension they could have, avoided entering the room completely.

However, let’s not forget that the participants are the ones that really make the show unwatchable; they are unlikable, exaggerated, and not trustworthy at all. They call themselves “experts”, but their approach to the scientific method is laughable at best, and it makes the entire show feel dumb and just a waste of time.

Some people might find enjoyment in watching three groups of people walking around in rooms and saying they are experiencing scary things, and we are supposed to believe them. There must surely be an audience for that. However, I dare to say that for most people, this will be a hard pass, and they will be better people for it. But hey! It is a show, at least.

SCORE: 3/10