Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cobweb’ on Hulu, a Derivative Monster-in-the-Closet Horror Retread

Cobweb (now streaming on Hulu) is one among many bump-in-the-night scarefests designed to make us break out into a cold sweat in the presence of early-20th-century wallpaper. Director Samuel Bodin helms his first feature, and aims to exploit – to paraphrase Werner Herzog – the voodoo of location with a thriller about a boy and his parents living in a haunted house, although Mom and Dad may have something to do with its hauntedness. A familiar premise, maybe, but there’s a chance it’s not a retread of a dozen horror tropes. A small chance, anyway. Very small. Wee, you might say. Very wee. 

COBWEB: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s just an old house. You have an overactive imagination. Go back to bed. Peter (Woody Norman) has heard it all from his parents, re: the thing that goes bump inside the walls of his bedroom at 1:45 a.m. He resists the gaslighting, though – he knocked three times and it knocked back. We were there, too. We heard it. And we’re not crazy, are we? All the clues point to the answer being no, considering this old house has a massive patch of rotting pumpkins in its backyard, and old ugly wallpaper that looks like it predates the revelation that asbestos is poisonous, and it really could use a good powerwashing. I mean, the siding is filthy. Mom (Lizzy Caplan), she thinks Peter is making it all up. Dad (Antony Starr), he thinks rats are scurrying around. Rats? Really? Considering the rats and the gaslighting and the parents giving off narrow-side-eye psycho-sinister vibes – and the siding, can’t forget the siding – poor little Peter probably needs to go into foster care. Somebody call CPS!

Title card: ONE WEEK BEFORE HALLOWEEN. Peter asks why he can’t go trick or treating and his parents speak in vague blather about that time before he was born when a little girl went missing on Halloween – and then they pretty much tell him to shut up and eat his dinner. It’s meat loaf. Specifically, really gross-looking meat loaf. Mom probably commits a culinary sin and makes it with ketchup. Bleeccch. Things aren’t much better for Peter at school, either. Bullies trip him and pick on him. Thank gawd for kind teachers, though; the new sub is an attentive sweetheart, Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman), as in “devine intervention,” maybe. Except when Peter draws a creepy creepy picture in class of himself laying wide-eyed in the dark in bed with the words HELP ME above him, Miss Devine walks past the dirty siding and knocks on the door to express her concern, and Mom hastily shoos her away – but not before Miss Devine catches a whiff of those Sinister Vibes. Intervention denied.

Meanwhile, every night, the whatever keeps on with the thumping. And the whispering. The very loud whispering. Yes, she speaks. She. Who could it be? She has advice for Peter regarding the bully: “Make him afraid of you.” So Peter pushes the bully down the stairs and the bully learns that legs don’t bend that way. Peter gets expelled, and as punishment, Mom and Dad move the fridge to reveal a door, and open the door to reveal the basement, and take Peter down and make him stay there. Now, why is there a chain on the floor? And a grate in the floor that hinges open and looks like the perfect place to imprison a Deadite? Oh, it’s probably not nothing. His parents aren’t hiding anything and they’re just odd ducks who probably just need to tweak their childrearing tactics so everyone can live happily ever after.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Caplan would be well-cast as the Other Mother in a live-action version of Coraline. Otherwise, we saw a lot of this bump-in-the-night bull roar a couple months ago in The Boogeyman, which basically ripped off The Babadook.

Performance Worth Watching: Norman – quite good in C’mon C’mon – might be the only cast member who wasn’t told that Cobweb is essentially a cartoon. His earnestness grounds the movie and makes it a little less annoying. 

Memorable Dialogue: Mom, who really sucks, gaslights her son: “That imagination of yours, Peter. It’s going to get you in trouble one day.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: No, it’s not the Great Pumpkin who’s haunting little Peter – despite that ridiculous backyard pumpkin patch, a laughably dumb red herring in a movie that tends to throw such things around willy-nilly. I guess it contributes to Cobweb’s eerie atmosphere, but it also contributes to its confused mess of tones: malevolent Brothers Grimm atmospherics meet goofy caricaturish characters in a story of child endangerment via gross parental malfeasance. Bodin seems to want us to laugh sometimes and feel terror at others, but I was distracted by a mortal concern for how and why the rest of the world doesn’t seem to notice that Peter’s parents are Not Right. Again: What’s the number for CPS? Another question: Why apply the logic of reality to a supernatural horror movie? Foolhardy am I.

Now, how seriously are we supposed to take this? Not very, I’d assert. The movie is more perplexing than amusing, scary or poignant. Characters are thinly rendered and the situations are all horror-movie clichés, building to a third-act climax with a few provocative shots that don’t make up for all the dim lighting and choppy edits. There are times when Chris Thomas Devlin’s screenplay almost kind of wants to tell the story from Peter’s point-of-view, which would make sense; a grade-school-age kid’s exaggerated emotions and perspectives would be a keen explanation for the film’s distortions of character and reality. Alas – alas, I say, alas – it’s not committed to that idea, an idea that might’ve differentiated the film from the scads of haunted-house/home-invasion/monster-in-the-closet thrillers. The only time I chuckled was when Peter and his parents eat the grimmest bowls of sludgy, sub-gruel soup, which verified that his nutty mother is, indeed, a terrible cook. I have a deep appreciation for scenes of tormented soup-supping, but beyond that bit, Cobweb is a dud. 

Our Call: SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.