“It’s called the Baby blue challenge, and it’s creepy as fuuuuck.” 

A schoolyard dare becomes an urban legend. When teens summon “Baby Blue,” something answers. The game spreads, leaving grief and whispers in its wake. Stopping it means confronting the first summoning and the cost of calling a name.

With The Summoning, Sergio Gonzalez, Brandon Piskorik, Corey Benson Powers, Brian Sepanzyk, and Felipe Vargas offer an anthology film using the concept of young people who must recite a formula in front of a mirror to summon a demonic force.

Disconnected stories

The Summoning begins with a successful scene that sets the table in a good way. A man on the road. A scary scarecrow that appears on the road and blocks the car. A man who decides to drive through. A successful murder. Then, nothing more about this story. Not even at the end. What is the purpose of this introduction? We will never know.

Then the main story settles in, with a concept that isn’t very original, but still promises a lot of fun. And to be honest, the story of the 3 girls calling a scary entity is quite successful. It’s what comes around this story that offers very little.

The 3 stories that make this film an anthology work have no link between them, except that of being told by the 3 girls in order to summon the cruel mother of the baby blue (Baby Blue). These stories are not totally bad. In fact, there are even some good moments of stress and an extraordinary jump scare. But since they have no real connection to the main story, they are useless. Rather than making a feature film, why not simply make 4 quality short films?

A few good moments of terror

Not everything is bad in The Summoning. Each story offers beautiful things, small flashes of horror that hit the mark. The old woman eating with her strangely enlarged mouth, the corpse that appears to scare the character and frighten the viewer, or even the appearance of Baby Blue’s mother are all sequences that bring the sensations one looks for in a horror film.

If only we had a little more… in each one… And above all, if these stories had even the smallest link between them, the result might be different. Since the movie is a feature film – which should give a coherent whole – with a thin narrative thread, we end up losing interest and finishing the viewing with frustration.

Anthologies must offer a clear link at the end, otherwise the viewer is left with the impression that the director (or the screenwriter) lacked ideas to make a feature film. Therefore, several shorts would have been better.

A little more…

When making a type of story that is already overused, you have to be creative to find a different angle, or something that will make the film stand out from the mountain of existing works. This is unfortunately what The Summoning fails to do.

The idea of the naive incantation in front of a mirror is worn out. Perhaps using it in the context of an anthology film could have been a new way to touch on this sub-genre? Unfortunately, this group of directors misses the mark.

In the end, a film focusing only on the basic story would probably have given a better final result. At least we would have a story that holds together. Maybe next time…

Trailer