One Halloween a young boy named Frankie Scarlatti (Lukas Haas) tells a scary story to his classmates. Frankie has a vivid imagination and likes to write stories. After school, two bullies grab Frankie’s hat and throw it into the class cloakroom. The bullies tell Frankie where he can find it. However when Frankie goes to get his hat, the bullies lock the door behind him. Frankie is locked inside the cloakroom where it begins to get dark. As it gets dark Frankie sees the ghost of a young girl being attacked by an unseen force then vanish. Somebody comes into the cloakroom and begins to look around. When Frankie makes a noise, the unknown person attacks Frankie and he blacks out.

Frankie finds out that the spirit he saw was of a little girl that was taken from the school years before and murdered. Several other children were also murdered in the following years but the killer was never found. When Frankie blacked out he had a vision of the girl whom he spoke to. She asked Frankie to help her find her mother.

As Frankie begins to dig further into the vision of the spirit and the other murdered children, he realises that the killer might be someone very close to home. All of it having something to do with the mysterious ‘Lady in White’ who lives by the cliffs. This movie is very eerie. I remember seeing it a very long time ago now, and I remember it scaring me. Not that it has many jumpy moments, but rather it’s just a really well put together ghost story.

Lukas Haas is brilliant as Frankie. Alex Rocco is also great as Frankie’s dad Angelo, and the great Len Cariou plays the family friend Phil. The effects of the ghosts can be a bit ropey in places, but the story is so well told that it would be cruel of me to really mark it down for that. If you have never seen this movie, then I urge you to track down a copy and give it a watch. It really is a creepily good movie.

4/5

JM