To start with I’m not going to get into the whole idea of whether The Dead Files is fake or not since it’s not really important at the moment. But being as it’s a show that deals with a great deal of material that’s gathered from the sixth sense of the cast members and deductive reasoning based on what evidence and factual data can be found, it seems that a plot for the movie might be a recurring disturbance within a small or medium-sized town that begins to get increasingly worse as the spirits or entity responsible starts out as playful and starts to get more violent as time goes on. While you might think that this kind of plot has been played out time and time again on TV and in movies, and it has, this time around it would be for The Dead Files, a one-time movie starring Ben Kingsley as Steve Di Schiavi and Mae Whitman as Amy Allan. The casting for anyone and everyone else could be up in the air as the main two that need to be mentioned would be those that actually host the show.
Let’s say that this disturbance is centered around several locations rather than just one, a trio or quartet of homes that are experiencing roughly the same phenomena at various times of the day and night. It would also be fun to think that these disturbances didn’t have a set time or pattern that could be tracked, making them truly and utterly chaotic. In comes Schiavi and Allan as the paranormal investigators, following of course police officers and a few other mediums, as well as priests, that give the house thorough look but can’t find any reason or any rhyme to the strange occurrences. The more people that are brought in, the stronger the disturbances grow, until finally the investigators are called in and begin their search. From that point on you can guess what might happen. They make their deductions, speak on their feelings, and start to dig a little deeper than anyone else has gone, and they find something that tells them just what is going on, and why. And that’s when the real danger begins.
There have already been so many ghost stories and possession tales that simply following this well-worn track wouldn’t be enough since many people still don’t know or don’t care about The Dead Files and in order to make a great movie it has to go all out and pull out every stop in order to really make something special of itself. By going the way of a haunting there is a risk of not being convincing enough or scary enough to draw viewers, but there’s also more freedom with it since a possession movie focuses on an individual and can’t go anywhere unless they do. Plus, a normal haunting is usually seen to be confined to one home without spreading out to any other location. Making a film that takes place within several key areas in a town could be classic since it means collusion between someone or something, a hidden pattern beneath the chaos that makes sense but only to those that initiated the haunting. In this manner the story is still rather fragile but it has a lot more potential with someone that has the requisite imagination.
Think of any and every ghost story you’ve ever watched and you might come to realize that hauntings are at times rather tame when compared to possessions since a haunting can grow violent and bloody, but the best are usually those that scare the living daylights out of an audience without having to go through barrels of blood and internal organs being strewn all over the place. Horror is great and all, but suspense, thrill movies, those are the type that get your heart pumping faster and demand that you sit on the edge of your seat so that you don’t miss anything. The Dead Files is a hotly debated show when it comes to being believed or not, but a movie would likely be all fiction and it would be better for it since the story that is possible to tell is one that could be based upon some historical happening if one could be found, but would be highly glamorized in order to really get the kind of frights that would be needed. It’s not often that you see Ben Kingsley or Mae Whitman in a horror thriller, but they do seem to fit the profile well enough and could possibly make something like this happen.
Whether or not there’s something in the works is hard to say but at this point there’s been no real talk about a Dead Files movie, though it might be an interesting prospect. At the very least it could open some new doors to horror.
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