FX artist turned director Victor Garcia’s new film The Damned (formerly Gallows Hill) features well-worn horror conventions and relatively generic thrills. Thankfully, it offers them up in a nice, atmospheric package devoid of many of the obnoxious filmmaking and editing techniques so many horror movies rely on nowadays. It gets off to a fairly slow start and barrages the audience with familial bickering that serves as backstory. Once it picks up though, The Damned offers up some decent thrills and surprises in a thickly eerie setting.

Peter Facinelli (Hollow Man II) plays David Reynolds, a man who travels to Colombia to retrieve his daughter Jill (Nathalia Ramos) from college. She refuses to go along with her dad because she despises his new fiancé Lauren (Sophia Myles). Ever since the death of her mother, Jill has been aggressively rebellious towards he dad, choosing instead to live with her aunt Gina (Carolina Guerra), a reporter in Colombia. Jill’s been getting romantic with her aunt’s cameraman, Ramón. Like I said, there’s a lot of family stuff going on in the first half.

Before the movie can turn into August: Osage County, the whole gang finds themselves stranded in a torrential downpour deep in the rainforest. They make their way to a secluded hotel, which is home to a sketchy old man (Gustavo Angarita) who warns them not to roam around the place. They of course do and find a little girl locked in the basement. When they attempt to free her, the old man turns violent.

This is where Garcia and screenwriter Richard D’Ovidio (Exit Wounds) start getting to the good stuff. Genre fans see where the story is going, but that doesn’t make the chills any less effective. Some of the jump scare moments and overtly gory stuff do fail to hit the mark. Where The Damned really excels is in its haunted house atmosphere and supernatural mythos. The evil being in the film, the “bruja,” has a really great story and Garcia really embellishes her story and role as a manipulative bitch.

There are a few moments during the excitement that threaten to drag the story down. These mainly involve the familial tensions that were set up early on. It’s handled in a pretty skillful way though, as the supernatural force uses it against Peter and Jill. By the end, Peter’s motivations become a bit muddled up, like Garcia and D’Ovidio weren’t sure how to wrap things up. Overall though, The Damned is a conventional horror film that manages to defy expectations enough times to make it a worthwhile watch.