The Forest ,directed by Jason Zada, had many great moments within the movie, but did not really have much originality when it comes to how this horror film attempted to scare the audience.

The story takes place in Japan’s Aokigahara forest, which is infamous for the amount of suicides that occur yearly. since 1950, an average of about 30 people per year commit suicide here.

Sara (played by Natalie Dormer), is determined to find her lost twin sister Jess (Also played by Natalie Dormer), who was last seen entering the forest. Although, she is warned by multiple people that the forest is a dangerous place because, it the spirits in the forest feeds on people’s sadness which causes people, who are sad,  that enters the forest to commit suicide. She later meets a guy at the bar which, coincidentally, is entering the forest to write story on the forest. This trip later turns into a nightmare when she decides to stay the night to find her sister.

The movie had many great aspects to it like the editing of sound effects and music to build up tension, but movie relied too much on surprise pop ups to scare the audience.If the movie had had more tension building moments, I think that the movie would have turned out a lot better, but unfortunately the movie had very few of these moments and took the traditional method of surprising the audience instead.The movie also had a few questionable things.One would be, why is there a cabin deep in the middle of the woods?It also failed to explain whether or not the forests effects can impact someone standing outside of the barrier the danger zone of the forest.I was also very disappointed that the movie ending took the typical horror movie route in which someone or something stands in front of the camera and quickly goes towards the audience.

Overall i give the movie a 5/10.Although the director (Jason Zada) did an amazing job on the use of sound effects and music to build up to moments, the film really did not use that technique much, and one of the scariest aspects in the movie was, unfortunately, the jump scares.I was really disappointed with how the movie turned out, and I don’t think I’m alone here. when I asked Jennifer Ledezma what she thought of what made the movie scary, she said “the pop ups were scary,” and she also said ”thinking of what happened was really scary, and knowing that the forest actually exists made it scarier”.