With a title right off the cover of a VC Andrews potboiler, I was already cringing before I popped the DVD into my player. Many minutes later--not doing much better.

What to do when bad horror takes itself seriously? If you're going to do horror not with a sly, little grin, not with injokes and allusions to camp classics, then please, for the love of god, make sure your shocks are solid, your premise isn't absurd and you have enough technical flair to match the moody and macabre tone.

This kind of horror is the most delicate breed. Too much of anything and it implodes. The filmmakers are gunning for a singular effect and every single element has to work flawlessly toward that effect. That's one of Poe's commandments, people. Horror is Swiss clockwork, every cog carefully laid. The worst reaction a purveyor of horror can get from an audience is laughter. Not laughing so as not to cry. Not incredulous laughter. Not laughter because you just had the pants spooked off of you, bladder unpent, adrenaline valves blown and gushing. Unless you're doing "An American Werewolf In London," the audience should be one petrified, shocked to stone.

I don't like coming down, like the hammer of Thor, on one horror piece after another. I adore the genre. Actually, it's not even a genre, so much as fiction's nasty side, where the unconscious self rules and everyone is their own doppelganger. It just seems most indie filmmakers are as wrongheaded in their approach as the Hollywood hacks they revile.

Nightmare is harder to conjure than a pleasing daydream. Anyone who has the huevos to try, for that alone, a nod of respect. But respect is not enjoyment, nor awe. Horror filmmakers--the ones that really get it--are true alchemists, turning the darkest in us into black gold.

Many try; few triumph. A sad, but solid, truth.