On the cusp of the first day of autumn, it only seems appropriate to start easing back into horror movies. And while bad horror movies are a dime a dozen, I feel like Netflix has a semi-reliable mix of old classics and new stuff. So this latest weekday watch was a movie called The Wretched.

The story follows young teen Ben, a high school kid who is visiting his dad as his parents navigate a divorce. As he’s trying to balance patching things up with his dad and making new friends, weird things start to happen next door. After seeing a creature lurking on his neighbor’s porch, he soon after finds the neighbors’ little boy terrified and hiding in Ben’s own house—and discovers that something is horribly wrong with the boy’s mother.

Y’all know I love paranormal everything. Ghosts, demons, hauntings, and all sorts of other-worldly horror scenarioes are scary because they defy our known laws of physics. This also means that filmmakers can choose to be creative with agreed-upon rules in folklore, like whether vampires have reflections or whether ghosts can walk through walls.

In The Wretched we have an interesting case that isn’t quite demon possession, but isn’t quite not either. We’re not dealing with Christian gods and demons; it’s something much older. And what starts off as a seemingly bread-and-butter scary movie situation takes a couple fun twists and turns along the way that kept the movie from being too predictable.

For one thing, this creature not only preys upon children and families, it manipulates the memories of the people around them. So when a child goes missing, nothing is done because no one remembers them. It’s as if the child never existed. That alone honestly made the movie worth watching, even though nothing else really stood out as groundbreaking: we have a troubled teen who adults won’t believe, a sweet love interest who insists on tolerating his whacko behavior, and a father with the patience of a saint.

Still, it offers up a halfway decent twist toward the end, and it gets props from me for making up a few of its own rules.

3 outa 5.

Side note: You definitely should skip this one if anything with kids is beyond your squeamish level. There’s a few scenes that toe the line of graphic.