Halowe’en may have come and gone, but if you’re still looking for scares, you could do a lot worse than Irish horror The Hallow.

Coming out at the same time as one of the most successful Irish films ever (Brooklyn), The Hallow offers a very different look at the Emerald Isle, taking the beautiful countryside, the quaint ways of life and the rich folklore of the nation and twisting it into something dark and terrible.

Joseph Mawle plays Adam Hitchens, a conservationist who has moved to the area to assess a local forest in the wake of its sale, and spends his days wondering through the trees with his newborn, while his wife Claire, played by Bojana Novakovic, stays at home to fix up their aging and secluded homestead. Only, according to local warnings, the forest is protected by ancient forces that don’t take kindly to people trespassing in it.

It’s not long before things begin going bump in the night, and the Hitchens family find themselves in a desperate fight for survival.

What’s impressive about The Hallow – which is essentially little more than a schlocky horror movie – is the way that it commits to that mandate, and delivers everything with such gusto. Horror movies often take their time in building up to the scares, but The Hollow features barely fifteen minutes of set-up before things get hairy, while a set-piece that would be most films’ big climax occurs barely half-way through.

The final 30/40 minutes is a run of unremitting horror: the pace never lets up, and the scares never relent. While this is undoubtedly refreshing, it also begins to work against the film at a certain point.

The beasties on display are initially terrifying: they lurk in the background of scenes, where they’re not the focus, and become even more frightening when you do spot them. Initial glimpses of the warped fairies/banshees/Hallow are very effective. But as the relentless parade of attack/flee/attack/flee continues, and we see ever-more of the admittedly impressive make-up effects and prosthetics, they become less intimidating.

While they’re used brilliantly in the early going, there comes a time when less definitely would’ve been more. As a result, after a first half which offers both a creepy, unsettling atmosphere and a few solid scares, the concluding half is far less effective from a horror perspective, albeit still entertaining.

The Hallow takes inspiration from any number of classic horror films and tropes – The Thing, Alien and The Wicker Man all have their dues paid – and while it doesn’t do anything terribly new, it delivers everything you’d expect from a genre film like this, taking in supernatural scares, body-horror and creature-feature with enough panache to see you through.

As the leads, Mawle and Novakovic are solid, although with so much of the plot hinging on the safety of their baby, Novakovic gets little to do other than play the desperate mother. As the Hitchens’ enigmatic neighbour, Game of Thrones actor Michael McElhatton is severely under-used, while the only other figure of note is a one-scene appearance from Michael Smiley as a local cop.

The script, by director Corin Hardy and Felipe Marino, does what it needs to, and even offers refreshing moments of its own: after their first major encounter with the creatures, Adam begins to rationalise the experience, only for Claire to instantly cut him off, “No. We both saw the same thing. It’s all real”. It’s always nice to see protagonists in a horror movie that aren’t complete imbeciles.

The score, by James Gosling, and the sound-design in general – so often the scariest aspect of a good horror film – are strong here, and the awful sounds and screeches of the Hallow are often chilling.

While Hardy’s film gets good value out of turning Irish fairy-tales into something ghastly – think a dark spin on Cartoon Saloon’s beautiful animations that look at Celtic folklore – the wider points the film threatens to make are never built upon. The film is bookended by scenes that imply that the selling off of national forests is a bad thing, yet the film in-between does little to explore this.

The focus on a baby in peril becomes tiresome, and the over-exposure of the Hallow saps the film of much of its terror by the end, even as it remains pleasingly pacy and enjoyable. The make-up effects are great, and the gleeful sense of fun that Hardy brings to what are some very dark thrills and chills is appreciated, but ultimately The Hallow is probably best recommended for genre fans only.

Released in UK cinemas on Friday 13 November 2015.

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