0.0 MHz

“Zero point zero megahertz is the frequency at which a person’s soul meets a ghost,” someone technobabbles in like the third scene of 0.0 MHz. I, uh… I to be honest did not understand this at all. Something about radios and/or brainwave scanning? Other than a few scenes in which the megahertz reader is inching downward towards zero to create tension, I don’t know that there was a reason for it. …or maybe it’s real ghost hunter technobabble, rather than made up? They did, after all, have a salt circle at one point.

That’s not really important right now, I suppose. The thing about this movie is, it is a nearly perfect Frankensteinian amalgamation of classic American slasher horror and Asian spooky ghost horror. It’s like, the entire first third is, hey, let’s get some teens (whether high school or in this case college, they are honorarily teens for these purposes) in a car and drive out somewhere bad, and even make sure that a crazy-eyed dude warns them not to go there. You know, the thing that’s gone from staple to signifier to self-parody over the course of my lifetime.

Then, gradual transition with significant overlap from that movie to the haunted ghost movie, complete with unwashed black hair and random double-jointed body horror. But somehow, it works? For a movie that feels like it was put together to fulfill the terms of a bet, it’s surprisingly effective. Of five cast members, I only knew for sure whether one of them was going to live or die, and that ain’t bad. (You’ll know too.)

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