Jeepers Creepers, Freddy and What’sHisName, and all those movies about vampires that have been bloodying up the silver screen--none of them scare, none of them really shock, and none of them have come close to raising a single hair on my neck.

And then I saw a movie with a name straight out of a daycare story time tale: Red Rover. And the hairs bristled from the top of my head and straight down to the tail I lost after my ancestors stopped swinging in trees.

I stumbled across this movie at the Tidal Wave Film Festival. I didn’t know anything about it, but I like William Baldwin and Jodi Lyn O’Keefe, so I settled in for what I thought might be an interesting drama about a girl (O’Keefe) who’s spent most of her life trying to end it because she can’t live with having watched her mother burn to death. Her psychologist brother (Baldwin) figures: Let’s go to the island up in New Brunswick that we’ve just inherited and be isolated and with our ancestors, and maybe sis’s psychoses will evaporate into the salty ocean air.

Not bloody likely.

Their ancestral mansion is on the island. It’s massive, it’s dark, and it’s spookier than a graveyard for black cats. It exudes a single message: "Stay the hell away from me." But of course, they go in. And this is after the folks on the mainland tell them that nobody ever goes to the island and comes back, so nobody goes there. And they’re right. Thousands of dollars worth of antiques and art are still intact and unstolen decades after the last of their ancestors have left the place.

Okay, so there’s the usual horror movie got-to-do’s like wandering off alone, and ignoring any and every warning from both human and not-human, but there’s a lot more. There’s color cinematography that hints of black ‘n white, endowing the movie with an otherworldly sense of dread. Ghosts appear, but they appear like ghosts should appear, abruptly and eerily. And, like that greatest of all horror movies in which nothing scary is ever actually seen to happen, The Haunting (1963), great filming and even greater editing shock without showing. The movie scares with angles and moods.

But Red Rover sports more than just great writing and filming: Baldwin and O’Keefe turn in chillingly real performances even when they’re doing the things that everybody knows gets you killed in a horror movie, those things that, supposedly, the people in the movie should know if they’re to be convincing. Red Rover’s shifts in character and human ambience would test the skills of many great actors, but O’Keefe and Baldwin settle convincingly into their characters and claw their way into that part of the viewers’ mind that doesn’t want to look under the bed.

And then the movie spins into a dizzying and unsuspected ending where everything on the island suddenly makes sense, and it’s the rest of the world that doesn’t make sense. And look out world.