10 Best Irish Horror Movies You Need To Watch

Writer-director Ivan Kavanagh’s The Canal is a slow-burn ghost story which gradually buries itself under viewers' skin to unsettling effect.

The film follows film archivist David (Rupert Evans) who becomes disturbed when he discovers that his family’s home was the result of a grisly murder in the early 1900s. Shortly after this macabre revelation, his wife (Hannah Hoekstra) goes missing, with David being labelled as the prime suspect.

David, however, believes that her vanishing is somehow connected to the house’s history and that there’s some other malevolent force at play.

As the mystery deepens, Kavanagh refuses to give anything away. Are the ghostly shadows David’s been seeing real, or is it just another symptom of his deteriorating mental health? It’s through this uncertainty where the filmmaker plants the seeds for the terror to come.

With few jump scares to speak of, the horror is generated from the increasingly tense atmosphere. The terror culminates in a climax that is equally harrowing and heart-breaking. Moreover, there's one sequence that makes The Ring look tame in comparison.

The Canal is a ghost story that takes its time to sink its claws in. It's only when viewers are ensnared in the psychological torment when this flick unleashes hell.