'The Unholy' is not designed to be deep, but since glimmers of depth are present, the lack of follow-up makes this a disappointing watch.įenn is a mess. The devil doesn't strut into town cackling with evil glee. It has some excellent jump-scares, but overall there's something rote about the execution, bits that feel sketched-in as opposed to filled out, and a surface-level interest in the main theme of Herbert's novel: what happens when the unholy masks itself as holy? The local priest says, 'Wherever God goes, the unholy follows.' You got that right. But is the Virgin Mary who she says she is? Based on James Herbert's 1983 novel Shrine, 'The Unholy' is fairly standard religious horror, just in time for Good Friday. Quivering with religious ecstasy, she performs a couple of miracle cures, and when word gets out-thanks to Fenn's stories-her small town turns into a modern-day Lourdes. Disgraced journalist Gerry Fenn ( Jeffrey Dean Morgan), investigating an incident of 'cattle mutilation' in a small Massachusetts town, trips over another bigger story, when a deaf teenage girl sees the Virgin Mary in the trunk of the scariest-looking tree on the planet.
