‘28 Days Haunted’ Review – Like Big Brother, But Worse

‘The Conjuring’ franchise has made Ed and Lorraine Warren the most famous paranormal investigators in the world. Lot of us cannot even name a third. So, the 2022 Netflix reality show ’28 Days Haunted’ banks on the franchise’s popularity, hoping viewers would be thrilled to watch three groups test Lorraines-propounded paranormal theories in three different haunted locations. Tony Spera, a paranormal expert (also, the couple’s son-in-law) co-hosts the show with Shane Pittman. The two monitor activities of the groups, who are under 24*7 surveillance and give their ‘expert’ opinion.

Armed with equipment but zero information on the properties, the investigators/psychics forming each group has 28 days to uncover the secrets behind the haunting. Horror fans who believe in ghosts, banshees and poltergeists might find this series mildly entertaining, but skeptics are going to want to rip their hair apart over just how bad this is. Episode three is titled “I’m Done”, in which the bickering between members begins and most viewers would be done with the show too. The fights between the cast is straight out of reality shows like ‘Big Brother’, but at least the drama on those shows is bitchy and hilarious, here it’s just unwatchable. The hosts of the show however try to spin the in-fighting as “the ghosts trying to divide and conquer the teams to stop them from uncovering the secrets of the location”. L-O-L.

Except for a few odd sounds and the paranormal investigators claiming they ‘feel’ something, not a lot of happens on the show. It’s most definitely scripted and terribly so. In-fact, even the cast members accuse each other of faking some of the weird supernatural stuff that occur. And the most atrocious thing the series does is trivialize a tragedy. One of the haunted locations is where the ‘Lawson murders’ took place, a case famous enough to have its own wikipedia page. Charles Lawson, a tobacco farmer, had shot his wife and six of his seven children to death in 1929 at their home. Later, claims were made that Lawson had sexually abused his teen daughter Marie and she was allegedly a few pregnant by her father at the time of the slaughter. In the series, the paranormal investigators ‘uncover’ that Charles Lawson did abuse his daughter and was possessed by a demon when he murdered his family. So they both implicate and defend the murderer – the devil made him do it. Disgusting.

Netflix should have just asked the producers of this show to make a fictional anthology of three short horror films spread over six episodes, instead of this monstrosity of a ‘reality series’.

It’s a 2/10 from me.