Police detective Mark Lewis (Frank Grillo) arrives at an abandoned Louisiana mansion to discover three dead bodies and one panicked survivor (Dustin Milligan). As Lewis and his team investigate the house further, psychologist Elizabeth Klein (Maria Bello) debriefs the survivor – named John – about the events that led to their deaths.

There is a canny cost-saving measure to Will Canon’s Demonic, in which the supernatural horror is split between the two narratives of the incident in the mansion and the police investigation after the fact. It is the latter that features Frank Grillo and Maria Bello, and carefully developed so at to shoot in as few locations as possible. That leaves the former to be populated by unknown – and much cheaper – actors for the bulk of the film. It is a trick employed on more than a few low-budget features; to be honest Demonic achieves it better than most. By using John (Milligan) as the link between the two halves, Canon assembles a fairly cohesive picture with a fairly decent level of suspense.

As for the actual plot, it is fair to say there is little here that its audience will find surprising. A group of people try to make an independent documentary in an abandoned mansion that was once the site of a ritual mass murder. Things go bump in the night: doors open and close by themselves, creepy ghosts seem to appear momentarily, and so on. It is a very well-furrowed field of screen horror, and while there are a few innovative and disturbing moments the overall impact is one of broad derivation.

The bulk of the cast fail to impress, but it is open to debate whether that is the fault of the actors or the poor dialogue. Grillo and Bello are both talented actors, but they lack much chemistry together: it feels suspiciously like their scenes were shot in a rush, with little time taken in rehearsal or discussion.

The entertainment value of Demonic is really based on what each viewer decides to bring to the picture. Anyone that is a keen and forgiving horror fan – happy to put up with some weak writing and direction if there are enough jumps and scares available – is inevitably going to get more out of the experience than anyone who is not. There are a few decent ideas that are fairly well executed, but there is also a lot that is overly familiar, and stereotypical to the point of feeling moribund. There are many worse horror movies out there. There are also many that are much, much better.