LET’S JUST get this out of the way: “innovative horror” is an oxymoron. If there is a scare tactic left that hasn’t yet been tried, that is probably because it can’t be found. We see movies like this because we like the conventions, and hope maybe some director might figure out a way to arrange them in a sufficiently startling, if not original, piece of trickery. So I when I say House, the film adaptation of a Ted Dekker-Frank Peretti collaboration novel, is The Ring meets The Amityville Horror meets Saw meets Hide and Seek meets 1408, it’s only mostly an insult. The real insult comes next, the form of a backhanded compliment: the only good thing there is to say about this movie is that its badness has nothing to do with its Christianness.

A slightly feverish, implausible plot might be forgivable had it managed to frighten or trick us in any way, an endeavor House abandons in its first ten minutes. Well-executed scaremongering is all about the foreplay—the setup, the suspense, the gradual revealing of its hand. There are so many elements screaming “BE AFRAID” in the opening moments that we can’t help but wish they’d shut up and let us be afraid. House gets too weird too fast, without establishing any sense of reality with which to meddle. An opening so packed with thunder—a sequence of impossible events set to a relentlessly overdone soundtrack—is bound to give way to lots of cinematic bludgeoning. House does not disappoint; at every turn, it exchanges true creep for blunt brutality. It also doesn’t fail to employ a truly impressive array of horror clichés: back roads, creepy houses, rats, axes, butcher knives, masks, demonic children, thunder, pentagrams, animal carcasses, automatic water faucets, and ceilings dangling with fetish items.

To zoom in on the construction of individual scenes is to magnify the film’s biggest failure: how often it squanders fantastic sets and situations that are teed-up for creepiness. There are almost zero effective jump scenes, and absolutely zero clever turns of plot. When “Randy-boy,” the aggressive rich-boy jerk, follows the elusive killer into the network of underground tunnels under the house, the eerie cat-and-mouse effect is spoiled by constant flashbacks and cutaways to other scenes. When Stephanie is locked in a tiny closet with water gushing under the door, frenetic camera changes and interrupting scenes keep the panic toothless. Attempting to keep four storylines in the air—complete with obvious and unenlightening flashbacks—proves too complicated a challenge when we know so little about what’s real or imaginary, which characters are dead and alive, and why everyone is doing the most illogical things a human could do in such circumstances. By the time the big ending comes around, anyone who hasn’t read the book will have no earthly idea what is happening, much less be able to untangle the blatantly obvious but impossible-to-understand spiritual analogy.

That brings us to the movie’s Christianness, which does a lot less damage to House than it has done to previous Christian movies. (Also exciting: it’s the first openly Christian film with an R rating since, well maybe ever.) There are a few telltale signs—a Bible verse on the opening title, a weepy Anberlin song, the main characters’ cartoonish marital strife. (“I’m tired and hungry!” “I hate you, Jack!”)—but those mild moments are the only ones that lit up my finely honed praydar. There’s an argument that a clearer Christian parallel could have been the one original thing about this movie. When it is revealed that the Tin Man was chained up all along, there’s a momentary indication that he was a sin allegory: loud, frightening, and mind-controlling, but (often forgotten to us) bound and powerless. Instead, House reaches for something more complex and less coherent. According to readers of the book, it has something to do with the wages of sin being death, though even that information does little to explain the bizarre ending, which involves a holy light visually rendered as something between the Angel of Death from The Prince of Egypt and an iTunes visualization.

If we’re only comparing to Dekker’s and Peretti’s previous (and even more disastrous) films, all directed by Robby Henson, House is a step up. It isn’t sunk by its spirituality and doesn’t feel like a low-budget misfire. House, rather, is a different kind of failure: an attempt to pull off a story so complicated an un-scary that it has to hack at you with a blunt battle axe to make you squirm.