What Lies Beneath is a departure for Robert Zemeckis, a director whose inhabited many different genres in his multiple decades as a filmmaker, but only delved into the world of horror two other times in his career, with the 1992 horror/comedy Death Becomes Her and the feature that traumatized me as a youth, The Polar Express. What Lies Beneath may not be as terrifying as his 2004 Christmas-themed motion picture, but hey, it works on its own merits as a spooky ghost story with some appropriately bombastic twists that feel like they should be told around a campfire via an adult holding a flashlight under their face.
