“I want this to be over,” whispers Casey (Odette Yustman) towards the end of The Unborn; those of us in the audience know exactly how she feels. The fact is that Casey’s ordeal – nightmarish visions of a dybbuk (a Jewish demon) in the form of a little boy whose uncle was murdered by Nazi scientists at Auschwitz– simply cannot compare to ours.

As scripted and directed by Blade creator (and Dark Knight story writer) David S. Goyer, The Unborn trots out one post-Ring horror-film cliché after another (leading to an admittedly funny moment where our heroine destroys all of her mirrors to keep creepy things from popping up in them). The telegraphed scares and exposition-heavy dialogue are really no more grating than in any number of other bad January genre releases, but Goyer’s Ira Levin-style attempt to integrate Holocaust tropes into his highly derivative narrative lowers the film somewhere beneath mere trash. The sole source of amusement is watching Gary Oldman attempt to play a Chicago-area rabbi who winds up exorcising Casey’s demons: the year is young, but I’m not sure anything in 2009 will top the sight of a British actor speaking ancient Hebrew with an American accent.