Haunted 3D Review: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Haunted 3D: Echoes Of The Past offers a few creepy visuals and a decent central performance from Mahaakshay Chakraborty, but its predictable storytelling, dated horror techniques, and stretched runtime make it a forgettable addition to the franchise. Horror fans seeking genuine scares may want to look elsewhere. Mahaakshay Chakraborty and Chetna Pande stars in Vikram Bhatt’s horror franchise return. Here’s the honest review on whether this supernatural thriller delivers anything worth watching.
There was a genuinely good run of Vikram Bhatt horror films. Raaz, 1920, the original Haunted 3D — these weren’t perfect movies, but they understood something fundamental about building dread. They had atmosphere. They took their time. They made you care enough about the characters that the supernatural threats actually felt threatening.
Haunted 3D: Echoes of the Past arrives fifteen years after the original and feels, unfortunately, like exactly the kind of sequel that gets made when a franchise still has name recognition but the creative energy that made it work has long since moved on.
Dev, played by Mahaakshay Chakraborty, shows up at a remote mansion near Maniktala Lake carrying emotional wounds from his past. He’s looking for peace. He finds the opposite — strange visions, unexplained incidents, and a growing sense that the house has secrets connected to a woman named Sunheri, played by Chetna Pande, and to whatever happened there before he arrived.
Written down like that, it sounds like the makings of a genuinely atmospheric supernatural thriller. The isolated location, the emotionally damaged protagonist, the mysterious woman whose presence may or may not be entirely of this world. There’s material here for something properly unsettling.
The film never manages to make the material work.
The horror mechanics are the film’s most immediate problem. Flickering lights. Creaking doors. Shadows that move when they shouldn’t. Ghostly figures appearing in mirrors. Loud jump-scare stings timed to faces appearing from the dark.
None of this is wrong in principle — these are tools of the genre, not crimes against it. The issue is that Haunted 3D: Echoes of the Past uses them without variation, without escalation, and without the kind of creative staging that makes familiar techniques feel fresh. By the time you’re twenty minutes in, you’ve developed a reliable instinct for when the next scare is coming. You can feel the buildup, you know the release is about thirty seconds away, and when it arrives exactly as expected, the only response is mild confirmation rather than genuine fear.
Horror that becomes predictable stops being horror and becomes something closer to a theme park ride — technically a sequence of scary things, but safe in a way that drains all the tension.
The film’s other serious weakness is the romance. Dev and Sunheri’s relationship is meant to be the emotional center of everything — the love that anchors the supernatural mystery and gives it stakes beyond simple survival. For this to work, the film needs to make you believe in them as people who matter to each other. It never does. Their connection feels constructed to serve the plot rather than emerging from genuine character development. When the dramatic payoffs arrive, they land on foundations that weren’t built strongly enough to support them.
The setting genuinely earns some credit. The fog-covered mansion, the mountain landscape, and the general isolation — there’s a visual grammar here that suggests gothic horror rather than the louder, more commercial variety, and in the early sections of the film it creates a legitimate sense of unease. The film that Haunted 3D: Echoes of the Past could have been is visible in those early atmospheric moments.
Mahaakshay Chakraborty is working harder than the script deserves. He brings real commitment to Dev’s emotional confusion and grief, holding scenes together through physical and emotional presence in ways that cover for writing that gives him surprisingly little to actually work with. His sincerity throughout is the film’s most consistent quality.
Chetna Pande does what she can with Sunheri, bringing some warmth and vulnerability to a character who exists primarily to be mysterious and then explained. The limitation isn’t the performance — it’s that the screenplay never gives her enough depth to make the character feel like a real person rather than a plot mechanism.
The visual effects are a significant issue for a film where supernatural visuals are supposed to generate fear. Some moments are handled reasonably; others look noticeably dated in ways that pull you out of scenes precisely when the film most needs your investment. In a horror movie, an unconvincing ghost effect doesn’t just fail to scare you — it actively undermines whatever atmosphere has been built up to that point.
The pacing compounds everything. At over two hours, the film is considerably longer than its story justifies. Scenes restate emotions and information that have already been established. The middle section loses momentum in ways it never fully recovers from, and by the third act you’re aware of the runtime in a way that no film wants its audience to be.
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If you’re a dedicated Vikram Bhatt horror franchise fan who watched the original Haunted 3D and wants to return to that world regardless of quality, this will give you enough familiar elements to spend two hours with. The nostalgia factor is real even if the execution is uneven.
For viewers who want a horror film that actually frightens, challenges, or surprises them, the experience is more likely to be frustrating than satisfying. The bones of a good film are visible in the premise and the setting. The film built around those bones never rises to what the material was capable of.
Haunted 3D: Echoes of the Past has the atmosphere, the location, and two committed lead performances working in its favor. It also has predictable scares, underdeveloped characters, uneven effects, and a running time that overstays its welcome by a comfortable thirty minutes.
Horror is one of the hardest genres to execute well because fear requires genuine surprise and emotional investment simultaneously. This film delivers nothing consistently enough to make the whole thing work.