Haunted Echoes Trailer (2010)

Guy and Laura Dykstra (David Starzyk and Sean Young) have recently suffered a parent’s worst nightmare: their eight-year-old daughter Kimberly was abducted from her bedroom and murdered. A suspect, Dennis Law, known to be a pedophile, was charged in the crimes, but evaded trial by committing suicide. The police are certain that Law was the killer, but Guy and Laura have lingering doubts since much of the evidence was circumstantial. Laura especially is tormented with grief, and Guy, a physician, decides they have to move out of their old place to make a fresh start and, hopefully, save their marriage. He buys a charming old house and, together, he and Laura set about fixing it up.

Not long after moving in, however, Laura senses something that she’s convinced is the spirit of her slain daughter. She never gets a good look at the spirit, but disturbing messages appear on the walls in fresh paint or chipped away in the plaster. The phone dials the same number again and again, all by itself. Friends of the Dykstras’ have encounters with the spirit, which is sometimes violent, and a neighbor (M.Emmet Walsh) reports seeing a young girl staring at him from inside the house when no one was supposed to be home. Guy is initially skeptical, but after a night in which he, too, is treated to supernatural happenings, he decides Laura must be right: Kimberly, from beyond the grave, is attempting to communicate. In fact, he and Laura decide she’s identified the true killer – Kenneth Monk, who was and is a music teacher at Kimberly’s school.

They ask the police to reopen the case. They’re refused. They investigate Monk by themselves and learn, by coincidence, he grew up in the same house where the haunting continues to escalate. Now Kimberly’s spirit – or what her parents assume is her spirit – is suggesting that they murder Monk so that he can never again harm another child. But what the Dykstras don’t realize is that they’re actually being manipulated by a different ghost altogether. Some years ago, Monk killed his devious sister, Elena, and buried her remains in the crawlspace beneath the house. In fact, it’s Elena’s ghost that’s seeking revenge, but Guy and Laura, with a need for revenge all their own, are only too prepared to believe that Monk is responsible for Kimberly’s death and hatch a plot to kill him.

But Monk’s paranoia has been activated by the Dykstras’ queries. Fearful they’re going to lead to prosecution for a crime that’s gone unsolved all this time, he moves to recover the body. He sneaks onto the Dykstras’ property and digs away in the crawlspace where he, too, is confronted with Elena’s spirit. Crying out, he gives himself away and attacks Laura when she discovers him, only to be finished off by Guy in the ensuing struggle. Afterwards, he and Laura learn conclusively that Monk had nothing to do with Kimberly’s murder. In fact, it was Dennis Law all along. But another child’s murder has been avenged, and, along the way, Guy and Laura have sealed the fissures in their shaky union. They’re finally ready to make that fresh start.