'Forget Me Not' Movie Review

Most slashers stop at the kill. Forget Me Not takes one extra step that genuinely creeps you out. Once you die, nobody remembers you ever existed. Your name disappears from people's mouths. Photos start dropping out of the conversation. And then, slowly, the world just closes over the spot where you used to be. That's the whole hook, and it's a good one.

The 2009 film, written and directed by Tyler Oliver and co-written with Jamieson Stern, premiered at Screamfest in October 2009 before getting a wider DVD and VOD release through Phase 4 Films in 2011. It opens at a graduation party, where Sandy Channing (Carly Schroeder) and her friends end the night with a midnight game of "ghost" in a cemetery. A girl they don't recognise joins them, asks Sandy if she remembers her, gets told no, and jumps off a cliff. From there, the friends start dying one by one, and each death carves a hole in the group's memory until Sandy is the only one left still holding the truth.

Brew TV's own pitch calls it a "Final Destination-type gem," which is fair if you allow some grace for the CGI. It's a Final Destination cousin with a J-horror ghost and a serotonin-deprived idea about guilt sitting underneath it.

Here's why it's worth a watch. The forgetting mechanic is one of those low-budget horror ideas you wish a bigger filmmaker had made. What gets you isn't really the kills. It's the way Sandy keeps trying to convince people that her brother had a girlfriend, that there was a guy named Chad, that none of this is in her head. The film stages that loneliness pretty effectively. Whatever else it gets wrong, it understands that the scariest thing in the room is being the only one who still remembers what happened.

Carly Schroeder is the reason the film works at all. She'd already done strong indie work in Mean Creek, and she carries this thing on her back, doing the "girl losing her grip on reality" version of the genre with more interiority than the script actually earns. Even the unkind reviews agree she's the best thing in it. It's a performance trying to be in a better movie, and it almost gets there.

The supporting cast is a late-2000s teen-TV time capsule. Bella Thorne plays Young Angela in flashback, and this was her first horror film, shot well before Shake It Up turned her into a Disney name. Cody Linley, fresh off Hannah Montana and a finalist run on Dancing with the Stars, plays Sandy's brother Eli. Chloe Bridges, Jillian Murray, Zachary Abel, Sean Wing, Brie Gabrielle, Micah Alberti and Brittany Renee Finamore fill out the friend group. If you came up on Disney Channel and ABC Family in 2009, half of them will trigger that "wait, I know this face" reflex.

The under-the-radar trivia is where this gets fun. Sister Dolores, the nun holding a key piece of the backstory, is played by Barbara Bain. That Barbara Bain. The one who won three consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards for Mission: Impossible in 1967, 1968 and 1969, the first actress in television history to do that. Also Dr. Helena Russell from Space: 1999. And Christopher Atkins, Brooke Shields' co-star in The Blue Lagoon (1980), shows up as Sandy's father. So you're watching a teen ghost movie where two genuine pieces of pop-culture history have wandered through the set, and almost nobody noticed.

Things to look out for while watching. The cemetery rhyme. It loops through the film and is properly creepy when chanted by kids in flashback. "Release the one ignored by heaven" is the kind of line that sticks. The way surviving characters' photographs and possessions vanish in small visual beats, those are some of the film's best craft choices. And the third-act reveal about what actually happened to Angela is more interesting than the slasher framing makes you expect.

Now the honest part. Where it falls apart is the ghosts themselves. The CGI has not aged well, at all. There's a J-horror jerkiness to how Angela moves, which works in glimpses, but the moment she is fully on screen the spell breaks. The dialogue is clunky in stretches, the early party scenes lean on the late-2000s slasher beats (drinking, hooking up, casual cruelty) that the genre had already chewed through, and a couple of the supporting performances are still in green-actor mode. The Letterboxd consensus lands roughly at good idea, rough execution. That tracks.

But if you grew up on this exact wave of teen horror, the rough execution is part of the appeal. Forget Me Not belongs to the post-Final Destination, post-Ring moment when American teen horror was busy rummaging through J-horror tropes and slasher logic and trying to make the lineage sing. It doesn't fully succeed. It does, though, leave you with one image that lingers. A girl in a hotel room trying to convince a brother who used to know her own boyfriend's name. That's enough to recommend it.

So the verdict. Watch it for the hook. Watch it for Schroeder. Watch it for the small surreal pleasure of clocking a three-time Emmy winner in a B-tier teen horror. Don't watch it for the scares. Watch it for the idea that a slasher about being erased is the kind of swing more 2009 horror movies should have taken, and almost nobody else did.