So the folks out at Lions Gate sent out a copy of Husk for me to review for you, and if you’re looking for a dose of good old fashioned After Dark, you’ll likely be surprised to find it here, in a movie you may well have already seen on the SyFy Channel, as that’s where it first showed up. But despite its admittedly humble origins, Husk will prove a lot better than most of what you see there.

Husk takes us out to a group of young folks out driving to a what I’m guessing is some kind of vacation spot at a lake house. Anyway, on their way there, an entire murder of crows slams into their car, causing them to wreck just outside an admittedly rather sinister cornfield. They seek help at an old farmhouse in the center of the corn, but what’s in the farmhouse is a whole lot worse than being stranded outside the cornfield. Now the vacationing group has to survive a night of horror in the corn.

Okay, granted…we’ve heard this kind of thing before. In fact, we’ve heard this kind of thing a lot before. But there’s still plenty of life left in this rickety old concept, and putting After Dark to work on it can’t hurt either. See, speaking here as someone who lives around a lot of corn fields, it’s easy to see why they’re scary. Corn leaves can actually cut skin, and a cornfield can be sufficiently dense for anyone to get lost in it. So picture yourself in the middle of a gigantic, super-dense concentration of leaves, some of which will cut you. Now picture yourself being chased by some ungodly horror out of the deepest depths, and now you’ve got the picture. This is some creepy stuff right here.

And when you reach the point where you find out just what’s going on in this farmhouse of horrors, well, that’s going to be even creepier, frankly.

Sure, this won’t be the scariest thing you’ve seen After Dark put out, but it will handily be near the top of the list, putting a surprising amount of scares and a full-on mastery of the environment (it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a cornfield look this scary) to put on a real horrorshow that should make you nervous every time you have to walk through a cornfield for some reason.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands Husk a nine out of ten for putting on a fine, creepy show that’s just a little bit implausible and unoriginal. Once again After Dark shows us just why they’ve been one of the best names in horror for the last five years.