"Black Box: Flight 298" review — conspiracy horror with a monster in the hold

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Low-budget chiller leans heavily on tinfoil-hat paranoia to build its reasonably effective suspense

Buckle up for a ride that’s turbulent with highly uneven quality but gets to its destination with a certain style. Black Box: Flight 298 is a horror-sci-fi-thriller that mostly takes place on a flight supposedly bound from New Orleans to Seattle, although it’s quite obvious this was filmed in a studio equipped with plenty of green screens to accommodate some cheesy visual effects in the back half.

However, before director Steven Quale and screenwriter Stephen Susco reveal the monster mastermind behind all the mayhem, they build up a pretty good head of suspense by gesturing towards the paranoia and terror many feel around air travel. Opening text ominously claims that the rates at which planes lose contact with ground control are much higher than the US Federal Aviation Administration admits, which doesn’t sound so bad really to viewers not prone to aerophobic anxiety. But that’s only the beginning of a yarn that bounces off tinfoil-hat paranoid conspiracy theories – there is literally a character who wraps her head in aluminium foil to protect herself from upper-atmosphere radiation – as well as more general angst around strange things that go bump in the stratosphere.

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