These days, if your college pulls funding for your dubious paranormal experiments, you’re probably out of luck.
But as the hokey and distantly fact-“inspired’’ thriller “The Quiet Ones’’ would have it, back in 1974 an unorthodox Oxford professor moves his operations to a rented country mansion.
I probably don’t have to tell you that it’s crumbling, with ramshackle furniture, a spooky attic and lights that flicker at regular intervals.
Because it’s the early ’70s, this spooky setting doesn’t deter regular attempts at hookups — one of the grad students (Rory Fleck-Byrne) is pursuing his blond classmate (Erin Richards), who in turn is not adverse to extracurricular activities with the prof (Jared Harris of “Mad Men’’).
But the teacher draws the line when the possessed subject of his experiments (Olivia Cooke of TV’s “Bates Motel’’) tries to do the nasty with a hunky member of the campus AV squad (Sam Claffin of the “Hunger Games’’ franchise) who’s been recruited to record the proceedings.
His found footage of the prof’s techniques — involving strobe lights, locked rooms and the subject’s doll — is not really scary, but then nothing in the film really is.
Veteran screenwriter John Pogue, in his second directorial outing, tries repeatedly and mostly unsuccessfully to jolt his audience by amping up the abundant sound effects to ear-shattering levels.
The film’s title, “The Quiet Ones,’’ doesn’t really mean anything, but it’s sure ironic.
The younger performers’ work — basically playing libidinal idiots — is far less interesting than Harris, whose sinister cultivated voice and craggy features would have once have made him a natural for horror films.
This film was sponsored by the venerable British horror studio Hammer, which would have known what to with somebody like Harris during its heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It wouldn’t have been a bore like this.