June 9 (2008): An Hour and 35 Minutes That Felt Like Forever

Some horror movies overstay their welcome. June 9 doesn’t just overstay—it moves in, refuses to leave, and makes you wonder if time itself has stopped working properly. The premise is straightforward enough: a group of teenagers in 1999 document their increasingly dangerous trips to Boston Mills, Ohio—better known as Helltown—a real location surrounded by urban legends about abandoned buildings, ghost sightings, and rumors of satanic rituals. They’re filming their pranks, looking for pot plants, and generally being the kind of obnoxious kids you’d expect from a found footage movie. What they find instead is a community of oddly dressed, disturbingly normal-looking people who really, really don’t want them there.

It’s not a terrible concept. The problem is that June 9 takes this idea and stretches it across what feels like an eternity of repetitive scenes where absolutely nothing happens. The movie runs 95 minutes. It feels like four hours and 50 minutes. That’s not hyperbole—that’s the genuine experience of watching these kids drive to Boston Mills, get told to leave, go home, play pranks on each other, and then repeat the entire cycle again. And again. And again.

Over the course of what we think starts on June 4th and mercifully ends on June 9th, the same basic sequence plays out with only the slightest variations. They find pot plants that are never mentioned again.

They encounter a couple having sex next to a rotting cow (because apparently that’s romantic). They get chased off. They come back at night. Lisa gets a nosebleed and throws up. The camera glitches. Rinse and repeat.

The movie throws in dozens of half-baked ideas and never follows through on any of them. There’s a supernatural element hinted at through Lisa’s constant illness and the video camera distortions, but it goes absolutely nowhere. There are mysterious photos of the kids found in a closet, suggesting they’re being watched and documented, but this is never explained or explored. The pot plants that motivate the entire first trip? Forgotten immediately. A kid in a fancy car tells them about Helltown’s weirdness in a scene that drags on forever in the pouring rain, and it accomplishes nothing except making us wish he’d shut up already.

The pacing is glacial. Scenes stretch on and on without purpose. The handheld camera work is so jerky it causes actual motion sickness. And because it’s all repetitive trips to the same location with the same non-events, it becomes nearly impossible to remember what happened when or which day was which.

Here’s the thing, though: when June 9 finally gets to the actual horror, it’s almost worth the wait. Almost.

The ending—both the murders and especially what happens after—is genuinely the best part of the movie. When the kids are finally captured and killed on June 9th, the deaths themselves are laughably bad. They’re gently tapped with hammers that barely make contact, fall over, and die. But what comes after is where the movie finds its footing. The community has a picnic. They’re chatting about sports, work, family—completely normal small talk as if they didn’t just murder a group of teenagers. Their belongings get sorted and distributed. The kids’ clothes end up in the workshop to be sold or kept. A child picks the video camera as his prize. The bodies get ground into slop and fed to the pigs. And through all of this, everyone remains disturbingly pleasant and ordinary.

This is the movie’s most effective idea: that evil doesn’t have to look deranged or deformed. These aren’t the typical movie cannibals—dirty, grimy, psychopathic hill people. They’re well-dressed folks who could be your neighbors, wearing 1940s-style clothing like it’s Sunday best, conducting themselves with eerie normalcy while committing atrocities. The field full of old cars from different decades suggests they’ve been doing this for generations. It’s unsettling in a way the rest of the movie never manages to be. The young actors actually do solid work here. Their fear feels genuine, especially in moments like when one kid hides in a closet and you can hear his terrified breathing. They make their characters believable even when those characters aren’t likable—and they’re not. We didn’t care if any of these kids lived or died. They reminded us of obnoxious YouTube pranksters, and watching them finally face consequences felt more like relief that the movie might end than actual emotional investment.

June 9 is based on real Helltown legends from Summit County, Ohio, where the government evacuated an area in the 1970s to create Cuyahoga Valley National Park, leaving abandoned structures that spawned decades of urban legends. The movie tries to incorporate all of this folklore—the hauntings, the satanic rituals, the mysterious phenomena—and ends up doing justice to none of it. It needed to pick one thread and follow it instead of scattering ideas like breadcrumbs that lead nowhere.

The stark yellow-orange filter whenever the kids enter Boston Mills is meant to create atmosphere but mostly just hurts your eyes.

The grainy found footage quality is fine once you adjust to it, but the color grading is distractingly bad.

There are moments where you can see what June 9 was trying to do. The slow build of tension as each trip gets slightly more dangerous. The creeping dread that something supernatural is at play. The final reveal of a community that treats murder as casually as slaughtering chickens. But the execution buries these ideas under an avalanche of padding, repetition, and unfulfilled setup.

The movie would have genuinely worked if it had committed to being a supernatural story—maybe the town only exists every hundred years, maybe these people are ghosts or demons reenacting their rituals. Or it could have worked as a straight cult thriller about isolationist cannibals. Instead, it tries to be everything and ends up being mostly just endless footage of kids driving back and forth to a place where nothing happens until suddenly everything happens in the last fifteen minutes.

June 9 isn’t completely without merit. The acting is better than expected. The final act delivers some genuinely creepy moments. The concept of normal-looking evil is compelling. But getting there requires sitting through what genuinely feels like the longest 95 minutes in horror movie history.

We’re giving it two and a half cents out of ten. Half a cent for the kids’ acting, half a cent for the effective ending, and one and a half cents for the disturbing ordinariness of the community’s evil. The rest? Lost somewhere in the fourth trip to Boston Mills on June 7th when we’d already stopped caring.

If you’re curious about Helltown folklore or want to see found footage that tries something different with its antagonists, there are worse ways to spend your time. Just be prepared for it to feel much, much longer than it actually is.