The first time that Kathryn Hunter appears in the ho-hum horror movie “The Front Room,” her head is forebodingly obscured by a veil. She’s at the funeral of her husband, who, you suspect, probably left this mortal coil unwillingly.

It’s too bad that he couldn’t stick around longer because if he had, the poor guy would have been able to watch Hunter — as a flamboyantly malicious force named Solange — rapidly get her weird on, inching into the shadows like a malevolent spider while weaving a progressively stickier, ickier web.

Hunter greatly enlivens “The Front Room,” so it’s too bad she is mostly relegated to supporting duties in this tale. Its featured attraction is Belinda (Brandy Norwood), an anthropology professor who quits in a fit of pique shortly after the story opens.

She has her reasons, more or less; she feels understandably aggrieved and undervalued at work, but given that she’s pregnant, and that she and her husband, Norman (Andrew Burnap), need the money, it’s clear common sense isn’t her strong suit. This first impression deepens into an irksome trait when she and Norman learn that Solange — his stepmother — will help them out if she can move in with them. Since they’re cash-hungry, they agree; woo-woo trouble ensues.

Writer-director twin brothers Sam and Max Eggers, making their feature directorial debut, have a grasp of the genre’s fundamentals:

They know how to stage an unwelcoming house, and how to play with light and shadow. But either they don’t know or don’t care how easy is it for viewers to lose interest in characters who, like Belinda and Norman, consistently make wrong choices.

It brings out the sadist in you (or maybe it’s just me), especially when those wrong choices are so obviously a matter of narrative contrivance and weak character development.

(“The Front Room” is loosely based on a short story of the same title by Susan Hill about a couple who, inspired by a sermon, charitably take in a widowed relative.)

A stage actress with an estimably rich resume, Hunter has been working in movies for a while but didn’t get the chance to pop on screen until she played all three weird sisters in Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth.” She dominates “The Front Room” the minute Solange drops her veil, smiles and starts using the character’s two walking sticks to drum an eerie rhythm into the proceedings.

Hunter is such a startlingly vivid and deeply expressive actor that her mercurial facial movements, elastic physicality and expansive vocal range — she growls like the devil, mewls like a newborn — suggest Solange’s volatility far more than any line of dialogue. Once Solange starts making trouble, you eagerly wait for her to do more damage.

Horror seems to run in the Eggers family: Sam and Max’s brother is Robert Eggers, who directed “The Witch,” and both have worked on his movies. (Max co-wrote Robert’s “The Lighthouse.”) “The Front Room” has its virtues, including the funereal production design, with its forlorn rooms and faded wallpaper.

Yet from its goo to boos, the whole enterprise is so familiar and at times rote that it feels as though Sam and Max Eggers haven’t so much directed the movie as reverse-engineered it.

They’ve obviously studied fairy tales, haunted-house flicks, religiously informed freak-outs and pregnancy-themed horror films, including “Rosemary’s Baby,” which hovers over this movie like a distracting, teasing specter. The problem is that the rest of us know those sources, too, so we’re primed to want better.