You don’t have to be a horror aficionado to know that corpses are scary. The lifeless husk of a human being, the rapidly decaying meat suit that housed all our thoughts and memories, is a brutal reminder of our fleeting mortality. So it stands to reason that a film like “The Possession of Hannah Grace,” about a woman working in a morgue where one of the corpses refuses to stay still, would be pretty darned scary. If only in principle.

And yes, that’s true. And only in principle. “The Possession of Hannah Grace” takes a concept so unsettling it’s already been turned into one great movie — “The Autopsy of Jane Doe” — and turns it into a dreary horror thriller, without any of those pesky thrills.

“Hannah Grace” begins with an exorcism scene so mechanical that it plays like a last-minute reshoot. Drab tones, rigid shafts of sunlight...