Home Sweet "House" Horrors

 

Home Sweet “House” Horrors

by Kristin Battestella

These contemporary horrors both foreign and domestic tackle suburban scares, refugee horrors, technological terrors, family vengeance, and home haunts. Dust off the welcome mat!

His House – Horror follows a Sudanese couple relocating to England in this 2020 Netflix release starring Wunmi Mosaku (Loki), Sope Dirisu (Black Mirror), and Matt Smith (Doctor Who). Perilous refugee boats begat detention, weekly asylum stipulations, and finally a newly assigned address – a dirty tenement they are lucky to have all to themselves. Despite having already been through so much, our couple laughs until they cry over their gratitude, hopeful for a new start before eerie echoes and shadows that move by themselves suggest there is more afoot than faulty electricity, peeling wallpaper, and holes in the plaster. Well done lighting schemes and dim sunlight through small windows create a moody palette for the background apparitions, ominous hands, kitchen oddities, and eyes watching from within the walls. Flashes of past troubles, childhood fears of the night witch coming to get them, and new scary experiences build tension. Husband and wife both have encounters they don't admit, and tearful conversations with dark door frames in the background put the viewer on edge with our characters. We think we see or hear something rather than having everything given away thanks to flashlights, masks, tool mishaps, and disorienting figures in the dark. Cultures clash amid the horrors as our refugees struggle to be part of the community, reluctant to use tableware and getting lost in the maze of lookalike attached houses. Cruel neighborhood kids shout “Go back to Africa” and a kind but clueless doctor doesn't know how to listen to the pain of tribal wars, butchered families, and doing what you have to do to survive. Our couple insists they are good people but must remain on guard against deep seeded racism even in such crappy conditions. Lazy office workers complain that their falling apart house is “bigger than mine” so they shouldn't be dissatisfied and “biting the hand that feeds them” – forcing the fearful to retract any moving request and hide the truth about apeth witches and ghostly torments. Although the Dinka dialogue is unfortunately not always translated, it's superb that this is told from the appropriate angle. This isn't a yuppie white couple choosing to ignore the spooky house warnings just to get out of the city and play unreliable scares with the audience. Eerie visuals, surreal waters, fog, and candlelight visions combine the personal horrors, supernatural, and real world frazzled as the demands to repay what they owe escalates from wet footprints and flickering light switches to monsters in the floor. Deceptive happy moments and psychological experiences take us to other places without leaving the congested house – reliving why with upsetting revelations that can only be put right with blood. This is a tender story about living with your demons; an excellent example of why horror from other perspectives need to be told.

The Housemaid – Covered furniture, candlelight, staircases, slamming doors, and screams get right to the gothic afoot in this 2016 Vietnamese tale. The grand French plantation in disrepair is out of place among the beautiful forests – reeking with a deadly history of cruel overseers, abused workers, shallow graves, and angry spirits. Rumors of mad wives, dead babies, decaying corpses, drownings, and bodies never found provide horror as the titular newcomer obediently does the housework during the day before the power goes out at night. It's forbidden to speak of the dark family history, and mirrors, lanterns, and dramatic beds infuse the creepy with Jane Eyre mood. Arguments over sending for a distant doctor or using Eastern medicine for the wounded man of the house give way to sheer bed curtains, sunlight streaming through the window, and a touch of Rebecca in the steamy fireside romance. Unfortunately, a snotty, two-faced, racist rival addresses the awkwardness of the help pretending to be the lady of the house amid resentful servants, war intrigue, classism, and the vengeful ghostly Mrs. roaming the halls. The cradle draped in black rocks by itself, but it's only for effect as jump scare whooshes, flying furniture, roar faces in the mirror, dream fake outs, old photos research, and visions of the past create an uneven contemporary intrusion when the period atmosphere is enough. Roaming in the scary woods just for the sake of bones and panoramic ghouls is unnecessary when we should never leave the congested house. Indeed, the horrors are superior when anyone trying to leave the manor encounters a terrible but deserving end. Questionable retellings, confusing ghostly revenge, disbelieving interrogations, and flashbacks within flashbacks play loose with point of view, but a not so unforeseen twist clarifies the demented duty over love begating the horror. Some viewers may be disappointed that the movie trades one kind of horror for another and has too many but wait there's more endings. This has its faults and uses western horror motifs as needed to appear more mainstream rather than low budget foreign film. However, the social statement characterizations are much better than formulaic Hollywood scares, and the throwback Hammer feeling, period accents, and gothic mood combine for a unique horrors and drama.

Retro Bonus

The House by the Cemetery – Director Lucio Fulci's (The Black Cat) 1981 splatterfest starts with broken tombstones, an abandoned manor, and a topless babe fooling around among the cobwebs before bodies on hooks, sexually suggestive blades through the mouth, and bright red gore with intense zooms and pulsing organ chords to match. This is only eighty-seven minutes but after the fine prologue precious time is wasted with location resets, past murder/suicide exposition, new colleagues continuing the house research, visions of bloody mannequins, and terrible dubbing for a creepy kid unfortunately named Bob. Thankfully there's a certain self-aware humor as the real estate agent runs over a “damn tombstone” and details regarding the original homeowner, ahem, Doctor Freudstein come to light. Over the top crescendos and intercut flashes indicating horror connections are expected, but while preposterous, the frenetic bat attacks are well done with screeching sound effects, stabbings, lots of blood, and disturbing splatter hitting a child in the face. Photographs have an ominous girl in the window one moment then gone the next, and the bizarre kids are wise to the freaky and/or paranormal while the clueless parents argue amid layered suggestions, frazzled screams, and suspect glances with the beautiful babysitter. Antique clutter and noises in the night lead to nailed shut doors, inlaid headstones in the floor hidden under a rug, ghostly rattlings, and scary basements. Eerie lighting and practical gore add to the mayhem, fireplace pokers, and freaky eyes in the darkness; however Victorian flashbacks, repetitive if chilling scares, nonsensical padding that goes on too long, and late tape recorder research montages (when the whole thing was supposed to be about researching the house history) are certainly confusing. Coherent plots aren't as important as being scary cool, and this is exactly what contemporary formulaic horror does right down to the remote control car for jump scares. Fortunately, the haunts, monsters, nasty smells, maggots, and butchered revelations are so grotesque we don't even care why. Heads roll in a wild finale, and we recoil even as we chuckle at the dated derivatives and our subsequent modern knockoffs. This is an entertaining midnight watch for the head scratching bemusements and the horror it gets right.

Split Decision

Our House – Town panoramas, vintage vinyl, and the happy dinner table open this 2018 remake of the 2010 movie Ghost from the Machine, but our college son inventor puts projects before his parents' wishes. More overhead locales and driving to the lab montages waste precious moments when starting with the gadgets and a line about his family not understanding his electromagnetic induction theories would suffice. Despite the high tech possibilities and recent gear, the experiments have a nice eighties low tech touch with light bulbs, knobs, and dials. Family tragedy strikes, but the drama moves so fast we can't enjoy the personal dilemmas as the eldest struggles to raise his younger siblings three months later and the middle brother blames him for their parents' deaths. Unfortunately, yet more silent driving montages and aerial transitions make the concept thin; filler leaving dialogue and actual interactions too short. Spinning equipment and clicking machinery intercut with writing on the mirror and little girls talking to imaginary friends are fine suspense, but there isn't that much ominous smoke in the experiment nor all that many strange occurrences. It's understandable if the children are jumping to hopeful conclusions in their grief, but the daughter is only a swimmer for derivative bathroom timers and water frights when the mad science possibility is enough without shoehorned scares. An inventor trying to contact unseen energies is reluctant to consider any ghostly communications until an obligatory internet research montage and hair on the arms standing up electromagnetic explanations dumb down the fantastic. Amplifying events with loud crescendos drags the last half hour as the spirited metaphors are lost to typical horror shadows and whooshes – forgetting any internal logic for contrived neighborly detours and solving past house crimes. Even those annoying town scene transitions disappear as apparent post production changes thematically damage the family drama and any horror or science fiction grief. Not bothering to study the original experiment video for three months provides convenient revelations in the final act before getting the details from the old lady next door, making the end different from what this says on the tin yet predictable horror nonetheless. Perhaps this is fine for horror lite fans but there was potential for a deeper examination rather than typical scares underestimating the human connection.

Skip It

A Haunted House – I'm not a fan of found footage films, so this 2013 horror comedy parody from Marlon Wayans (Scary Movie) mocking the genre seemed like it would be fun. Plain text warnings of recovered recordings, assorted camera angles, and onscreen timestamps open the winks as the new camera and young couple moving in together don't mix thanks to his dog, her boxes, his arcades games, and her dad's ashes. Affection, sass, and bemusing stuffed animal foreplay are ruined by hair in curlers, open bathroom doors, and awful farts in the night – making for refreshingly real relationships and humor. No blind spots in the video coverage means catching the maid up to some saucy, and racist, voyeuristic security camera guys want your passwords. Fetishizing friends want to swap, the gay psychic wants to know if they've had same sex encounters – all the white people are envious opportunists and that's nice to see in a genre so often dominated by such caucasity. Sleepwalk dancing and what happens during the night silliness caught on camera escalates with getting high and mocking the usual sheets, smoky imagery, whooshing, and Ouija boards. Our couple jumps to conclusions about the haunting over noises, misplaced keys, doors moving by themselves, and kitchen mishaps, but neither is a catch and a lot of incidents are more about their own faults and problems. They probably shouldn't be together horror or not, and some of the not addressing their own issues is too on the nose serious or uneven alongside the humor. The misogyny is akin to women often being haunted and not believed in horror, but nothing is scary because the overtly comedic attempts are out of place against the formulaic encounters. There's an imaginary friend, pervert ghost, demons, a deal with the devil for Louboutins, and the final act is an old hat exorcism meets Poltergeist parody crowded with male ghost rapacious and more unnecessary homophobic jokes. There's promise in how the camera brings out the voyeur in us all, changing us once we're in front of it by revealing our true selves or why we're weary of the lens. A taut eighty minutes with bemusing commentary on the genre's flaws could have been a watchable, but the dumb and offensive shtick goes on for far too long – becoming the monotonous horror movie it's trying to send up thanks to a surprising lack of personality.