Jason M. Jones

Bret Easton Ellis recently tweeted that Art House Horror was quickly become his least favorite genre. As a horror fan, I see his point. There has been a lot of good stuff in recent years in this particular niche. Ti West’s The Innkeepers and House of the Devil were stand outs. Let the Right One In is a fantastic film (despite being well reviewed, I didn’t like the American remake, particularly for the miscasting of Chloe Grace Moretz and what I see as Matt Reeves misunderstanding of what exactly made Tomas Alfredson’s film great, but that’s an entirely different review). But like most subgenres of horror there has been more bad than good, and the horror critics’ tendency to wet themselves with excitement every time a horror film has Terrence Malick pretensions is quickly becoming tedious. Both It Follows and The Babadook were enjoyable, but fell apart in the last acts. And while I have yet to see The Witch, on Friday I watched the most recent of these lauded Art House Horror films, We Are Still Here. With this film, first time director Ted Geoghegan shows himself a filmmaker with the talent to make a great horror film in the future, but We Are Still Here isn’t that film.

The set-up is promising. An aging couple, the Sacchettis, grieving the loss of their only son in a car accident, move from the city to a secluded house on the outskirts of a remote village to try and move on with their lives. The setting, rolling snow clad fields, presents the location as miles from the nearest neighbors, and this in and of itself instills a sense of unease. Soon after they arrive, the standard set of horror movie tropes begins. Bumps in the basement, a secluded room seen only through an opening in the brick wall is discovered there. The room is hotter than the rest of the house and smells of smoke. The first time I encountered these tropes was when I read William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist as a teenager (Friedkin in his film didn’t rely too heavily on them), and there’s a good reason they’re employed again and again: they’re effective. Like the old mirror trick where no one’s there when the protagonist opens the medicine cabinet only to find someone behind them when they close it, this is always scary (scoff if you will, but do me a favor: think about it the next time you’re alone in your bathroom at night and tell me I’m wrong). Of course, the trick has to be done right. And in We Are Still Here, it begins on the right foot. The music radiates an eerie drone. We’re on the edge of our seats waiting to see what will happen, what evil will be revealed.

After a visit from strange neighbors, whose only purpose seems to be to impart an ominous backstory that the house was once owned by a mortician who sold corpses illegally and killed himself, the film begins flailing. Mr. Sacchetti calls an electrician to come and see about fixing the boiler in the basement. Once Sacchetti leaves, the electrician sets about work, and the lights flicker off. At this point, Geoghegan still has us. But then, the electrician is attacked, and the perpetrators look like the “tooth fairies” from the Guillermo Del Toro-produced Are You Afraid of the Dark, only twice that size. And whereas the evil wasn’t convincing in its impish form in Dark, it fails here too. The inability to create a monster that can’t transcend CGI is the movie’s first flaw, but not its last.

Mrs. Sacchetti calls in her dead son’s roommate’s parents who are earthy-type hippy spiritual mediums to see if the spirit in the house is their son’s. The Lewises show up, and though Lisa Marie and Larry Fessenden emanate fantastic energy as May and Jacob Lewis, the characters aren’t well-developed beyond their essential role in propelling the plot by being able to pick up vibes. And of course, the instant the Lewis’s son and his girlfriend arrive on the scene, you know they’re cannon fodder. I’m sorry for anyone who dislikes spoilers, but if you can’t figure that out yourselves, there isn’t much I can do for you.

In any case, there’s a Wicker Man element to the plot. The townspeople aren’t what they seem and the evil within the house has been known to them for some time. This is where the film, like Babadook and It Follows, really loses me. To resolve the story, everything is explained, and any scares it earned during the first half dissolve in frustration at knowing too much. For all that, I didn’t hate We Are Still Here. The film was competent. But does any filmmaker set out to make a film they want reviewers to call competent, watchable? I agree with Easton Ellis. The primal element of fear originates in not knowing. As soon as I know why something is happening, it’s not scary or at least, not as scary. I believe I mentioned before that the scariest experience I ever had at the cinema was the first hour of James Wan’s Insidious before he offered his astral-projection explanation and revealed a Darth Maul-derivative demon. I wish more Art House Horror directors understood this.