MY REVIEW

Perhaps as a reaction to the torture-porn gorefests of the 00s and the so-shaky-you-can-barely-see-the-characters found footage films of the late 00s and early 10s, independent horror in the last few years has seen a return to the sorts of classic creepers that populated movie screens in the 60s and 70s. I’m talking about films like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen, films that work first and foremost to create an atmosphere of creeping, almost primal dread before getting down to the business of delivering the shocks and surprises. In the last few years, there have been a number of films that draw inspiration from this method of telling horror tales: blockbuster successes like The Conjuring and The Woman in Black and more indie hits like It Follows and The Babadook all aim for ambiance as much as they try for jolts and jitters.

In We Are Still Here, we find the combination of a couple of recent horror trends (which are of course revitalizations of older tropes) — horror closely tied to a sense of place and history, and horror serving as a metaphor for a different, deeper emotion, like grief and loss. The Conjuring and The Woman In Black are both haunted house tales in the vein of gothic horror classics like The Turn of the Screw. The Conjuring’s location is a rundown farmhouse where terrible, traumatic things have taken place in the past tied to the breakdown of family life and a mother’s inability to protect her children from harm, whereas The Woman in Black takes place in a rundown English manor out on a misty moor, where, uh, terrible, traumatic things took place tied to the breakdown of family life and a mother’s inability to protect her children from harm. This is one of those common themes with mythic resonances in horror, and not just American horror; from The Amityville Horror to the original and remade The Grudge and back to pretty much every season of American Horror Story, horror understands that deeply traumatic events relating to families that have failed in their primary function — to be a unit that ensures the survival of its young—can leave psychological scars on a location, allowing the events of the past to echo forward and disturb the present.

Everyone always has High Hopes when they move into a new house, don’t they… at this point in American history, everyone should just assume horrific murders have taken place everywhere.

In It Follows, the teenaged/twentysomething protagonists are mourning the loss of their youth as they run from the knowledge of their own encroaching mortality brought about by burgeoning sexuality (just like Regan’s possession in The Exorcist is so closely tied to fear of the female body). On the other hand, in The Babadook, a mother and her son are unable to escape a monster that seems to be a physical manifestation of their inability to successfully grieve the loss of their husband and father, respectively.

We Are Still Here is a new telling of the same old tale, as Carol Clover and James Twitchell would say. And remember, just because the film covers similar ground as other films doesn’t mean that makes it a bad film; on the contrary, Clover and Twitchell would argue, and I often agree — that’s what makes it interesting. This time, in this telling of the tale, our story is set at a stately farmhouse in the middle of nowheresville, New England. This story, too, is also motivated by a mother’s inability to save her son from dying; here, the mother wasn’t as involved as the mothers in The Woman in Black and The Conjuring, but she believes on some level that she has failed in her role as protector all the same. And the first manifestations of ghostly activity in the house appear to be directly related to that grief — Anne is the only one who senses the presence in the basement at first, and the spirit at first appears playful, concentrated around objects central to fond memories of her son.

These look like exactly the sort of nice, respectable folk I never see show up on my doorstep in the middle of the night.

However, when their new neighbors stop by for a nightcap and tell them about all of the awful things that have happened on the property, Paul and Anne realize that their house has a terrible history. It turns out there have been several families that have lived there before them, and they have all perished. “This house needs a family,” says their neighbor, giving them an unsettling smile. At first they assume he means the house needs inhabitants simply because it’s sad to see it left empty for too long. It’s a sappy sentiment that is almost immediately underscored with gravity, when the man’s wife hands Paul a note reading “This house needs a family. GET OUT.”

It turns out she’s trying to save them, because the spiritual presence isn’t their dead son Bobby after all. Instead, lurking in the shadows of the basement, carried through the house on wisps of strange smoky smells, is a family of charred and vengeful ghosts. And these ghosts are frickin’ AWESOME.

For the first half hour or so, before the ghosts show up on screen, I found myself thinking that the film’s low-budget status was rather evident. Some of the shots with windows leading to natural daylight are incredibly blown out, and some of the camera movements are a little uninspired. But when the ghost appeared, I forgave and forgot everything else; the special effects here are fantastic. The first family who occupied the farmhouse died in a fire, we quickly find out, and so their spectral selves are singed and scarred, covered head to foot with soot and still-glowing cinders. When they move, sparks curl up from the cracks in their charred skin like crackling logs in a bonfire. The effect is supremely unsettling in the calmer moments, and downright scary at the more intense ones.

We learn early on that it’s not just the spooky inhabitants of the farmhouse that our heroes need worry about; the inhabitants of the tiny town are just as dangerous. Like the townspeople in The Woman in Black or The Wicker Man, or perhaps more directly the friendly old folk in Rosemary’s Baby, there’s something dangerously off about the locals. This is another trope that has particular folkloric significance. Much of horror is the story of civilized man battling against the savagery of his fellow man, often a loner or outcast from society who exacts stunning violence for often-incomprehensible reasons. This particular horror model, however — man versus the unfamiliar society where he finds himself — is an inversion; instead, our heroes are the loners, pitted against an insular, savage society that enacts stunning violence against them as a way of protecting their way of life.