“This house needs a family.”
Written & Directed by: Ted Geoghegan
Starring: Andrew Senseing, Barbara Crampton, Larry Fessenden, Lisa Marie, Monte Markham
The H-Bomb: After losing their grown son, Bobby, in a car accident, Anne and Paul Sacchetti (Barbara Crampton and Andrew Sensenig) relocate to an old farmhouse in a small New England town. Apparently, the house has been vacant for thirty years, so they were able to pick it up for a song. Before too long, Anne and Paul start experiencing some strange things inside the house, such as picture frames breaking on their own, the scent of smoke coming up from the cellar, along with the usual shadowy figures and unexplained noises at night.
Believing it’s the spirit of their son reaching out to them, Anne invites her new age psychic friend, May (Lisa Marie), and her husband, Jacob (Larry Fessenden) over for the weekend, in order to try and make contact with whatever this presence is in their home. However, as they investigate, they start to realize that the activity in the house may have less to do with their son, and more to do with the home’s original owner, and the dark secret being kept by the local townsfolk.
I stated some months back, in my Insidious: Chapter 3 review, that I was growing very tired of the endless barrage of haunted house movies that we’ve been inundated with for the past five years or so. They all look the same, sound the same, have the same structure and tropes, and even though there have been some good ones (The Conjuring, The Babadook), most are just generic junkers infested with Boo! scares, and are, for the most part, totally and completely indistinguishable from each other. So yeah, fuck ’em, I have had enough, especially after sitting through that lame ass Poltergeist redud.
Then a film like We Are Still Here comes along, and what do you know, it’s a genuine breath of fresh air. It starts out like your typical haunted house thriller, with the typical paranormal goings-on. However, it soon turns into something considerably less conventional, somewhat less predictable, and much, much darker. Darker and bloodier… but I’m getting ahead of myself. Apparently, the film had some buzz around it a few months back, a buzz that I was somehow oblivious to, as this movie wasn’t on my radar at all when I decided to give it a rent. That, no doubt, has worked in its favor.
My initial knee-jerk reaction to We Are Still Here was to label it as this year’s Conjuring, this year’s Babadook, but I’m not going to do that, as I feel that would be doing it an immense disservice. Making that kind of comparison would not only set expectations too high, it would also be rather misleading, because while this is a haunted house film, it is one that is truly unique, and plays by its own rules.
Drawing inspiration from Lucio Fulci films from the 70’s, instead of other contemporary supernatural flicks, writer/director Ted Geoghegan delivers a ghost story in which the restless spirits aren’t interested in merely taunting and tormenting the living… no, they’re a bit more ruthless in nature, as we, and the poor souls who cross them, come to find out. And that’s an aspect of We Are Still Here that had me totally taken aback… this thing is fucking brutal. Eyes ripped out, torsos torn in half, red shit spraying all over the place. Going into a haunted house movie, I don’t expect a gore show, even from the R-rated ones, but that is exactly what I got here. People dying in some painfully unpleasant ways.
In a way, the violence made the picture all the more unpredictable. Characters who we would normally expect to hang around for a while, are instead getting offed rather quickly and suddenly, which amps up the threat, because we no longer can tell who will be safe and around by the end. There are only so many times we can see a door open and close by itself before it stops being scary, but watching some fool get his stomach turned inside-out… shit! Very rarely would I argue that violence makes a horror movie legitimately more intense, but here it had me thinking, “This couple really needs to get the hell out of that house.” And when their hippy friends attempt to conduct a seance, I shouted, “Fuck, that’s a bad idea!”
Of course, the film is not driven by blood and guts alone, as Geoghegan does create some good old fashion tension early on, particularly whenever Paul and Anne have to head down into the dark old basement. Karim Hussain’s muted cinematography captures the mustiness of the old house and the bleakness of its isolated rural surroundings. The way in which the Sacchetti’s interact with their strange new neighbors, and the way the rest of the town looks at them sideways, constantly puts us on edge. Had Geoghegan kept this dread building pace through the entire picture, We Are Still Here could very well have become this year’s Babadook.
Unfortunately, the slow burn is soon abandoned, and the scares start coming with little to no build up. Perhaps Geoghegan was trying to play against the norm, by intentionally not building up to such moments… however, I suspect it comes more from inexperience. Either way, at a scant 83 minutes, the story certainly could have used more room to breathe, more time to draw things out, get under our skin, get us stressed, get us pissing ourselves with anticipation… then BAM, pull the trigger at just the right moment to make us jump. James Wan is a fucking master at this. Geoghegan, on the other hand, has some growing to do, as there are points where it seems as if things are being rushed, and the suspense is being forsaken, simply to get to the grisly climax.
The all-too-quick pacing issues aside, there is still a bloody fun time to be had. Since I knew nothing of the buzz going in, it turned out to be one hell of a little sleeper. It’s well acted, with Crampton and Sensesing giving nice, naturalistic performances, and indie horror guru Fessenden’s funny, wild man turn reminded me of Jack Nicholson more than once. The blood does flow freely, and ghost movie fans unaccustomed to that may find it off putting. Me, I fucking relished it. We Are Still Here is right there with It Follows as being one of my favorite horror films of 2015, and being that this is the glorious month of Samhain, there is no better time for you to check out this gruesome little spook show for yourself.
