The Nineteenth Night of Halloween: We Are Still Here

ON THE NINETEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched We Are Still Here (2015), by Ted Geoghegan. This indie haunted house movie stars horror legend Barbara Crampton, best known for the H.P. Lovecraft adaptations Re-Animator and From Beyond, as a grieving middle-aged woman who moves into a mysterious isolated homestead with her husband after the loss of their son. As it turns out, their new place is cursed, such that entities in the basement demand periodic human sacrifice. 

Many of the standard tropes for modern haunted house cinema appear here, including the gradual escalation from little bumps and gusts to voices and rearranged furniture to full spectral manifestations; the enlistment of a spiritualist against the wishes of a skeptical spouse; and standoffish locals giving the new residents intense side-eye. Having the protagonists be grieving the recent loss of a family member is the one that usually aggravates me. I understand that it lets the screenwriter kill multiple birds with one stone: it quickly makes the heroes sympathetic; at the same time it believably causes them to dwell on death and the beyond, thus creating tension over whether or not the phenomena are merely psychological; and it makes the audience reflect on the theme of mortality as well. But for that reason, it usually feels clumsily inserted. Somehow it works here, though, through the subtle touches used to hint at the mother’s lost relationship with her son and the unusually restrained depiction of grief. The same goes for the other standard tropes. Their patient and skillful handling over the course of the first half reminds us why they became standard in the first place. When they work, they really work to instill terror like no other type of horror.

Then, in the second half, We Are Still Here makes a wild break from convention through an explosion of gore and surprisingly corporeal mayhem at the charred hands of the basement dwellers. It’s rare that a film is equally effective at both executing conventional narrative turns with nuance and wildly defying genre expectations, but Geoghegan pulls it off. And as usual Crampton is awesome.