His House
A happy side effect of movies getting made specifically for smaller screens is smaller budget movies getting their time in the sun. Would a movie like His House have gotten the sort of international release it got in pre-streaming days? Probably not, I think. And if ever you need to make a convincing argument to a Marvel-loving friend that a smaller budget doesn’t mean smaller themes, His House might be a great starting point.
His House is ostensibly a horror movie about a refugee couple, Bol and Rial, who escape South Sudan’s civil war to find themselves confined in a haunted house in the back alleys of a UK suburb. A combination of government bureaucracy and unfamiliarity with their new surroundings forces them to spend most of their days indoors with little to no outside human contact. Almost right from night one, things start to go bump, and the differing reactions of Bol and Rial (played expertly by Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku) form the backbone of the movie.
One reason I’ve struggled with horror in the past is because of how far removed its otherworldly beasts are from the lives of its human protagonists. Naive high-schoolers, lonely writers and their easily-scared wives and kids, bright-faced newlyweds alike are all usually tormented by some ancient atma who has failed to find worldly peace. The source of the scares, therefore is impersonal; it’s no different from a bullet, a cannonball, or lupus. It isn’t about the protagonists really, it’s about the ghosts. When you feel little empathy for the protagonists, whose navigations through the maze that is the human condition is barely explored, the only way for a movie to truly terrify you is with jump-scares and gore. As someone who likes to avoid strokes and nausea, I avoid this kind of horror movie.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out is a great example of a new sort of horror movie whose horrors stem from those everyday tragedies that are part of the lives of so many.
However, in the previous decade, a new kind of horror film has come to be: one where the source of the horror has a face all-too-familiar to the story’s protagonists. Where the true horror is our protagonists’ everyday life, the human condition. Movies like The Babadook and Get Out serve as archetypes for this kind of film. His House is not only a worthy addition to this genre, but also, in my view, perhaps better than both those movies. It is when Remi Weekes’ movie reveals the true nature of the spirits haunting the couple and why Rial believes that it has followed them here from their homeland that the film truly shines. It becomes clear that the true horrors of the story are the tragedy refugees like Bol and Rial are escaping, and their rudderless lives in the corners of the countries that once colonised theirs. If I say any more, I risk spoiling the film. I say watch it.
Just purely as an experiment on societal norms, at what point would the average human bean find not crying in the cinema weirder than crying in one. How deep must the tragedy pictured be, how profound the sense of loss, how unbearable the pain of two dee characters, before your average dudebro thinks not crying would be perceived as a sign of serious apathy, psychopathy / sociopathy even.