This House Has People in It

One day, a family is about to celebrate their son's birthday party,when something strange begins to occur.

This short film is what all horror movies should stride to be. It didn't scare me because I though a jump scare would happen, it scared me because of the unknown.

This short film is very similar to the likes of "Too Many Cooks" and "Unedited Footage of a Bear". This film being made by the same people that made "Unedited Footage of a Bear", it's a great improvement. While "Unedited Footage of a Bear" tried to subtly teach us a lesson, "This House Has People in It" is just good old horror.

This short horror movie will definitely be up there with the likes of "The Blair Witch Project" and "Alien". Check it out as soon as you can -HashtagBrownies

The odd Adult Swim "infomercials" series of sorts contains practically all of their best content (other than, obviously, Tim and Eric and The Eric Andre Show), and seems to be where they let their creators really have fun and go mad at play. Directed by the brilliant and twisted humorist, satirist, performance artist, and horror filmmaker Alan Resnick, the Adult Swim crew's own mini David Lynch, 'This House Has People in It' is unapologetically bizarre and occasionally confusing. It is an uncomfortable and genuinely quite creepy combo of comedy and chaos. It is surreal and scary and surprisingly hilarious, very much like practically every project worked upon by Mr. Resnick, and I love the man for it! Now, I am in all probability off to view various analysis videos of this along with a boatload of disturbed rewatchings!

I'll forgo a synopsis of 'This House Has People In It" because one can find and read it elsewhere. At first I thought the idea of using only security video footage to tell a story was a novel and interesting one but when the point of view changed such that it was impossible for the security camera to have captured it, the effect was jarring and annoying. That was my first gripe. My second was the response of the couple when they realized the unconscious girl had a problem. Who would not call 911 immediately? But they didn't and their odd behavior failed to suspend my disbelief. Then there was the peppering of viewer YouTube videos explaining THHPII. Most of the videos were longer than the original, some much longer. If a story needs to be explained then perhaps the story wasn't told well. I understand vague references are clever. I delight in esoterica but inside jokes and obscura do not a good story make. This House Has People In It spent too much time trying to show how smart it was. The final result was not as bad as, say, Plan Nine From Outer Space, but it wasn't nearly as much fun either. But it was mercifully shorter.

I imagine that This House Has People In It could have been what might have occurred had David Lynch been given the keys to the Paranormal Activity franchise. What is going on here? Well, we have a suburban family, or seemingly normal, with a husband a wife a son a baby and a grandmother (and some guy fixing some pipes or something in the basement), and there's also what I think is the couple's teenage daughter laying face-down on the kitchen floor. And at first it seems like she's on the floor because... I'm not even sure, maybe passed out or drunk or on drugs or did something that is making the parents more annoyed than anything. But when the father comes over to move her, she... doesn't get it, she's just staying there. Is she dead? How? More to the point, she seems to be sinking into the floor....

The director Alan Resnick spends his 12 minutes going between about eight or nine different surveillance-style cameras laid all over this house (and one camera that gets close to the girl-on-the-floor's face, how exactly that's there I don't know, don't ask I guess), and while this manic and macabre mega-ultra-abyss-darkly comic set piece unfolds in the kitchen, the son is expecting some friends for a birthday party at this exact same time. The cutting between different perspectives makes for the real oddness of the whole piece; this aired on Adult Swim, which also put out a few years back "Too Many Cooks", and there's this aim from the studio to go for experimental cinema, things that we just don't see ANYWHERE else.

It would be one thing if the director had his characters explain things - why the girl's on the floor, why she's sinking, what the hell is the grandma doing watching strange things on TV with a guy saying how many times someone should say the word 's***' etc - but then it might ruin what is going on here actually, which is a vision of quickly deevolving hell. This is what happens when you look under the hood of a seemingly normal family and find something otherworldly, mysterious, maybe unholy(!) Or maybe it's just something weird for the sake of it and I'm being played for a fool. But I think it's daring and wonderfully bizarre, and to sustain that for 12 minutes and to make me want to watch it again to see what else I missed or didn't hear (the talking is not as clear as one might hear in a 'Paranormal Activity' movie, which makes sense), and that's something. Certainly not for ALL tastes.

This is what happens when someone observes the bizarre fad of "planking" and says to themselves, "I could make a movie out of that."

If we don't let our cynicism overwhelm our suspension of disbelief, then 'This house has people in it' is duly unsettling. Preparing for their son's birthday party, a young couple has an argument in the kitchen. It's a very curious thing, that their teenage daughter is lying on the floor in an act of apparent rebellious disobedience, and they readily ignore her casually disruptive behavior as the passing phase that it is. Until it becomes clear something else is going on.

The surreal occurrence in the kitchen gives way to other parts of the house unraveling, and we get to watch it all through the security cameras that have a (seemingly impossibly mobile) eye on each room. As the scenario unfolds, more things continue to go wrong, further building the unease of the short, culminating in a climactic unexplained event.

I appreciate the simplicity here. Each scene is depicted as an apparent recording of the events on a VHS tape, which is a little anachronistic since the short itself dates the events to 2015, when VHS was already mostly forgotten as a format. But still, the inherent nostalgia lends a small bit of credibility to the scenario, aiding our suspension of disbelief and fostering the notion that this is a thing that really happened, and could happen.

There's not a great deal of plot, and there's not a great deal to say. This is less an active narrative than the passive observation of events as they occur. It's odd, certainly, but with just the right helping of creepiness to keep us engaged.

'This house has people in it' isn't going to be for everyone or have broad appeal, but it's an intriguing watch if you're looking for something a bit different.