House Hunting (2013)

It’s a tale of two families—Hays and Thomson.  Charlie Hays (Marc Singer) has his hands full with a new(ish) wife, Susan (Hayley DuMond), and a teen daughter, Emmy (Janey Gioiosa), who hates her.  Biological mom ran off with another man.  Charlie works for a company (bank? investment firm?) that foreclosed on a farm, house and 70 acres, and Dad is taking the family out to look at it, thinking he may want to buy. 

Other family.   Don Thomson (Art LeFleur) is a grouch who is being dragged from one open house to another by his wife Leslie (Victoria Vance) and his teen son Jason (Paul McGill).  As he stands, smoking, in front of a suburban mediocrity that looks pretty much like the one they just left, a man wearing one of those hideous arctic hats with earflaps—mukluks for the head—and leading a dog on a leash approaches him.  They agree that the neighborhood sucks and the man gives Don a card with an address on it, an address for the perfect place, a farm on 70 acres. 

The Hays family arrives at the house first, but they are immediately followed by the Thomsons.  The two men appraise each other as rivals for the property, but neither of them goes into the building beyond the foyer, and then they decide to leave. 

As Charlie drives away from the house, a young woman rushes from the woods in front of his car.  He smacks into a tree, but gets out and goes to her, sees that he didn’t hit her but that still she is covered in blood. 

Don pulls up behind him.  Since Charlie’s car is too scrunched up to drive, Don offers to take him and the young woman back to the house so they can call for help.  The young woman, Hanna (Rebekah Kennedy), tries to flee in fear.  When they ask her why, the families discover that she has recently had her tongue cut out. 

All seven people cram into Don’s car and head back to the highway, but end up every time they try back at the house.  Which apparently doesn’t want them to leave.  In the pantry, they find seven cans of beef stew.  They think they see the man with the hat walking his dog, but when they shout at him to stop, he disappears. 

A month later, a month of no communication with the outside world, there continue to be seven cans of stew on the shelf every day. 

Until the day there are only six. 

The film was written and directed by Eric Hurt, who plays around nicely with the devices of the traditional ghost story.  What he does best is suggest a meaning for what the families are going through while keeping a definitive explanation just out of reach.  The best ghost stories don’t tell you what you you need to know in order to make the oddness understandable.  That’s not the way ghosts work in real life (so they tell me).  It’s said that the difference between a fictional ghost story and a real one is that the fictional haunting makes sense and the actual one doesn’t.  Hauntings don’t always happen out of a need for spectral revenge, or for the completion of some unfinished business. 

If you need an explanation in this case, imdb says that the film’s script is loosely based on Sartre’s play No Exit.  You can extrapolate a meaning from that. 

The acting is fine and production values are good.  There’s not a lot to be said yay or nay about either thing.  The real pleasure comes from watching a contemporary ghost movie that looks further back for inspiration than last week’s episode of some ghost hunting show on cable TV.

100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (2012)

Whew—this one’s so derivative it could have been shot with a Xerox machine. It’s yet another:

·        Tale of an overnight ghost hunt in a haunted location

·        Group of numb-nuts young adults who think they can strike it rich by taping their effort to capture a ghost in the camera

·        Collection of things that go terribly wrong

·        Series of deaths as we count down the crew members who get bumped off in desperately unimaginative ways

·        Poorly written, poorly directed rip-off of Paranormal Activity with a soupcon of Blair Witch tossed in for, hell, I don’t know why. 

This motley crew and onscreen talent go to the student dorm where Richard Speck tortured, raped and murdered seven student nurses on the night of July 13, 1966. That’s true, of course—you can find the details easily enough. How you feel about taking such a horrific crime and turning it into such lame entertainment is your business. 

So anyway, seven of the eight team members lock themselves into the building, they say to keep vagrants from coming inside. It makes sense, except for the fact that there is only one key to let them out again. When the director of the project gets sliced in half (why and how we don’t know—Speck didn’t hack on guys) and the key is in his pocket, we realize just how stupid having only one key is. 

Okay, one gal gets ghost raped and murdered, one guy is hanged, one gets chewed up in a drain pipe, and the others get killed in ways that are as forgettable as the characters themselves. Believe me, life is too short to memorize details from movies like this. 

The film we see is what was left behind when the ghost hunters were taken up to that Haunted Mansion in the sky, presented to us courtesy of the Illinois Police Department. Say what? We get this credit at the beginning of the film and since it’s a pretty good guess that there is no “Illinois Police Department” the filmmakers waste no time in shooting the this-is-real-folks-it-really-is in the found footage. 

There are no actor or writer or director credits but the cast is made up of Jennifer Robyn Jacobs, Jim Shipley, Tony Besson, Jackie Moore, Hayley Derryberry, Adam LaFramboise, Mike Holley, Chance Harlem, Jr., and the unseen Nancy Leopardi and Steve Mencich as ghost voices.  Leopardi wrote and Martin Andersen directed.  

It’s all sadly lacking in everything  it shouldn’t be lacking in, and brings nothing new to the party to make up for it. This is the kind of movie that having something else to do for 90 minutes was made for.

“The Empty House” (Algernon Blackwood, 1906)

Despite the fact that this tale was first published in 1906, it’s a wonderfully cinematic examination of a notoriously haunted house. Blackwood wastes no time, jumping in immediately with a paragraph that defines what a haunted house is and describes the effect it has on anyone brave, ignorant, or foolish enough to enter it.

“And, perhaps, with houses the same principle is operative, and it is the aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof, long after the actual doers have passed away, that makes the gooseflesh come and the hair rise. Something of the original passion of the evil-doer, and of the horror felt by his victim, enters the heart of the innocent watcher, and he becomes suddenly conscious of tingling nerves, creeping skin, and a chilling of the blood. He is terror-stricken without apparent cause.”

That, to coin a phrase, says it all.

In the story, Jim Shorthouse receives what appears to be a semi-urgent request from his Aunt Julia that he come to visit her at once. She’s acquired the keys to an infamously haunted house on the other side of town and she wants Shorthouse to accompany her while she goes exploring. She makes him promise that he will not leave her side even for a minute because “persons who had spent some time in the house, knowing nothing of the facts, had declared positively that certain rooms were so disagreeable they would rather die than enter them again.”

As the two ghosthunters enter the old house, Aunt Julia relates a brief history of the brutal crime that initiated the haunting.“’It has to do with a murder committed by a jealous stableman who had some affair with a servant in the house. One night he managed to secrete himself in the cellar, and when everyone was asleep, he crept upstairs to the servants' quarters, chased the girl down to the next landing, and before anyone could come to the rescue threw her bodily over the banisters into the hall below.’"

’And the stableman—?’

"’Was caught, I believe, and hanged for murder.’”

Blackwood then takes us on a regulated tour of the house, first downstairs and then up. He is an absolute master at describing everyday items in such a way that they assume personalities, and none too pleasant ones at that. He evokes that feeling that things change as soon as you look away from them—“There was the inevitable sense that operations which went on when the room was empty had been temporarily suspended till they were well out of the way again.”

The tension continues to build as Shorthouse and Julia are certain they hear a man sneeze next to them. Shadows are cast when there is nothing there to cast a shadow. Every time they turn a corner or move from one room to another, you wonder what they are about to encounter. Shorthouse “felt as if his spine had suddenly become hollow and someone had filled it with particles of ice.” The aptness of the simile is dazzling.

Then it happens, with a sudden jolt as powerful as the one that accompanies the first appearance of the old woman in “House on Haunted Hill,” a movie moment which may very well have been inspired by this story. “Facing them, directly in their way between the doorposts, stood the figure of a woman. She had dishevelled hair and wildly staring eyes, and her face was terrified and white as death.

“She stood there motionless for the space of a single second. Then the candle flickered and she was gone—gone utterly— and the door framed nothing but empty darkness.”

This is one of the most effective old school haunted house stories you will ever read. Take a look at it here -- http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/authors.html -- and you’ll know why Algernon Blackwood was one of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite writers.