The Halloween List: We Are Still Here

After I finished The Guest, I got on the elliptical and loaded up Netflix. By pure coincidence, We Are Still Here was next in my queue, and opened… on a couple coming home after the death of their son.

We Are Still Here is still a very different movie – the couple begin experiencing strange phenomena around their house, like pictures their son hated falling over and cracking, or voices in the basement. It turns out this is a new house they’ve just moved to, hoping to get away from some of the grief, but they suspect something has followed them here. But the locals explain that horrible things once happened in this house, and they’ve always found it eerie. We begin to question what is watching them.

What unfolds is one of the finest recent haunting movies outside James Wan’s The Conjuring series and The Wailing. While this is also a period piece, set in the 1970s, We Are Still Here uses the visual style of film rather than digital, and has best-in-class costume design and make-up. Characters often felt familiar to me because I knew adults like them in the early 1980s when I was a child.

There’s a great charm, too, to casting so many actors with fading looks, receding hairlines, and other touches of age that the crew don’t cover up. They feel aging in a way that Hollywood tends to hide. It nails its period better than any other Horror movie I’ve seen since House of the Devil.

The house they’ve bought also lacks glamour. The ground and upper floors are both worn, not in need of repair, but with the scuffs and chips of time. It brought me back to times spent in old Maine houses. Only the basement seems odd, with its hole in the wall that might as well lead directly to Hell.

Especially if you have Netflix and are craving a haunting for Halloween, this is a great pick. Indie Horror seems to be grasping period pieces better than ever before.