It’s a totally bitchin’ two for one on this episode of Horror Homeroom Conversations in which we head back to the 1980s with Todd Strauss-Schulson’s The Final Girls (2015) and François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell’s Summer of 84 (2018). Criminally underrated, both films deploy depictions of nostalgia in order to reflect and then disrupt audience expectation of Reagan’s America. In doing so, each film reveals a surprising depth that challenges horror film conventions.
Our House is the feature-length directorial debut of Anthony Scott Burns, who also directed the excellent “Father’s Day” segment of Holidays (2016), reviewed here. Nathan Parker wrote the screenplay, based on a 2010 film, Ghost from the Machine, written by Matt Osterman.
Our House is set in a time that evokes the 80s (there’s an interesting ambiguity about time that resembles what David Robert Mitchell did in 2014’s It Follows). Our House centers on genius college student, Ethan (Thomas Mann) who is obsessed with creating a machine that forges a kind of wireless network of electricity (how it works exactly was a bit obscure). His scientific obsession, in time-honored fashion (going back as far as Frankenstein), causes him to neglect his family—something he soon lives to regret when his parents are killed in a car accident. In the wake of his parents’ death, Ethan must relinquish college and his fledgling career as an inventor to get a job, drive a minivan, and take care of his two younger siblings—Matt (Percy Hynes White) and Becca (Kate Moyer). As the months struggle by, Ethan is eventually lured back to his project, and it’s not long before he discovers that the device animates the dead—and not only the recent or the happy dead. Ethan unwittingly unleashes darker spirits that start to prey on his family and his neighbor, so he must, again, give up science and devote himself to protecting his family.
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