Is a house a structure inhabited by us, built for our protection and comfort, designed according to our needs? Or does the house live through us, sucking up our time and energy with constant needs for repair, changing us to fit it, all the time watching us die? The question of who owns whom, and the challenge posed by a capitalist culture of status defined by display of wealth, are at the heart of Enda Walsh’s amazing animated anthology The House (2022).
The titular building housing a trilogy of terror written by Walsh and directed by Emma de Swaef, Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, Johannes Nyholm, and Paloma Baeza looms threateningly like a toy shop model for Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. But the connective construction of the Irish playwright’s scary stories is in many ways much more material, even materialist, than Jackson’s quintessential haunted house: a metaphorical mansion whose creation, contrivance and contraptions unfold in Emma de Swaef’s and Marc James Roels’ first segment. Playing out like a puppeteering prologue, “And heard within, a lie is spun“ is the most dread-inducing and desolate of the features, each of which bears the unique artistic signature of its directors. Read more
