Horror, not Horror: The Night House

 "Horror, Not Horror" movies are those that toe the line of being horror movies but don't quite comfortably fit the mold.  I'm not a big horror fan (Toast is the horror buff here), but I do quite like these line-skirting type movies, as we'll see.

2020, d. David Bruckner - rental

In his write-up for In The Earth, Toasty brought the term "elevated horror".  There's no single defining definition for this term, and it's one that causes a lot of frustration in both the horror fan and film critic community.  The way it is used, it's not a subgenre but a way of trying to single out a horror film from the piles and piles of other horror films that are made each year (I think next to Hallmark-style holiday romances, cheapo horror is the next most overproduced). 

"Elevated" means lifted or raised above, so it's a snobbish label to try and apply to a film, inferring that it is somehow better-than just by applying the label.  In the past few years it has come to imply some form of artist merit or that it's more palatable to a general audience, not just a genre fanbase .  At this stage the general critical opinion on "elevated" is that it's a bullshit term, but it's in the ether now, and will continue to be used.  If anything the term will likely wind up as a derogatory term for a horror movie where the creators are trying too hard to escape the genre, be too clever about their horror, or appeal to an audience at the exclusion of horror fans.

For me, I guess "Horror, Not Horror" is my toying with some of the same conversation around "Elevated Horror".  But "Horror, Not Horror" is broader than that.  I could easily put a TV mini-series like Dr. Death through the "Horror, Not Horror" ringer, as it is pretty damn horrifying and upsetting, but it falls under True Crime, Docu-drama labels because it's not employing standard horror tropes.  If there's no metaphysical, paranormal element, or if it's not using kill/maim/torture gags, can it still be called horror?  

The Night House I'm sure has been reviewed with the "elevated horror" label, if only because it's a sort of haunting story with some clever directing tricks and a recognizeable lead.  Rebecca Hall stars as a grieving widow, now alone in the semi-remote house-on-a-lake her husband built himself.  He committed suicide out on the water in a boat, with seemingly no warning signs, leaving behind a cryptic note.

As Hall is left to deal with her grief, she starts experiencing paranaormal phenomena in the house -- stereos turning on at random, creaks and noises that sound like more than just the house settling, wet footprints -- as well as dreams where it seems like her husband is trying to communicate with her.  It's all kinds of disturbing (the cel-phone bit early on got me pretty good).

Then she discovers pictures, pictures of women who look kinda-sorta like her, and strange designs in his book of architectural drafts of the house, and some books on the occult.  These threads start connecting back to her own history of having survived an accident, though being technically dead for a few minutes.

That's a lot of little details, some of them seeming quite disparate.  Is this a ghost story, or is it a past trauma returning story, or is it a discovering secrets of someone you love story?  Yes, the answer is yes to all of these, and it is quite intriguing, if sometimes hard to marry these all together (though the film believes it does this in a pretty pat fashion). Standing on their own there's three very different, very good stories to tell here.  Brought altogether, it's still good but, yeah, a lot.

One of the best elements of the film is the set design which, when viewed from certain angles, elements form the shape of a human body, and then the shape moves.  It's creepy as hell, but kind of underutilized, and very fleeting.

I've given a lot of the dots that are placed down in this film, but not all of them, and how they all connect together to form the whole picture may be just a little too much, but it's certainly not uninteresting.  Hall is really good, having to hold so much of the film to herself.  There's one point in the film that goes a little too far in its paranormal activity and what Hall is asked to do looks pretty goofy (the poster attached kind of spoils what I'm talking about).  It's supposed to be a powerful scene for her but, oof, it just doesn't translate (and the fact that they use it on the poster is kind of a double oof).  That short sequence alone drops the whole film down a whole notch.

Back to the idea of "elevating" horror, director Bruckner dances around really going full horror in the third act, and tries instead to settle in with the emotional impact all these revelations have on Hall.  But it would have been a much bigger standout had it leaned even more into the moving shapes and the paranormal, punching home these elements built up over the film.  It's a solid, solid watch but if it wasn't so concerned about "elevating" itself, it could have really been something special.

But, but, but...is it horror?
Yes, it most definitely is. But it should be even more so.