Fantasia ’15 Review: WE ARE STILL HERE

Canadian Premiere

USA, 2015

Directed by Ted Geoghegan

There’s this thing that happens to regular movie goers after sitting through a couple of Fantasia festival screenings. Their complexion lightens, for lack of sunlight. They appear gaunt, yet bloated, from malnutrition (subsiding solely on a diet of concession snacks and lost potential). They adopt an odor that is not unlike a mix between grandma and sour milk. I’m mostly kidding of course, but sometimes, the end result is truly worse than what you would actually see onscreen. Bon Cinema!

In keeping with ghastly apparitions, I was finally able to catch a screening of We are Still Here, following its world premiere at SXSW. Hyped as a return to the Bayou boogaloo films of Lucio Fulci, We Are Still Here sets its sights squarely at The Beyond, but without the “nightmare logic”:

Middle aged couple move to an old country home to run away from the painful memories of having just recently lost their son. They invite the parents of their boy’s best friend to try and “exorcise their demons”. But not all is right in this house. A strange presence is felt and rumors of the previous inhabitants start to surface. Crazy village superstition? Otherworldly forces afoot? Does the couple have the guts to find out?

There’s cultural continuity in tales like these. Loss of a loved one, the desire to see them again, and the sanctity of one’s home are great set pieces for story tellers to fuck with their audience without investing too much in hand holding the viewer. We Are Still Here plays with these elements to create tension, but does not go all the way: there’s a nastiness that’s alluded to but which never quite materializes. I heard the filmmaker speak of the love of the genre, and how greats like Fulci influenced him, but you can tell he came from a good home. The misogyny and pure meanness that impregnated Fulci’s works may be referenced, but they are not emulated.

It’s understood in the modern ghost film that there is usually a wrong that needs to addressed. In this film, the terrifying images on screen are cathartic in that they are a physical manifestation of some form of loss, which is intimate  and relatable. Outwardly, the film also reminds us how mob rule can skew and control a story through time, think a popular Christopher Lee film, which remains very relevant today, what with all the armchair warriors navigating the Internets.

That’s not saying that the film is ineffective as a horror piece. It’s truly “shit your pants” scary at times and the team behind the visual effects and photography did great things to imbue texture onto a tried and true formula. We are in the post jump scare era, where people laugh at it, rather than dread it. The end result is much like that EDM stuff the kids are overdosing to these days: you know the beat is going to drop, you just don’t know when (pretty much the recipe of any horror film). Kudos for gauging expectations.

There’s plenty of guts, gore and violent imagery to keep you explicitophiles  keep you interested, but the staying power of a film like this one is attributable more to something else. There’s an allegory here somewhere and I’m wondering if by We Are Still Here, the filmmaker is referring to the audience itself, and its hunger for more films like these.

So long sunshine, I’m out!

Jo Satana