We Are Still Here: The New England Haunted-House Throwback

The family in We Are Still Here are called the Sacchettis. That is not a random surname. Dardano Sacchetti wrote The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond, City of the Living Dead and Zombie Flesh Eaters — which is to say he wrote most of the films that made Lucio Fulci’s reputation, and a fair chunk of what got the British Director of Public Prosecutions reaching for a list. Ted Geoghegan named his grieving American couple after an Italian screenwriter, in the opening minutes, as a signed declaration of what the next ninety minutes intend to do to you.

It’s a useful warning, because for the first hour We Are Still Here does not behave like a Fulci film at all. Geoghegan’s 2015 debut is a patient, cold, genuinely sad picture about two people who have lost a child, and it earns every drop of what it eventually spills.

Two people and a lot of snow

Anne and Paul Sacchetti — Barbara Crampton and Andrew Sensenig — have moved to rural New England in the winter of 1979 after the death of their college-age son Bobby in a car accident. The move is Anne’s idea. She wants a new house because the old one had Bobby in it, and she is the kind of grieving person who believes geography can help.

Crampton is the film’s engine and the reason it exists. She had spent the eighties as one of the defining faces of American horror in Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraft pictures, then largely left the business for years, and this was the film that announced her second act as a character actress of real weight. She plays Anne without a trace of the scream queen: a woman being carefully, visibly reasonable, holding a shape together, and — crucially — willing to accept a haunting because a haunting would mean her son is somewhere.

That’s the film’s most humane idea. Anne wants the house to be haunted. When she starts to sense a presence, the discovery is a relief. Sensenig plays Paul as the sceptic, and the marriage friction is the good kind, the kind where both people are being reasonable and neither can reach the other. He wants her to see a doctor. She wants to be visited.

The neighbours arrive. Dave McCabe and his wife turn up with a casserole and small-town warmth and an unmistakable undertow of appraisal, and the film lets that sit. Then Anne calls in Jacob and May Lewis — Larry Fessenden and Lisa Marie — old friends of a spiritualist bent who arrive in a van with the confidence of people who have read some books. Fessenden is superb, playing a man whose belief in the paranormal has never previously been tested by anything.

The furnace, and how the house works

The craft here is mostly about heat, and it’s the most elegant thing in Geoghegan’s design.

The house is cold. New England, winter, snow to the treeline, and Michael Tessari’s photography keeps the palette at the blue end and the light thin. And in the middle of all that cold, the basement is far too hot. The furnace roars. The walls stay warm. Soot appears where soot has no reason to be, and handprints in it, and the film’s most effective early images are of black marks blooming on a wall in a room that should be freezing.

That’s the whole exposition, delivered physically. The previous occupants of this house — the Dagmars, undertakers who defrauded the town over what was and wasn’t in the coffins — were burned out of it. The house burned. The Dagmars burned. And what is left is heat in a cold place, which is a far better piece of ghost-mechanics than any amount of dialogue, because the audience feels it before it knows it.

The Dagmars themselves are the other good decision. They’re charred, black, cracked, glowing at the seams like something still cooking, and Geoghegan keeps them mostly in doorways and mostly in the corner of the frame for the first hour. Practical effects, patiently used. He knows that a burned man standing very still at the end of a corridor is worth more than any amount of him moving.

And then there’s the film’s structural gamble. Geoghegan splits We Are Still Here into two films joined at a hinge: sixty minutes of restrained American grief drama, and then twenty-five minutes of unrestrained Italian gore. The turn is deliberate, announced by that surname in the first reel, and executed without apology. Heads come apart. The camera goes to the Fulci place — close, wet, and lingering — and the film’s careful blue-grey control gives way to something operatic and absurd.

The real ancestor

The House by the Cemetery is the acknowledged parent, and the correspondences are deliberate: a family moving into a New England house with something in the cellar, a child, a town that knows, and a basement that is the film’s true address. Geoghegan has never been coy about it, and the surname is the receipt. If you want the wider case for why Fulci is worth taking seriously as a stylist, his New England pictures are where the argument is easiest to make — the man could not write a plot to save his life and could compose dread better than almost anyone working.

The deeper ancestor, and the one Geoghegan gets less credit for, is Burnt Offerings. Dan Curtis’s 1976 film gives a family a summer house that repairs itself as it consumes them — every death restores a shutter, mends a window, brings the place back to life. That’s the actual mechanism of We Are Still Here: a house with an appetite on a schedule, and a family delivered to it. Curtis’s film and Geoghegan’s share a thesis that most haunted-house pictures avoid, which is that the house is the one with plans.

The third strand is Shirley Jackson, and specifically The Lottery — a community with a periodic obligation, discharged politely, by nice people, on somebody who has recently moved in. The New England setting is doing that work on purpose. For the full map of the form, see the haunted-house canon and the structural argument in the haunted-house film and the architecture of fear — this film sits at the point where the American house-as-grief tradition shakes hands with the European house-as-abattoir one. For another 2010s debut that pulls the identical hard tonal switch — grinding domestic realism for an hour, then a last reel that goes off like a firework — We Are What We Are is the companion piece.

The case against

The tonal hinge is the film and it’s also the objection. There are viewers — serious ones — for whom the last act betrays the first, who spent an hour with a woman mourning her son and did not want the payoff to be exploding heads. That’s a coherent position. The grief drama Geoghegan builds is good enough to sustain a whole film, and the film he actually made discards it for a genre pastiche that Anne’s story never asked for.

My view is that the switch is the point, and that the surname told you in reel one, and that a film about a woman who wants the supernatural to be real owes her a supernatural that is unambiguously, extravagantly, physically real. But I would concede that the transition costs the picture its subtlety in about ninety seconds, and that Crampton’s best work is all behind her by then.

The other problem is the supporting cast. Outside Crampton, Sensenig and Fessenden, the performances range from serviceable to visibly under-rehearsed, and the townspeople are thin in a film that needs them to be a genuine community. The budget shows in the human beings rather than in the effects, which is an unusual way round.

We Are Still Here streams and has had a good disc release. Watch it cold, in winter, with the heating off — the film is very interested in the temperature of the room you’re in. Then queue The House by the Cemetery and Burnt Offerings and you’ll have a full evening on the proposition that the building was never on your side.

Spoilers below

The town has an arrangement, and Dave McCabe is the one who explains it.

Every thirty years the house takes a family. The Dagmars died in the fire the town set, and what stayed behind needs feeding, and the arrangement has been that the community supplies somebody — an outsider, a new arrival, someone with a removal van and no relatives nearby. The Sacchettis were selected before they viewed the property. Anne’s belief that she chose this house is the film’s saddest revelation.

The presence Anne has been feeling is the second one. She has been reading it as Bobby, because that’s what she came here to find, and the film lets her hold that for as long as it can bear to. The Dagmars are what’s in the walls.

The séance goes as séances go. Jacob and May’s confident spiritualism turns out to be a hobby brought to a professional engagement, and the film disposes of them with a speed that is genuinely shocking — Fessenden’s fate in particular arrives with no build at all, which is exactly the Fulci principle: the death does not wait for the music.

Then the town arrives to complete the ritual, and Geoghegan springs the trap. The Dagmars have no argument with the family. Their argument is with the people who burned them and have spent a century using them as a municipal utility. What follows is a massacre of the townsfolk by the thing the townsfolk have been farming, staged with a gore-comic exuberance that is pure Gates of Hell, and it is the most purely enjoyable ten minutes of horror the decade produced.

The Sacchettis come through it changed and diminished, and the film’s last gesture is the one it has owed Anne since the first scene: a suggestion, held briefly and left unexplained, that Bobby is there after all. Geoghegan doesn’t confirm it. He puts it in the frame the way he put the soot on the wall, and lets a woman who moved to a haunted house to find her son have the one thing she asked for, in a house that has just eaten a town.