Netflix’s Terrifying Horror That Took the Haunted House Movie to New Heights

Haunted houses are a staple of horror movies. From The Shining to Poltergeist to The Conjuring, the world of cinema is full of films about houses, apartments, and hotels possessed by ghosts, demons, and various other manifestations of the supernatural. These stories scare us for a myriad of reasons. Sometimes, the rupture of the illusion of protection within one’s home is enough to bring fear to our hearts. In other instances, it’s what the ghosts represent — repressed memories, the past, the future — that really terrifies viewers. More often than not, these movies produce fright just by packing some good acting and even better scary scenes. In this scenario, Remi Weekes‘ His House stands out for featuring everything that makes a haunted house movie spooky, and then some more.

Originally released in 2020, His House is a Netflix original that not only offers some great frights, but also presents us with an exploration of grief, guilt, and what it means to belong. Brilliantly acted, particularly by its stars Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku, the movie has an equally well-written and captivating story, penned by Weekes alongside Felicity Evans and Toby Venables. Perhaps more importantly for a haunted house movie, it features some legitimately terrifying moments, from incredibly tense sequences to killer jump scares. However, though all of these elements are enough to make His House a must-watch film, they are not the reason why Weekes’ project stands out among others of its kind. His House is a horror movie in which the horror goes way beyond the supernatural. It is a ghost story in which the ghosts will live with the characters forever, no matter what they do.

His House

Release Date

January 27, 2020

Director

Remi Weekes

Cast

Sope Dirisu, Wunmi Mosaku, Malaika Wakoli-Abigaba, Matt Smith, Javier Botet, Yvonne Campbell

Runtime

93

Main Genre

Horror

Genres

Horror

Tagline

When ghosts follow, they never leave.

What Is ‘His House’ About?

The plot of His House follows a couple of immigrants trying to carve a new life for themselves in a hostile country. Chased away from their home in Sudan by a civil war, Bol (Dirisu) and Rial Majur (Mosaku) traverse the ocean with dozens of other people in a dinghy for a chance of survival in the United Kingdom. Once there, they find themselves in a shelter until a derelict house is assigned to them by the government — a house that is filled with ghostly noises and images that they must learn to live with, for leaving the place behind might mean deportation for the couple. Dealing with the traumas of war as well as the loss of a child drowned at sea, Bol and Rial are forced to live with ghosts that they would rather have left behind, forcing themselves not to make any trouble so that they can be some of the “good ones,” as the hateful social worker played by Matt Smith tells them.

Dealing with themes such as survivor’s guilt and the tension between honoring your past and fitting in with your present, His House is as much an intimate drama as it is a horror story. Watching the movie, we spend most of our time exclusively with Bol and Rial, examining their different approaches to being in a new country that doesn’t necessarily want them there. Rial suffers from the micro and macro aggressions of random people, from doctors to kids in the streets. Understanding that the ghost that inhabits their new home is an apeth, a night witch enacting revenge for the things they did to survive, she wishes to go back to Sudan, to either live with the pain or die alongside her loved ones. Meanwhile, Bol stumbles upon a somewhat more welcoming community and does his best to fit in, even forcing himself to abandon the habits and beliefs that he has grown up with. Refusing to face his past, he initially denies the presence of the apeth and tries to reason himself out of his situation.

Eventually, though, both Bol and Rial realize that there is no running away from the apeth, nor denying his existence. They must learn to live with this entity that carries with it the memories of everything and everyone that they lost. Rial must accept that she has survived and that there’s no going back to the world that she once knew. Bol, in turn, must understand that his memory will never leave him. There’s no drowning it, much like there’s no use pretending to be someone you are not. As Rial puts it: “Your ghosts follow you. They never leave. They live with you. It’s when I let them in, I could start to face myself.”

‘His House’ Is Not Like Other Haunted House Movies

The ghosts are, of course, your memory. They are the people that you lose along the way, as much as they are your guilt for surviving. And these things, these feelings, will follow you from one house to the other, guaranteeing a terrifying experience no matter where you choose or are forced to live. This “wherever you go, there you are” approach is a big part of what makes His House such a particularly scary movie. In a way, it’s not the house that Bol and Rial live in that is haunted, but Bol and Rial themselves. However, unlike, for instance, a movie such as Insidious, in which a personal haunting is something that can be solved through some supernatural healing, Bol and Rial have no choice but to accept the presence of their ghosts. They will never be free of them, for they will never be free of themselves.

Thus, moving from one house to another would do nothing to make their situation any better. They can never leave their haunted house behind, for the house they inhabit will forever be haunted. However, they also can’t move to another place due to limitations imposed on them by the UK government. The stakes are really high for Bol and Rial. They can’t leave their new home behind because that might mean being sent back to a war-torn country where their chances of having a life or even surviving are slim. It’s not just a matter of being stubborn and not moving because “ghosts aren’t real,” or of remaining in an evidently demon-ridden home for the chance of winning some money. Bol and Rial can’t leave because the world outside their new house is more terrifying than any ghost.

‘His House’s Horror Is Rooted in Realism

That goes, of course, for the war they might be forced to return to, but also for their London neighborhood. Between teens shouting at Rial to go back to Africa and an ominous elderly woman telling Bol that he will just be sent back anyway, so why bother trying, Rial and Bol are surrounded by flesh-and-blood monsters wherever they go. Their lives have taken a particularly terrifying turn in that there is absolutely no safe space for them, neither inside nor outside their house, neither in their home country nor in this strange new land.

Finally, but definitely not as importantly as the rest, His House also stands out as a scary movie by bringing horror to our very own daily, urban setting. It fits in with movies such as Poltergeist and Evil Dead Rise in that it doesn’t rely on the strange emptiness of the rural lands or on the uneasiness of old mansions to produce fear. The house that Rial and Bol inhabit has its specificities, of course: it carries the marks of a particular era and a particular country. However, no matter where you live, it still feels real and very much known. This creates an atmosphere in which the horror feels like it could happen to any of us, even though the movie makes it quite clear that Bol and Rial’s trauma arises from very distinct circumstances. In the end, this atmosphere allows us to empathize more with the main characters, helping us to fully understand all the terror that they must live with.

His House is available to stream on Netflix.

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