A couple mourning their son moves to an old house in a small town,
where they are pitted against supernatural forces and a dark secret. HORROR
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We Are Still Here (2015)Written and Directed by Ted Geoghegan
Starring Barbara Crampton, Andrew Sensenig, Lisa Marie, Larry Fessenden, Monte Markham |
We Are Still Here has aspirations of being the next House on Haunted Hill, but it never provides any sort of substance that warrants such a comparison. It's all style, relying on (impressive, I'll admit) makeup and generic characters to build an average, forgettable haunted house flick that you can watch once and pretty much just never need to mention again. The worst part is the potential is there. It's just never suitably mined for a decent film.
The plot revolves around a house on the outskirts of a small town. Every thirty years or so, the house requires a sacrifice of a family for...reasons. We never get why the house needs a sacrifice. There's vague mention of gods and something under the house, but that's as far as it goes. I suppose elaborating on that concept would turn the film into a blatant ripoff of The Cabin in the Woods. The climax of the film shows us that the townsfolk are the ones sacrificing outsiders so they can keep their town and crops alive. That's The Wicker Man, but we've already established how unoriginal this film is so I'll table that. I wish they'd gone into more detail on the ghosts and their role in all this. With both the townsfolk and the ghosts involved in the sacrifice, everything just got muddled. We Are Still Here is three different horror movies fused into one nonsensical mess that attempts to use common horror tropes and somewhat decent actors to stand out among the rest of the low budget horror garbage out there. Instead, its reliance on unearned mystery and audience assumption causes it to fall flat on its ass and become as forgettable as it hoped it wouldn't be. It happens all the time, especially to ghost movies. |