2015 Films: #13. We Are Still Here

This was an On Demand viewing on a Saturday night September 20th. This picture was released on June 5th and received a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. Screenwriter Ted Geoghegan wrote this film and makes his debut as a director on it as well. Taking place in 1979, the Sacchetti's move to a New England town in the dead of winter after their college aged son dies in a car crash in hopes of getting some closure. Weird things start to happen and Anne (Barbara Crampton) thinks it's the spirit of their dead son. Her husband Paul (Andrew Sensenig) isn't quite convinced but that doesn't stop Anne from inviting over her alleged psychic buddy (Lisa Marie) and her Jack Nicholson-esque husband (Larry Fessenden).

Things start go bad when the Lewis's son and girlfriend are brutally slain at the house while everyone is in town having dinner. When they arrive back at the house, the men have a seance while the women are grocery shopping. Here's where things heat up, Jacob Lewis gets possessed and eventually kills himself. It turns out that the spirit that Anne thought was her son, is in fact the spirit of a family murdered in the house back in 1859. Every thirty years, a new family needs to be sacrificed in order to appease the demonic family (the demonic family was murdered by the townsfolk in 1859 after an incident where they should've only been run out of town and since they were wrongfully slain, the patriarch of the group put a curse on the town). In order to ensure the sacrifice takes place the townsfolk charge the Sacchetti house and things get messy.

By messy I mean the walls are literally painted with blood.

This picture is simplistic and very minimal until the end where the walls of the Sacchetti house are literally painted with blood. The picture runs 84 minutes long and it never drags (a lot of the action takes place in the last 15 minutes or so). Geoghegan does a nice job with the lighting when there are shots of creepy things moving around in the basement and keeps the demonic family under wraps until the big reveal at the end.

Surprise everyone!

There's not a lot of original thinking here but it works. Geoghegan seems to take some ideas from John Carpenter's The Fog and numerous other films of this genre. This was a fun film to watch with some good scares. A 94% rating seems high to me but it was good and I'd recommend over a lot of zombie films that I mistakenly took the time out to watch.