Haunted Houses

How do you make a haunted-house movie these days? After all those Paranormal Activity movies, audiences aren’t as quick to sympathize with people who don’t just pack up and leave the moment they see their first levitating object or hear the creepy whispers from the closet.

Nowadays you need to find reasons to keep people coming back to their creepy abode. Maybe they can’t sell the place. Maybe they think they can get a movie out of it. Maybe the dog is the only resident who knows what’s up. (I am very keen to see Good Boy, by the way.) And maybe they can’t decide to just up and leave, because they’re kids and they literally have nowhere else to go.

That’s the pitch for Bring Her Back, the new film from Danny and Michael Philippou, the twin Australian YouTubers who broke out with the Gen-Z nightmare of Talk to Me a couple of years back. That one sold its high-concept possession horror with a nervous energy that made the experience of watching it feel unstable as well as unpredictable, as if the movie could fly into a rage at any second. This one is almost classical by comparison, using stillness and quiet – along with obfuscating visuals – to unsettle the viewer, and make us wonder what it is that we’re not seeing or hearing.

So there are these two kids, teenage Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger stepsister Piper (Sora Wong), who end up alone after their father’s sudden death. Billy will turn 18 and become Piper’s guardian in a matter of months, but until then they’ll be staying with Laura (Sally Hawkins) in her remote but very nice house. It has a pool and everything! It’ll be great!

Laura is fluttery and friendly and maybe a little overprotective, which is only natural since she lost a child of her own to an accidental drowning a while back. But she’s trying to move forward, rebuilding her home, and in fact she’s already fostering a little boy called Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). As Andy and Piper quickly discover, that kid’s weird. But Laura might be even weirder.

As you might have guessed, the primary vibe of Bring Her Back is dread – a pit-of-the-stomach uneasiness that starts early in the film and just keeps getting worse, as Andy and Piper are put through psychological and physical hell in the service of someone else’s obsession. Piper also has some visual limitations (as does the actor playing her), and Aaron McLisky’s cinematography frequently lets us share her perspective – things are often obscured, blurred or clouded, forcing us to imagine what might be happening in the frame, and why.

The Philippous are extremely well-versed in the modern horror canon – Martyrs and Hereditary appear to be favorites – and the most intense moments of Bring Her Back have the impact of those films played at 16rpm instead of 33 1/3, the better to see exactly what’s happening to these poor kids. Talk to Me was torturous and haunted, too, but not like this; this movie is uglier and more sorrowful, rooted in the sort of grief that crushes a person’s morality along with their soul, tilting them in new and awful directions.

Martyrs offered us a glimpse of the void as well, come to think of it, but this movie breaks with Pascale Laugier’s unrelenting nightmare by caring about all of its characters – the torturer as well as the tortured – and ends on a moment of empathy that might well break your heart. That’s something new.

A24 is releasing Bring Her Back on disc in individual 4K and Blu-ray editions; Elevation's Canadian offering is Blu-ray only. But all of them include the same suite of extras, which is a nice surprise: There's a feature commentary from the Philippous, a deleted scene and “Coming Full Circle: Making Bring Her Back,” a twenty-minute production doc featuring interviews with the filmmakers, the cast and the makeup effects artists whose work is so integral to the story.

The Philippous – whose always-on excitability rivals that of a young Quentin Tarantino – take obvious pleasure in the emotional and physical extremes of their story, but never to the point of rolling over their collaborators. The featurette also makes a special point of honoring young Jonah Wren Phillips, who’s never seen on-screen without some form of prosthetic or practical alteration, and who turns out to be enthusiastically, cheerfully unfazed by anything he’s asked to do in the film. His character can’t really be called the hero of the picture, but the actor certainly is.

Speaking of houses of horrors, Warner Bros. is capitalizing on the impending release of The Conjuring: Last Rites next month – the fourth and apparently final chapter of the Conjuring series, and the ninth in the overall franchise, which also includes three Annabelle movies and two Nun pictures –with a 4K edition of the left-field blockbuster that started it all.

The weird thing is, The Conjuring was not expected to be a hit. Everyone expected Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim to be the breakout genre picture of the summer of 2013; New Line Cinema’s little creeper about Christian ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren yelling at ghosts in the early ’70s was just a fun little thing James Wan was doing between Insidious movies.

Warner junketed the two films together in San Francisco, and Pacific Rim got the big-deal promo push while you’d have hardly known the Conjuring team was in town. But audiences were much more interested in the spookums than a kaiju throwdown – and since movies where actors stare into darkness listening for creepy noises are far cheaper to produce than elaborate CG monster action, a franchise was born.

I have to admit I am not a huge fan of the Conjuring films. The things James Wan finds scary – creepy puppets, silent-movie makeup, people in formal wear standing very still – just look silly to me, and his tendency to belabor easily digestible concepts like vengeance, haunting and possessions with elaborate, pointless mythology just grates. Plus, the gimmick of stretching out a scene to prolong the tension for a jump scare quickly becomes predictable.

I mentioned the Paranormal Activity movies earlier; those movies always have a little fun with the audience’s understanding of horror-movie rhythms. How many times has a character casually blocked off a part of the frame by opening the refrigerator, bracing us for something scary to be revealed, only to close the door and go on with their day? Wan plays everything out so seriously, cloaking his world in oppressive darkness, snuffing out anything that might break the tension.

As Lorraine, Vera Farmigia almost droops with the weight of her gift; she carries the weight of this world and the next on her shoulders. Patrick Wilson’s Ed might crack a joke here and there to lighten the mood at a press conference or calm a skittish client, but he’s literally laughing in the dark. The Conjuring movies have no sense of humor; if they did, they’d show us the real Annabelle doll …

… rather than the nightmare version Wan created when he couldn’t get the rights to the actual doll. And what parent would bring home that rouged-up goblin in the first place?

Still, I’m clearly in the minority here. Enough people showed up for The Conjuring that the franchise became one of New Line’s most successful brands, with the first eight films pulling in an estimated $2.2 billion globally over the course of a decade. The series’ full-on Christianity didn’t hurt, either, especially since it carried none of the provocations of an Exorcist movie. It’s got clean-cut heroes saving a nice nuclear family from a nasty ghost; nobody needs to swear, goodness knows.

And the movie is well-made, using the aesthetic of a ’70s thriller (natural light, wide shots, slow zooms) to unsettle the audience well before the scary stuff starts, and trapping its protagonists in a series of beautifully constructed spaces with deep, thick shadows filled with menace. Warner’s new UHD presentation – accompanied by the original, heavily atmospheric DTS-HD 5.1 mix – makes those shadows so much darker.

The 4K disc ports over the trio of featurettes produced for the original 2013 Blu-ray release; the one that focuses on the real Lorraine Warren is easily the most interesting, because Warren really does believe everything she’s saying. (Her endorsement surely helped get the faithful out to the megaplexes.)  

There are also two new retrospective featurettes produced for this edition: “Scariest of Them All” and “Reflections on The Conjuring,” which offer archival production footage with new paired appearances from Farmiga and Wilson and Wan and Taylor. There’s nothing revelatory here – everyone had a great time, the production design was really convincing, James Wan isn’t coloring his hair anymore – but there’s a sweet nostalgia at work here, as everyone takes a victory lap for the sleeper that spawned a dynasty.

I can’t decide whether a moment of Wilson and Farmiga watching the set footage on a tablet together is lazy or adorable; the co-stars have a chummy, supportive rapport that mirrors their performances as Ed and Lorraine Warren. Let’s go with “adorable,” then; it’s not what you’d expect from a movie about ghost-hunters, but Ed and Lorraine are the heart of Wan’s series … insofar as it has one at all.

Bring Her Back is now available in individual 4K and Blu-ray editions from A24 in the US, and on Blu-ray from Elevation Pictures in Canada. The 4K edition of The Conjuring is on shelves next Tuesday, August 26^th, from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment.

Up next: The end of the month brings a flood of titles from Criterion and Via Vision … and Wes Anderson’s latest, too. Keep an eye out.