Somehow horror, a genre all about awful, terrible, really bad things, can create a genuinely warm sense of community. Weirdos who never quite fit in anywhere can find their tribe; artists come together to devote their full creative energies to something no one would ever want to experience; anyone with a camera, the passion, and a halfway good idea can get a few people together and bring their dream to life, or nightmare as the case might be. There are endless examples of modestly budgeted, or even really low budget flicks hitting it big, the idea and the artistry shining through and proving that well-heeled Hollywood holds no patent on talent, skill, or cinematic value. Films like Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, or The Evil Dead are recognized as classics of the form, catapulting their creators into horror icons, and they were all made on a shoestring.
While there are, of course, examples of non-horror low budget successes, it feels like this Mickey-Rooney-esque, “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” spirit is really a core feature of horror filmmaking. Whereas today’s film might not quite ascend to the heights of the above-listed Romero/Carpenter/Raimi opuses, it does serve as an inspiring example of that creative spirit, making do with the tools and people available to bring a dark vision to life.
La Casa Muda (2010)
This is quite the little success story. Filmed in Uruguay for only $6,000 (for comparison, that’s 1/10 the budget of The Blair Witch Project) and only intended for local release, Gustavo Hernández’s La Casa Muda (The Silent House) went on to successfully tour the festival circuit and get a fair amount of worldwide acclaim as a solid, inventive scary movie with an effective gimmick, namely, a haunted house film in one continuous shot in real time, that isn’t found footage. This had only recently even become possible thanks to then recent advances in shooting digitally. The result may sometimes be a little less than beautiful to behold (the flat sharpness of 2010 digital hasn’t aged well), but it’s still pretty effective in creating a sense of fear and delivering some jumps. When you take into consideration the fact that this is an ultra-low budget movie made with 4 actors by a first time writer/director, it really stands as a tremendous accomplishment. One year after its release, it was already followed by an American re-make (which I haven’t seen and can’t comment on).
So, what is it about? That’s a rather good question, really. On the surface, we have a young woman, Laura (Florencia Colucci) and her father, Wilson (Gustavo Alonso) who come to an old, boarded up, remote house to clean up the property so that Nestor (Abel Tripaldi), an old friend of Wilson’s, can sell it. Nestor meets them there, shows them around, and tells them not to go upstairs because some tiles are loose and it’s not safe. Then he takes off and the father and daughter go to sleep for the night with a plan to rise early and get to work. But almost immediately, Laura starts to hear strange sounds and get creeped out. Her father investigates upstairs (of course) and within minutes, she finds him, hands bound, and possibly dead. Terrified, she sneaks around the house, hiding from some unseen threat and examining small details that might give her some clue as to what’s going on.
From time to time, unsettlingly upbeat music plays unprompted on a small radio, a creepy little ghost girl appears, someone runs at Laura with a knife, and generally spooky haunted house shenanigans ensue. Finally, Nestor returns, which leads us into a third act revelation which is either a shocking twist that changes everything or simply does not make a lick of sense.
After finishing, I had to go back and re-watch the beginning and the end, seeking clues as to which it might be, and I’m still not certain. Basically (and here lie spoilers), it seems that perhaps at some point in the past, Laura had lived in this house (but maybe it was another girl – maybe it was many different girls, none of whom were her – maybe, she was one of many girls in the house) with Nestor and her father, who were both having sex with her (or them). She got pregnant and they killed her baby as it could have been the product of incest/evidence of what they had been doing.
Before making this discovery, Laura spends a lot of time wandering around the house, examining things when it seems that she should just get the hell out of dodge, but perhaps she has forgotten/blocked out her time here and finding all these little artifacts of her past is bringing it back. Or maybe something ghostly is happening and she’s tapping into the trauma that had happened here to another girl/other girls. I’m honestly not sure.
The big reveal happens when she finds a wall covered in photos of Nestor and Wilson with some scantily clad/naked/pregnant/no-longer-pregnant girl(s). BUT, was that her in the photos? My facial recognition software couldn’t process it with multiple re-viewings (though it’s never been one of my strengths)—I thought there were at least 2 or 3 girls, and maybe none of them were her, or maybe all of them were her. Anyway, eventually she kills Nestor. The end.
Ok, so for a while the story is so simple as to be non-existent, and later it’s so confusing as to lead to a lot of post film head scratching. In the end, I think it probably just doesn’t work, but I can forgive the film in light of its successes. And this is something I hold dear about horror; it is a constant opportunity for artists to focus on form, to show what they can do with visual/auditory storytelling, to create an effect for the viewer. And Hernández does that. This is a technically tight first outing, and an effective little horror flick.
There are a few solid moments of camera choreography that build suspense and deliver some real scares. Also, there is a fascinating sequence close to the turning point when Laura has temporarily escaped from the house and it seems that she is constantly running out of and then reappearing in the frame from an angle that you don’t expect her to, based on her previous trajectory. The sense is that she’s running away but can’t escape and is repeatedly returning to where she’d just left. That wasn’t what was happening, but this nice little trick of the camera really created the impression. It’s something you might imagine in a highly edited sequence and pulling it off within the constraint of the unbroken shot is a feat.
The sound is also striking in its spare use. With almost no dialogue, the viewer is attuned to every creak, ever breath (not the first time this has been done in a horror movie of course, but nonetheless potent). There is also a nice moment when she’s outside and the sound is all muffled—contrasting the crisp, clear ability to hear every scratch and step inside the house—as if the house brings things into focus for her and, having left it, she is lost – she can’t orient herself.
But of course, the most noteworthy aspect of the film is its continuous-shot-in-real-time maneuver. This has been done before, but rarely with the same flexibility employed here by Hernández . Obviously, in the past, working with big, heavy film cameras, there were restrictions that don’t hinder a lightweight digital camera and it was necessary to hide cuts so the film canister could be changed (as Hitchcock did in Rope). The possibility of digital film making defines many of the film’s successes and failures.
First off, while this quality of digital filming may have been a familiar look just 10 years ago, it already looks dated—so shallow and flat, so evenly sharp. Also, the obviously handheld camera suggests found footage and draws more attention to the camera itself than may have been desired. However, there is a reason that found footage has been so successful, that so many people respond to it: there is a thrill that comes from the limited perspective. We know we can see only where the camera is looking, and when the camera turns away from where we expect a threat, or when a character temporarily fills the frame, obscuring what’s behind her (as is effectively done in an early scene), tension is compellingly built. Again, this trick is not new, but when it works, it works, and here, it works.
Finally, the single take delivers a really intriguing twist in the narrative. The whole idea of one sustained shot with no cuts in real time tells us that we are seeing everything with no trickery—that in digital high definition, we can see everything – nothing has been removed—and we follow Laura through almost every frame. And yet, with the third act revelation, it seems that what we have seen was inaccurate—she has killed her father and Nestor, intentionally, fully knowing what she was doing, not just stabbing the wrong person when he runs at her in the dark. She bound their hands and stabbed them until they were dead. And we didn’t see it. We saw her scared, in a mysterious haunted house, worried about them, where they had gone, what had been done to them. The only little ghost girl was in her mind. The camera has shown us everything with no chicanery, but it was still an unreliable narrator. It’s either a brilliant move or a frustrating cheat, depending on how you feel about that particular epiphany. But, even if it’s a cheat, it’s a pretty fun idea, and it’s pulled off effectively.
Either way, kudos are certainly due to the small team that made this imperfect, but rather impressive little flick. It’s easy to point out the flaws of a thing, but a whole lot harder to make a thing, yourself. Hernandez et al. made a pretty great thing here. We should all be so successful.
