JP Nunez
Most of the time when you watch a horror movie, you can pretty easily pigeonhole it into a particular subgenre. It might be a slasher, a ghost movie, a zombie film, or one of about a million other possibilities, and this isn’t a bad thing. Some of the greatest horror movies of all time fit very comfortably into a single subgenre (like The Exorcist and Night of the Living Dead, for example), but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes a film completely bursts the bounds of our usual categories, and The Night House looks like it’s going to be one of those movies. Here’s the official plot synopsis:
Reeling from the unexpected death of her husband, Beth (Rebecca Hall) is left alone in the lakeside home he built for her. She tries as best she can to keep it together—but then nightmares come. Disturbing visions of a presence in the house calling to her, beckoning her with a ghostly allure. Against the advice of her friends, she begins digging into her husband’s belongings, yearning for answers. What she finds are secrets both strange and disturbing—a mystery she’s determined to unravel.
When the trailer starts, you think it’s going to be a more or less typical ghost or demon movie. Sure, there’s a mystery involved, but that’s par for the course with these films. And then the big reveal comes. Beth’s husband built a backward copy of their house before he died, and when she finds it one night and goes in, she sees herself sitting on the couch in the middle of the day.
It’s an absolute bombshell that changes your entire perception of the film. The Night House isn’t just a ghost movie. It’s some sort of weird sci-fi/fantasy/ghost/doppelganger/I don’t even know what to call it kind of story, and the rest of the trailer simply reinforces that impression. It’s a bunch of bizarre and baffling imagery that just raises a million more questions, and I’m super intrigued.
See, I’m the kind of guy who usually knows everything there is to know about a film before I see it. I watch all the trailers and follow all the movie news, so I usually have a pretty good idea of what to expect when I walk into a theater. But this time, I don’t, and it’s refreshing. It’s nice going into a movie not even knowing how to classify it. We have no idea what’s going on in this story, and I for one am really looking forward to the wild ride of finding out.
The Night House is currently scheduled to come out in theaters on July 16, so we’ll know in a few months if it lives up to the crazy promise of its trailer.
So what do you think of the trailer for The Night House? Do you agree with JP that it offers intriguing and subgenre-bending questions? Let us know in the comments!
If the movie induces half the suspense of the trailer then we’re in for a wild ride. Can’t wait to see it! I want to go home scratching my head and looking behind me!