The true events that inspired new movie HIS HOUSE
Chilling, thought-provoking and rich with emotional impact, UK horror movie HIS HOUSE premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2020, and has had global rights bought by Netflix. Felicity Evans, the story’s co-writer, breaks down some of her inspiration for the film…
I first came up with the idea for HIS HOUSE in 2014/2015. I’d been reminded of something I’d heard about years before, a haunted house in rural Essex, England.
This building, claimed the owner, was so beset by frightening and unexplained phenomena it was impossible for her to continue living there. She couldn’t rent it out or sell it, either — the place was entirely uninhabitable, spiritually contaminated by its long-departed occupants (women accused of witchcraft during the 1600s, housed there overnight before being taken to nearby Colchester for trial and execution).
In the UK, there’s a lot of cultural baggage to do with wealth and class wrapped up with home-ownership. Buying a house has become prohibitively expensive for those without huge salaries or access to family money, and owning a property is as much a status symbol and a source of investment as it is about making a home. Owning a house is something of a ‘gold standard’ for where you see yourself in life, and where you want to be heading.
And yet here was a period house, in a beautiful village ‘within easy commuting distance of London’ as the brochure would surely say, lying empty. It was failing in its allotted function as status symbol and investment opportunity — letting the side down: driving away buyers, renters and property portfolio magnates with its bumps, screams, mysterious pools of blood, rattling doors and sudden, icy chills. A ‘difficult’ piece of real estate, beyond the pale, resisting commodification — what to do with a place like this?
It struck me that, in story terms, a house this undesirable would be used for dumping people who — we’re consistently told — are also ‘undesirable’. They would be lumped together, a mutual punishment for being unacceptable to the kind of society that puts more value on a house than a home. Scapegoated and marginalised: of course it would be refugees allocated a house everyone else had shunned. In turn, the building and its demons would become a metaphor — and perhaps something more — for everything the refugees had escaped, and the trauma they still faced. Subsequent research for the first draft of the script (co-written with Toby Venables) revealed the unspeakably squalid conditions in which refugees are housed in the UK: insect infestations, rats, damp, mould, collapsing walls and floors, decades of ingrained filth. Any complaints are met with removal to properties that are even worse, if that were possible. The hauntings experienced by the central protagonists of HIS HOUSE became a metaphor for this, too.
The human brain is hard-wired for storytelling, and more and more we understand that the best way to relay information is by using stories and classic story structure (this ‘power’ can be used to damage as well as inspire — fake news channelled through social media, for example). I wanted to put my yen for storytelling to positive use, originating HIS HOUSE to try and make a difference and relay a message I think is vitally important: one of compassion and responsibility.
I hope that when you watch the movie, you think we did a good job…
More from Felicity Evans on Twitter @ScribblerEvans