“Gee honey, wouldn’t you know it? Our car broke down!”

“And on this dirt road in the middle of nowhere, too!”

“Well, it’s pouring rain, but there’s no sense in waiting for it to let up!”

“That’s right! Let’s start wandering blindly!”

“Good idea!”

“Hey, here’s an old abandoned-looking hotel that seemingly appeared out of nowhere! Looks nice! Let’s stay the night here!”

“I agree with that thinking!”

“It sure looks haunted! But luckily, there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

Er…something like that, anyway. It’s not quite an exact transcript of the setup for House, but my point here is that we’ve seen that setup so many times that it probably constitutes its own genre by now. House is a film that’s completely unashamed of what it is: a cheesy, derivative horror film with lousy acting, obvious dialogue, and nearly every cliché in the book. It’s the sort of film that no one can admit to enjoying without losing all of his or her credibility.

I loved it.

Nuthin' scarier than being dressed up as someone's twisted sex fantasy and surrounded by obvious metaphors for temptation.

There. I said it. Now I have to spend the remainder of this article attempting to justify that somewhat embarrassing fact. It will be a daunting task, but I think I’m up to it. Let me list the reasons:

1. House is aware of how derivative it is. I mean, just look at the title — it doesn’t get much more minimalist than that. And when the storyline includes a spooky house guarded by some misanthropes who are obviously sexually repressed, a serial killer who attempts to provoke his victims to kill each other, a creepy girl with black hair who’s always whispering enigmatic things, and a pentagram with a goat’s head in it painted on the wall for no apparent reason, you have to assume that the creators can’t have an entirely straight face here. Or maybe I give them too much credit.
2. House is eclectic. It may draw heavily on a lot of sources, but at least the sources are somewhat diverse. On the one hand, most of the plot points are lifted from the horror films of the last decade; on the other hand, the tone plays like an homage to cheesy drive-in flicks of the 1970’s. This is all overlaid by an MTV style of editing, which serves to disorient the viewer and possibly add to the fright (depending on whether this sort of thing scares you, of course).
3. House doesn’t really feel any sort of need to make sense. Yes, this is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned. In a story like this, the twisted nightmare of a house is really a metaphor for the clashing forces in the characters’ psyches, and the fast, frenetic cuts and general lack of concern for continuity only make it seem more dreamlike. The general lack of explanation for most of what happens inspires a much more visceral response, and frankly is a welcome thing in a film where the exposition tends to be completely inane.
4. House is a “Christian film” — whatever that phrase may mean. In this case it means that it was based on a book by “Christian horror” (yes, that has been a real subgenre, since at least the late 1980’s) authors Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker. I realize that Christianity has been a controversial thing since the day that one Jewish carpenter walked the earth (which explains the backlash against Creed — come on guys, they were bad, but they weren’t that bad); I’m not going to enter that debate right now, but I will say that Christianity adds a lot of depth to House — and works both for it against it.
   
   It just ain't a horror flick without the creepy kid.

5. It works for it in that it means that House has to have something on its mind other than the bloody mayhem going on on its surface. It plays out essentially as an allegory for the psychological hell that people put themselves through when they refuse to let go of their past — something like what C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce would be if he had written it as a horror novel. It’s not exactly complex or challenging, but it does make House one of the deeper horror flicks to come out this year (and of course there’s a lot of competition for that).
6. It works against it in that House is determined to be a “Christian film” but not look like a “Christian film.” In other words, all the references have to be the wink-wink-nudge-nudge sort (along with a brief homage to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress) — and in this sense, it’s fighting a losing battle from the beginning. Still, this adds a large amount of tension to the proceedings, and while it’s certainly not the sort that the filmmakers intended, it makes House a compelling watch of the “train wreck” variety.

Really, what it comes down to is that I like cheesy movies that are eclectic and different (I’m not sure why this is, except maybe that they’re the sort that get me thinking about the process of filmmaking). I haven’t read any reviews of this one, but I guarantee that most of them are negative. That’s okay — I really can’t fault people for disliking a morality play dressed up as early 2000’s spook horror filtered through 1970’s camp and MTV freneticism. But if you’re at all like me, give House a chance.