THIS HOUSE HAS PEOPLE IN IT: A Disturbing Little Masterpiece

This house might be haunted… or maybe it’s even worse. This House Has People in It.

Adult Swim is by now a cult evening programming block of the famous Cartoon Network channel, which for nearly quarter of a century has been successfully hypnotizing the minds of American viewers. This is not, however, a pleasant trance inducing a blissful state of daydreaming and relaxing inertia.

Quite the opposite – the platform for such series as Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! or Childrens Hospital is a laboratory of phantasmagorical deliriums, much closer to the nightmare aesthetics of Lynch’s Eraserhead than to the far more innocent cartoons aired on the channel in the morning and afternoon hours.

One of the hallmarks of this programming block are so-called infomercials, which late at night effectively put viewers’ mental hygiene to the test. These short film forms imitate the schemes of television commercials and announcements, and then run their banality through the authors’ completely unrestrained imagination.

On March 14, 2016, Adult Swim premiered an intriguing creation by director and visual artist Alan Resnick. Its title is This House Has People In It, and the work is patronized by shock and a lack of common sense. What exactly is this twelve-minute piece? In short, it can be described as a loose variation on the assumptions of the popular genre known as found footage.

Without unnecessary introductions, the director throws the viewer straight into the middle of a psychodrama observed through cameras installed in the rooms of the titular house. Much like in The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity, we listen to the emotionless dialogues of the main characters, whose numbed acting seems like a mockery of the interactions presented in the most famous horrors of this type.

In Resnick’s film, this passivity is intensified to almost grotesque proportions, which gradually begin to evoke a feeling of unease. After a few minutes it becomes clear that something is wrong here, as inexplicable things begin to happen in the house, the characters start losing their minds, and the rooms shown become prisons for them.

Kafkaesque paranoia emphasizing the absurdity of the situation combines here with the claustrophobic motif of the room-as-cage, known for example from Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.

The creator of this short film multiplies abstract clues and motifs from second to second, only to cap this tragic farce with clichés of contemporary horror cinema. Thanks to this framing, it becomes clear that we are witnessing an audiovisual experiment playing with viewers’ expectations. Resnick seems to be saying: You crave cheap scares? Then I will present you with a closet monster you will never forget.

This House Has People In It is an intriguing little masterpiece that uses the basic primer of horror cinema in order to spectacularly tear off the cover and rearrange the pages. The result is an oneiric collage, a postmodern Frankenstein that effectively robs one of sleep.