The House on Pine Street (2015)

Seven months pregnant Jennifer (Emily Goss in a nuanced tour-de-force performance of a type you don’t usually expect to find in your indie horror and whose absence would have ruined this particular film) and her husband Luke (Taylor Bottles) are moving from Chicago to the town in Kansas where Jennifer grew up. Unfortunately, this also means for Jennifer to return into the sphere of influence of her horrible, horrible mother (Cathy Barnett). Something the film will only ever talk around instead about for much of its running time concerning Jennifer’s mental health and the life of her foetus happened in Chicago, and the move is supposed to help her getting over it. Because returning to a place you hate always makes things better, or something. Well, and Ma’s got a job for Luke that’s better than bar keeping, so there’s that.

At least, the couple is now living in a surprisingly big, surprisingly cheap home. Exactly this home will turn out to be a rather large problem though, for shortly after they have moved in, Jennifer starts to see and hear all the typical signs of a movie haunting: doors bang, invisible forces knock, and some particularly nasty manifestations surround the bedroom cupboard, as these things do. Alas, only Jennifer hears and sees these things, so Luke quickly starts to think that the nasty things from Chicago that are not meant to be explained are happening again. He also seems, just like Jennifer’s mother, to be the type who thinks that berating the mentally ill as if they’d picked their problems is a good way to help them. Consequently, Jennifer becomes more and more isolated and more and more fixated on the manifestations, which in turn increase. Things can only end badly.

At its surface, Aaron and Austin Keeling’s The House on Pine Street behaves like a very traditional modern movie about a haunting. The film’s supernatural manifestations are not only highly typical of modern ghost horror movies – though the film very pointedly and for a good reason doesn’t really show any ghosts – but the most traditional ones you can find beyond the dragging of chains. Unlike a lot of modern ghost movies good or bad, Pine Street doesn’t much go for jump scares, though. This is a film that’s much more interested in showing the increasing dread and horror of its protagonist when confronted with a cupboard door that meaningfully opens and closes at will than having it shut with a loud bang (though it does that too, of course).

That’s because below the surface, the film is modelled on a different style of ghost story, the kind where the spooky manifestations are generally realized in the appropriately spooky and creepy ways, but where they are also there to mirror and explicate what’s going on in the characters, in this case Jennifer. The ghosts or whatever is haunting the house, you see, are the movie-real manifestations of Jennifer’s fear of her pregnancy, of unwanted change, of her feeling of having lost control over a life she cherished before her pregnancy, of her growing estrangement from Luke. This doesn’t necessarily mean Jennifer is indeed seeing horrors where there aren’t any, but it does mean that she and the horrors are very much belonging together and very much saying something about each other.

This isn’t news in horror films, of course, but the Keelings’ film truly does put the emphasis straight on this element, even using an explanation for the haunting that’s increasing the connection between Jennifer’s life and what’s going on in the house, walking the often problematic line between the idea of the haunting as metaphor and the haunting only as metaphor (the latter a form of haunting I find rather irritating thanks to its closeness to that most horrible thing in the world of art, allegory) like the Great Valerio before he fell.


It’s not all perfect, though. The film’s final twenty minutes feel curiously draggy, as if the film couldn’t quite decide how to properly end proceedings (though I do approve of it not going the most obvious way there in the end), and the hauntings are sometimes a bit too conservative for my tastes. Fortunately, these things only mildly distract from what is a surprisingly intelligent, and actually psychological haunted house movie.