Lost media and its close cousin, found footage, fascinate us because of the instant tension between the passive and the actively menacing. There is nothing inherently dangerous about watching a movie, or stumbling upon some half-remembered public access kids show while you’re trawling through the least-watched videos on YouTube, but our brains are hard-wired to view these things in terms of the forbidden.
It’s hidden knowledge, a secret that’s both alluring and potentially devastating, and when it’s translated into fiction effectively, there’s a sense that you have to look away, but you can’t.
Play House, the first-ever Fantastic Fest pitch contest winner making its World Premiere at the festival this year, loves that feeling. It savors, bathes in it, saturates its frames with it. Lost media and analog horror are having a moment right now, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to pull off. There are very fine tonal lines you have to walk, and while it occasionally stumbles, Play House walks those lines with compelling grace.
Elliot (Will Harrison), a former child actor still getting over a bad breakup, has just purchased a fixer-upper in Southern California, which he may or may not have done as a means of convincing his ex Cath (Jessica Sula) that he’s trying to get his act together. His best friend, YouTuber and lost media expert Alden (Jordan Gonzalez), sees the place as a dump, and he’s right.
The walls are filthy, the carpet stinks, the kitchen is falling apart, and the old, rusted water heater in the basement doesn’t work except when it’s croaking out sinister knocking sounds in the middle of the night. There’s a lot of work ahead, but in the name of turning over a new leaf, Elliot dives in. At least until he finds the tapes.
In the basement, stuffed in an old plastic shopping bag, Elliot uncovers a series of VHS tapes and decides to watch them, out of boredom (his Wifi hasn’t been hooked up yet) at first, and then out of genuine interest. The tapes are episodes of a children’s TV program in which a human host, Mr. Morton (James Urbaniak), interacts with monstrous puppets voiced by what sounds like very tired, very frightened children. It’s a weird pop culture artifact, so obscure that internet searches turn up nothing, and even Alden’s never heard of it.
So, with Cath hanging around the house out of renewed interest in Elliot’s life, the three friends start looking closer, and what they find is something frightening which may or may not be bleeding into Elliot’s real life in his new home.
There’s a real art to pulling off convincing lo-fi, analog footage for fictional lost media, and Play House would be dead in the water if it couldn’t pull that off, but director Nicolas Curcio and his team attack it with deft, careful hands. The show Elliot finds is definitely creepy, but as Elliot himself says, so was a lot of kids’ TV produced in the ’80s and ’90s. Rather than launching directly into all-out, obvious terror, though, the film’s depiction of this old TV show is surprisingly tragicomic, complete with weird puppet reactions and a host in Morton who’s just weird enough to start convincing Elliot that something might be off.
This could be a fake show in the middle of a horror movie, but it could also just be a weird thing someone made in their basement once upon a time, and it’s that convincing duality that gives the film a very solid start.
Narratively, the film is a bit rocky, particularly around the second act when the film needs time to pass so it can develop certain subplots while the main plot just feels sort of punted down the road, but that does nothing to overshadow the solid storytelling at work here. Curcio and co-writer Kirby Gladstein set up their concept elegantly, set it in motion quite well, and when it comes time for a few well-placed scares, get the pacing right for maximum atmosphere.
The visuals help this tremendously, not just because of the wonderfully creepy production design at work in the old videotapes, but because cinematographer Zayd Ezzeldine manages to delicately paint in shadows in all the right places. Too often at this budget level and with digital photography, these movies can turn out flat, too light or too dark, allowing little space for contrast. I loved following this movie down into its dingy basements and through its dark hallways, and it adds a layer of the Gothic to a rundown old house in the middle of a modern urban sprawl.
The characters also help the film through its slightly rough-edged moments, particularly Harrison, who has to spend a good portion of the movie alone in a sparsely furnished dump of a house, trying to grapple with the mounting disease his new home has brought. Sula and Gonzalez make excellent foils for him, each drawing out a different side of Elliot’s personality to create more dramatic tension. And of course, Urbaniak is a born scene stealer, and reaches genuinely impressive levels of terrifying.
Though it sometimes stumbles with an oddly meandering plot and it doesn’t quite reach the emotional heights suggested by its first two acts, Play House succeeds thanks to a solid foundation and flashes of genuine horror brilliance from a group of rising indie stars. If this is the kind of film we’re going to get out of Fantastic Fest’s pitch contest, I’d call that initiative a resounding success. Play House is fun, creepy, earnest, strange, and exactly the kind of movie indie horror fans should be lining up to see.
Play House made its world premiere at Fantastic Fest. Release info TBA.
