The Lobster Dance

Image: I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House poster. Image of a woman in 19th century dress in profile, her arms are attached backwards. Source: IMDB

In the course of doing this series, I always find a couple of duds–films that aren’t very interesting, not ones I can recommend as feminist horror films but also not ones that clearly illustrate problematic elements. (2016: The House on Sorority Row, The Moth Diaries)

Lily Saylor is a in-home hospice care-giver who is afraid of horror stories. She moves to Braintree, MA, to care for Iris Blum, a retired horror author who has dementia and keeps calling her “Polly.”

Major spoilers ahead.

I worried at first that this movie would be about elder/caregiver abuse, but it’s actually a rather straight-forward ghost story. Iris Blum’s 19th century home is haunted by the ghost of Polly Parsons, whom we see in flashbacks–a pretty young bride murdered by her husband and shoved in a hole in the shiplap. (Uh oh, HGTV – killer shiplap!) Polly’s ghost tells Iris her story, and Iris publishes it as The Woman in the Wall. At some point, Polly stops speaking/appearing to Iris, but when Lily moves in, Polly starts ghosting around again.

What I liked:

-Shirley Jackson vibes, including young Iris’s fashion

-The set and lighting

-The scene where the ink from eye from the author photo of Iris comes off on Lily’s hand

– Lily failing at reading The Woman in the Wall in bed

-The idea that the moment of death is tied to the physical body, not the spirit, so ghosts don’t remember it

What didn’t work

-Constant voice-overs about how Lily is going to die soon and will never be 29. About half of these could have been cut, and leaving parts about borrowing houses from ghosts and the part about ghosts forgetting their deaths

-Weird CGI Polly with backwards legs doesn’t look quite right, and I don’t mean in a “your legs aren’t meant to go that way” way. It really reminded me of a child’s backwards Halloween costume, and not in a scary way.

Honestly, I think the the hamfisted narration and the weird CGI ruined an otherwise subtle, atmospheric ghost story for me, which is really a shame. Also, fuck shiplap.

Contains ghosts, domestic violence (not with caregiver/patient), dementia, some gore, mold, brief body horror. My complaints are all about the CGI and narration–there’s nothing particularly problematic or misogynistic.