Ten Days of Terror!: We Are Still Here

Film: We Are Still Here
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There are times when I am frustrated with myself for writing as much as I do on these reviews. It’s great when there’s a lot to say about a particular movie, and in fact writing 800-1000 words on a movie is sometimes a little restrictive. But then there are times when I don’t have a great deal to say. That’s not always a bad thing in terms of what it means for the film. In this case, We Are Still Here is a movie that deserves to be talked about for all of the right reasons. There’s just honestly not a lot that has to be said about it.

The main issue going in is that this is going to be a list of tropes. This is very clearly a haunted house movie for starters. It’s also a movie where outsiders move into a small town and end up in the town’s creepy haunted house, filled with terrible lore of the former occupants. And, naturally, the house is going to be filled with some unquiet ghosts. That’s the set up, and in truth, the film isn’t going to deviate from this much, but it’s going to play within those constraints surprisingly well.

The story takes place in the late 1970s, although this isn’t really going to be anything that plays into the story in any real way. Older married couple Anne and Paul Sacchetti (Barbara Crampton and Andrew Sensenig) have moved to a small rural town in New England in the hope of a new start. We learn soon enough that their son Bobby died in a car accident a few months previously. After they have been in the house for a couple of weeks, they are visited by neighbors Dave and Cat McCabe (Monte Markham and Connie Neer) and told the history of the house. More than a century before, the house was used as a funeral home, but the people who lived there, the Dagmars, were accused of selling the bodies to nearby medical schools and burying empty caskets. The Dagmars were run out of town (we are told), but the house has a reputation because of its past.

Despite all of this, Anne believes that she can sense Bobby in the house and invites May and Jacob Lewis (Lisa Marie and Larry Fessenden) to visit them. The Lewises are the parents of Bobby’s old roommate, and both of them are spiritually “awakened” in the post-Hippie sense of the phrase. Additionally, their son Harry (Michael Patrick) and his girlfriend Daniella (Kelsea Dakota) have been asked to come up as well.

While we get some hints of something going on—Joe the Electrician (Marvin Patterson) is burned in the basement and we catch a glimpse of an apparition—things both literally and figuratively heat up when Harry and Daniella arrive at the house. They show up when everyone else is at dinner. Harry explores the house and is attacked and killed in the basement by an apparition that looks as if it was burned in a fire. Daniella flees, but is killed by something similar in the car.

As it happens, the house does have a terrible history, but it’s not exactly what we have been led to believe by what we have been told. Eventually, things are going to come to a head in a terrible way, some of which is going to involve a séance gone terribly wrong and a possession that is far more upsetting than many in other films.

We Are Still Here is, honestly, based on a lot of horror movie tropes that everyone has seen more than once. This is very much a standard haunted house story in terms of the set up, no different from The Haunting or 13 Ghosts in that respect. And, ultimately, the way this plays out, since there’s going to be a moment where everything turns and something else is revealed is not new as well. In that respect, there’s not a huge amount of anything new going on with this film.

And yet, it works pretty well. A lot of that is the cast. These are very average looking people, and the presence of scream queen Barbara Crampton and oddball character actor Larry Fessenden don’t hurt. It also helps that the ghosts that we are going to encounter are surprisingly effective. They look like, essentially, humans turned into charcoal—blackened, flaking skin with points of red embers, but with piercing eyes. The effect is genuinely disturbing and it works beautifully.

We Are Still Here could honestly be a little longer. It runs about 83 minutes or so, and while it tells the story, there’s room here for it to be a little slower in the reveal or to build things up a bit more. This is not a movie that requires multiple viewings or a great deal of study, but it’s effective for what it is an what it wants to be.

Why to watch We Are Still Here: Surprisingly inventive for something bound by some tropes.
Why not to watch: Honestly, it could be 10 minutes longer to build a bit more.