THE RED HOUSE

THE RED HOUSE is a queasy dissertation on Rural American Gothic. Something about the solitude of out-of-the-way, neglected spaces lends them to secrets, pent-up guilt, sexual anxiety and madness.

Crippled farmer Pete Morgan (how did he lose that leg?) and his spinster sister Ellen (why didn’t she marry her true love Doc Byrne?) live in seclusion with their adopted teenage ward Meg (what really happened to her parents?). When Meg’s classmate Nath comes to work the farm, his schoolboy crush on Meg in tow, Pete begins to unravel. He warns of screams in the night and an evil Something that inhabits the Oxhead Woods, centered around an abandoned red cottage and derelict ice house sequestered deep among the trees. Undisclosed sexual and murderous transgressions of the past break through into the present, shattering the carefully crafted veneer of gentility at the Morgan Farm with shame and tragedy.

For many years, THE RED HOUSE languished in public domain hell and was available only in substandard copies. It’s a gift to see it fully restored, and to be able to appreciate its great visual beauty and nightmarish, proto-Lynchian noir sway.