Family Go to the Bad House is available as a free download if you e-mail familygotothebadhouse@gmail.com (from 1st October 2026)
By their very name and nature, genre films are generic. Horror cinema is built from an expansive but nonetheless finite set of tropes that adapt themselves to the times and fashions that they also mediate, but that themselves change surprisingly little across the decades – and Graham Hughes’ latest feature takes a structuralist approach to horror, exposing all the building blocks that make up the genre’s ‘bad house’.
Hughes is known in genre circles for writing and directing eccentric takes on horror (Death of a Vlogger, 2019) and science fiction (Hostile Dimensions, 2923) that find humour in the horrific, and overcome low- to no-budgets with whipsmart ideas – yet in Family Go to the Bad House he can claim only an editor’s credit. For this is a manic assemblage of scenes from other horror films, cut together to tell a familiar story – and the only parts of it that could be said to have been directed by Hughes are the opening and closing credits, and a séance sequence in the middle excerpted from Hughes’ own Death of a Vlogger (which also allows Hughes a brief on-screen cameo). Here, though, editing itself creates a disorienting world of both continuities and discontinuities, as a story as old as the history of horror cinema keeps retelling itself through different casts, settings and times.
The plot is an amalgam – a distillation of many other horror films’ plots – in which a father (who is also an author), a mother and their child move into a new home where, from the very first night, things creak and bump, where attics, basements, closets, bathrooms and under-bed spaces are the haunts of predatory entities (or anxious psyches), and where the family will soon find themselves under assault from buried ghosts, from possession-happy demons, from inter-dimensional monsters and from the returning repressed. The family will receive warnings from a Harbinger and consult a useless Doctor, before turning for help to an Expert in the paranormal – and ultimately they will confront head-on the sinister forces in the house, as a nuclear family, that conservative mainstay of the species’ survival and continuation, faces its fears of an unresolved past and an unsettled future.
If all this sounds a little like, say, Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror (1979), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981), Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982) or James Wan’s Insidious (2010), then Hughes duly quotes from these, their sequels, and hundreds of other titles, with a palette of films that span a whole history of horror from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to films released in the same year as Family Go the the Bad House itself like Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Sam Raimi’s Send Help, Damian McCarthy’s Hokum, and Sébastien Vanicek’s Evil Dead Burn.
Here every character is an archetype played by multiple actors across different eras and countries, now in black and white, now in colour, now in live action, now in stop motion (Henry Selick’s Coraline, 2009) or in CEL animation (Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, 1988), and even in space (the Alien films and Paul W.S Anderson’s Event Horizon, 1997). It is a compendium of conventions and clichés, skilfully cut and collated from 387 (!) features and juxtaposed, often with sly wit, to reveal the iterations that echo uncannily down the ages. Hughes’ film both deconstructs and reconstructs horror, showing its ritualised, repetitive, even universal recurrences that fall somewhere between genre essentialism and hard-wired psychology. It is also of course a labour of deeply, dementedly obsessive love from Hughes, who has cast his analytic gaze over a vast filmography, resurrecting and remixing it back into what it was all along.
Like Györgi Pálfi’s Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen (2012) – which is duly acknowledged in text at the beginning – and also like Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) and Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson’s The Green Fog (2017), this tells its story from a dizzyingly kaleidoscopic montage of footage reappropriated from other, pre-existing films. What Hughes amply demonstrates is the otherness, expressed across chronologies and cultures, that is all at once in horror and of horror, but also lurking just beyond it, unifying the genre with its persistent, transcendent presence in the shadows. Yet right from its childish, solecistic title, Family Go to the Bad House also shows that perhaps the best approach both to exorcising anxiety and to dispelling evil from our domestic lives, is not fear so much as laughter.
strap: Graham Hughes’ latest venture is an uncannily amusing experiment in appropriation and montage, reconstructing horror’s edifice from the building bricks of films past.
© Anton Bitel
