If You’re Going To Watch One Black Horror Film, Make It This One
It’s Black History Month in 2025 and you’re looking for something to watch, maybe even rewatch? Trump has come into office. Again. You want something that will shake up your thinking and put you in the mood to take on these next four years. May I introduce His House?
This 2020 horror thriller film was written and directed by Remi Weekes, from a story by Felicity Evans and Toby Venables. This Starchild Pictures production scares us with witches, phantoms, gunfire, self-mutilation, tribal violence, and the cold depths of the open sea. But the film’s greatest horror is the systemic mistrust and derision felt by the married refugees Bol and Rial when they reach their safe “asylum”.
Looking back at this instant classic, we can see ourselves and our neighbors in the ordinary ghouls of His House. And that’s what we need right now. We need to remember that it’s not hard to be the bad guy and if we don’t watch out we can end up one ourselves. To understand how we can stop ourselves from falling into the footsteps of these villains, all we need to do is not make their mistakes.
The first of these villains are the “pencil pushers”. We meet them when the loving but deeply disturbed Bol and Rial are greenlit to live in the UK as Asylum Seekers. They are reminded this does not make them citizens and comes with strict instructions. All the while, their dead child, Nyagak, is brought up in front of them without grace or care. These people are technically offering the couple a chance at a new life, yes, but their callousness and lack of humanity chill the audience as the film begins.
This happens again when Rial goes to the doctor for her check-up and her doctor has not checked her files enough to know that their child is no longer with them. She insensitively requests to see the girl for a check-up next and then makes a flippant remark about Rial’s tribe scars. So, Rial matches her energy with a reaction full of disdain and traumatic over-sharing. Not having learned from her mistakes to treat her patient’s mental health as fragile here, the doctor falls into awkward silence and Rial is left to seethe alone.
From their first night in the house, they’re immediately and regularly accosted with images of the dead they left behind including Nyagak and the others who were on the boat with them. Rial knows it’s a witch’s curse that has come for them. Among other abuses, they hear the Witch’s request for Bol to kill himself. Though he denies any of this is happening, he’s plagued by the visions as much as his wife and is unable to overcome his turmoil and guilt. Through His House, however, we learn that the phantoms are only as powerful as you let them be.
On the other hand, scarier than the inert phantoms is their intentionally antagonistic caseworker Mark, played to a beautifully aggravating effect by Matt Smith. When he first shows them their home he remarks that he hopes they are two of “the good ones” adding to the undue skepticism aimed at them and all refugees. But, we then learn that Mark has been comparing himself to Bol quite a lot, to the point that he thinks Bol owes him some kind of debt. Mark asserts that he was a banker like Bol had been before “They sent all the jobs abroad”. He feels he was let down by society and blames a foreign contingent for his problems.
Mark is dangerous in a very real way. Mark brings up later on that he’s just “doing his job” but we can see he reacts with amusement at potentially making trouble for Bol. He also likes to threaten potentially sending Bol home to a dangerous country. Mark uses the power in his job to make other people’s lives worse. He has been blinded by his own self-pity to the plights of others even as he sees them every day. That’s what makes Mark the most dangerous beast in this film.
But bureaucracy isn’t the only villainy on display. At one point, Rial is taunted by three teenage boys for being a “Freshie”. The obvious distress this causes her is heartbreaking. Plus, there’s a sadness surrounding these children who are taught so young to be cruel to anyone performing Blackness “more” than themselves. Rial had hoped for a friendly, or at least respectful interaction, for once since arriving in this foreign country but was thwarted again.
Similarly, there is one villain who is harder to pin down but something we all must battle. His house begins with a closeup of exactly what people think of when they hear the word refugee. A Black man and child walking through drylands covered in sweat and dirt. Despite their dark complexion, the tired young girl Nyagak carries a blonde doll in her arms representing the pervasive ideal of an “innocent white child” even while in South Sudan. The purity of the “White Girl” continues as the doll is saved from this place and held as a totem by Rial throughout the film.
Throughout this film, we are confronted with this doll, the ever-present reminder of the loss of both their child and their own innocence. This totem is a constant reminder it’s always safer to be White. It’s also a reminder that the film’s final villain: systemically racist cultural representation. Fighting this villain may take more than just a movie rewatch or two to fix. But by filling your time with things other than the White paradigm, you’re doing at least something to confront an issue we are all constantly fighting.
Categorized:Editorials
