Revisiting the Haunted House: Remi Weekes’s ‛His House’ (2020)

Abstract

His House (2020) is an uncommon generic hybrid that infuses horror with social realism. The film centers on a South Sudanese couple who have fled their war-torn country and are now seeking asylum in Britain. As the ghosts of their traumatic past have followed them to Europe, the couple cannot make a home of the subsidized house they have been granted, which turns into a gothicized haunted house. The unknown world outside is also a source of terror, as it is shown to be fertile soil for insidious trauma. This article reads the film as an exploration of in-betweenness whose specificity lies in the way it articulates two narratives of liminality: that of asylum seekers as “threshold” people, and that of a couple placed in the liminal state of grief. The hinge articulating the two narratives is the concept of home and the question of (not)at-homeness. Remi Weekes rewrites the Gothic topos of the haunted house by making it a house of mourning where the wish to move on is impeded by the pull of the traumatic past. Not only are the couple in the emotional limbo of grief, however: they are also in the stage of uncertainty experienced by asylum seekers who do not know whether they will stay and live or be sent back to die. Though the film gives the narrative of mourning a happy end, the refugee narrative is left ambiguously open-ended.