No matter what age you are, houses have the potential to be naturally scary, particularly in the period where you’re just getting used to living there. It makes the setting such a fertile ground for horror, hence excellent films like the original Conjuring or Amityville Horror, or Mike Flanagan’s Haunting shows. Netflix’s upcoming animated horror series The House wants to explore this terror through a trio of different stories, and each one looks to be pretty scary in their own right.
The stop-motion anthology will see people move into a single home in different periods of time and find that things are rather...off. Whether it’s bugs coming out of every corner or giant baby things lurking in the shadows and ready to sneak up on them, the titular house threatens to consume its inhabitants and drive them mad, if not put them in physical harm entirely. It’s been described as an “eccentric dark comedy,” which seems to be half true—maybe they’re hiding the laughs behind those dancing cockroaches.
Produced by the UK based Nexus Studios, the directors are all experienced stop motion filmmakers. Belgian tag team Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels (This Magnificent Cake!) are directing Chapter One, about a 19th century family looking to restore their family names; Chapter Two, about a property developer in the present day who finds the home has unexpected guests, hails from Swedish director Niki Lindroth von Bahr (The Burden); and Paloma Baeza’s (Poles Apart) Chapter Three closes things out with a landlady trying her best to restore the home in a future world that seems rather post-apocalyptic. The cast is pretty star-studded, featuring Helena Bonham Carter, Matthew Goode, Susan Wokoma, and Jarvis Cocker.
Horror and animation are good friends, but it’s not every day that you see it in stop motion. Depending on how into animation you are, it’s possible that the last thing you saw to hit this particular niche was Paranorman nearly a decade ago. With how good Netflix’s animated output was this year, here’s hoping The House continues that streak when it premieres on January 14, 2022.
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