Jaden Jordan
- Mar 15, 2020
- 3 min read

House of the Witch (2017)

Updated: Aug 3, 2021

The Breakdown: A bunch of teenagers go into the local haunted house, only to find out that, shocker, its haunted.

Watch If: You love formulaic, trope fueled haunted house movies.

Not If: You're looking for an actual scare, or overly care about plot.

SECONDARY FACTS

Overall Rating: 1.8

Length: 1:30

Country: USA

Language: English

REVIEW

THE QUICK AND DIRTY

This is a super-tropey haunted house flick that hand-waves more than a few obstacles in its attempt to boost the scare factor and get to the end.

PREMISE: 1

A bunch of teenagers go to the local haunted house on Halloween. Legend says that a witch lived there, and guess what. All of that is correct. There is nothing remotely new or original in a single point of this film. And the parts that might have been such, are either not explained or just straight up don't make sense.

ACTING: 2

First off, despite their being some... fairly obvious visual differences between some of the cast members, I still had trouble telling the characters apart. Which could just as much be the fault of the writers. Throughout the entire, it seems that, without exception, the actors are either taking their roles far too seriously, or not at all seriously. The scary scenes aren't scary, the few rescue moments fall flat, and you don't really feel like routing for... any of the characters, honestly. The acting is, frankly, on par with the spooky kids shows that used to be on television. (Think Goosebumps, but not as bad as the acting in Beetleborgs.)

And it doesn't help that the teenage characters certainly seem to have been written by people who... never were teenagers? or are just so out of touch that everything in the film feels like a poorly done parody.

AUDIO AND VISUALS: 3

There are some surprisingly well done effects in this film. For starters, most of the gore is far superior to the quality I would have expected. And there's a smoke effect that, while certainly low budget, doesn't really take away from what they're going for. Then there's the editing. There are scenes in this movie that leave me very confused about the spacial arrangements of everything in the shot, and scenes that are drawn out WAY longer than they should have been.

ATMOSPHERE: 2

House of the Witch is unnerving in exactly one way: It feels like an alien or AI of some sort watched a bunch of "teens in a haunted house movies," and then made its own. There are so many tropes and asides to this film that it comes across like a jigsaw puzzle made of three different puzzles that just sort of happened to fit together. Like, it all adds up to a square, but there isn't a clear picture.

The story itself is fairly straight forward, but there are so many twists and turns, so many important details that aren't framed, or things that are framed that don't end up mattering. And there are moments of triumph and defeats that are out of nowhere, or glossed over all together.

Also, the characters don't make sense together, the framing incident in the beginning has absolutely zero baring on the rest of the film, and the tone is greatly ruined by the fact that their 'abandoned' haunted house clearly has some modern fixtures and a nice new coat of paint. It feels like it was just shot in a nice suburban house. In fact, you know the house. Its that one that that one friend lived in, where the upstairs was carpeted that awful off white, and the kitchen cabinets were like... birch wood or something.

This might not have been so noticeable if there weren't parts of the film clearly shot somewhere entirely different, but there are rooms in this house that feel old and abandoned, and the juxtaposition of the scenes make it all the more clear how out of place most of the house is in the film.

DELIVERY: 1

There are a bazillion and twelve antiquated tropes in this movie, and the things they choose to explain, and not to explain are a bit of a toss up. I think with a bit more polishing and... coherency, this could have been a neat little film, but as it is... give it a miss.