Home With A View Of The Monster, the first feature film from twin brothers Alex and Todd Greenlee, made its debut before a nearly-packed house in the Devon Energy Theater at Harkins Bricktown, screening as part of the 2019 deadCenter Film Festival. Described by the filmmakers during the post-screening Q&A as “the movie version of a puzzle,” the film features two separate narratives, woven together non-linearly: in one, Dennis and Rita, a young couple with serious marital problems (played by Sébastien Charmant and Ellen Humphries, respectively) flee the titular abode, convinced—we ultimately learn—there is a sinister entity living in somewhere in the walls; in the other, a haunted man, Chance (Jasper Hammer), meets up with his online paramour Kate (Danielle Evon Ploeger) for a self-destructive rendezvous in Dennis and Rita’s apparently haunted house, on rent through an Airbnb-like app while the homeowners camp out their issues in the woods. Everyone’s motives, however, are not what they initially seem, and as the seemingly disparate pieces fall into place, we begin to see the overall picture for what it is.
It is clear the brothers Greenlee love horror films. They mentioned specifically The Shining, The Amityville Horror, and The Cabin In The Woods as influences on their film, but several other titles come to mind, including The Babadook, Paranormal Activity, the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting Of Hill House, and David Lynch’s noir thriller mind-bender Lost Highway. There’s even a nice visual homage to Poltergeist toward the end of the film. But the filmmakers do not simply ape these various inspirations; Home never feels like a knockoff. Rather, the Greenlees put some of the best scenes and thematic elements from these films into a blender and puree them, ultimately producing not a muck of conflicting tastes, but a strange blend of flavors that manages to work. For instance, basically the entire plot of Paranormal Activity occurs in a short flashback montage set to a peppy pop song, but the monster in the film isn’t a demon, it’s a symbol for psychological issues, much like in The Babadook—though here, the creature is a manifestation of personal stagnation and inhibition as well as, in a loose sense, grief.
For the filmmakers, emphasizing drama over scares was important. Alex Greenlee told the audience, “The big goal was to make a horror movie that was a horror secondarily, but on the surface, it’s really about the people. What was happening between them was scarier than the ghosts in the background.” Perhaps even more important than the film itself, though, was the ability to produce it in Oklahoma. The Greenlees are natives to this state, and while they currently live in Los Angeles, they were determined, even at a young age, to make their first feature here. Two of the cast members, Jasper Hammer and Ellen Humphries, also hail from Oklahoma, so the production was very much a homecoming for them, as it was for the Greenlees—a much happier homecoming than the one detailed in their film, but a nice coincidence nonetheless.
