Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie''s plot.
That’s. More. Like it!!!
I had been dreading this movie coming up in the rotation for a while now. Not only is it based on a Lovecraft story (three actually, “The Shunned House”, “Dreams in the Witch-House” and “The Music of Erich Zann”), but it’s also Italian, which meant I was probably going to have to sit through a lot of bad dubbing. And when the first scene came onscreen and I saw the thing was shot on video, I groaned a little bit. But holy crap, just give it a few minutes and you soon realize THE SHUNNED HOUSE isn’t just your average low-budget horror flick put together by a bunch of wannabe’s. This is the real deal. Low budget, sure. Video quality, of course. But good God it’s creepy, atmospheric, addictive (I’m already looking forward to watching it again), and the type of horror movie I have been waiting for since I bought this stupid collection.
The Shunned House is an Italian inn originally from the early 1700s. Over the years the place has been razed and rebuilt three times, and always just happens to be rebuilt to the specifications of the original floorplan. Deaths have taken place there, dozens of them, and in the present day, writer Alex (Giuseppe Lorusso) and his girlfriend Rita (Federica Quaglieri) have come to the place while Alex does research on it for his next book. He’s already got a ton of notes and photos he’s gathered, but he feels he needs to actually be in the place to soak up its atmosphere and verify the notes he’s obtained. And it’s a creepy place, believe me.
As Alex and Rite take photos and measurements and generally deal with the strange goings-on of the house, the story begins to jump through time, telling two other separate—but obviously somehow-connected—stories about other inhabitants of the strange house.
In one, mathematician Luigi Montella (Emanuele Cerman) is having horrible dreams of death and blood while sleepwalking throughout the house at night, and the innkeeper’s daughter Nora (Silvia Ferreri) is trying to help him understand what he does while he’s mobile—and to put him at ease and assure him he’s not responsible for the infant’s being murdered in town, even though he shows up one morning covered in blood.
At another time in the house, Marco Del Vespro (Michael Segal) is entranced by the violin playing of his neighbor Carlotta Zann (Cristiana Vaccaro) and asks her to play for him. But when she stops playing, and the banging outside her third-story window starts, Marco tries to help. The last scene of this story was, at first, laughable, but the singular image of Carlotta slumped dying in her chair while trying to play her bow across her own veins is still with me. Sure it’s silly, but it’s memorable.
Meanwhile, back in the present, Alex and Rita find themselves more and more affected by the house, jumping through time, seeing ghosts, having awful dreams. Rita is getting sicker and sicker and Alex more detached. It’s not the most original outline, I know, but the rest of the movie makes it work.
Screenwriter Enrico Saletti and director Ivan Zuccon have taken these three stories and woven them together perfectly into one coherent whole. The visuals are amazing. Zuccon knows how to stage a scene, and how to effectively transition to the next one, even if that next one is 200 years in the past. The seams almost never show.
The use of lighting and sound was perfect, both creating this incredible unsettling sense of doom in almost every scene. It’s been a long time since I’ve drawn my feet up onto the couch, away from the floor, while I watched a horror movie, but THE SHUNNED HOUSE had that effect.
The gore is present, but not overdone—which is surprising considering how much blood there is. The acting is really good, as well, and the dubbing was only distracting twice. This is where my questions about the movie arise. All the changes made to the three Lovecraft stories I understand, and they all work well within the confines of this new, bigger, whole. But while most of the movie LOOKS like the Italian actors are speaking English, there were two scenes with the 40’s Innkeeper where she was obviously speaking Italian with English dubbing, but Nora’s answers were in English. So my question is, were these scenes shot separately? Is there an all-Italian version of this movie? All notes written in the movie were in Italian with English subtitles, so I have to think it was originally in Italian, but then why are the actors speaking English? Even if they are over-dubbed with more coherent accents—which very much looks like the case in a number of scenes—it’s still easy to tell they ARE speaking English throughout most of the movie. Except in those two scenes. It just confuses me. Then again, it’s a Lovecraft movie. I don’t think it’s supposed to make perfect sense.
What I DO know, without a doubt, is that I’ll be watching this one again, probably a few times. I search and search and search for a decent horror movie with the sense and knowledge behind it to creep me out, and finally THE SHUNNED HOUSE manages to do that just fine. In the end, even the video quality faded into the background and I was able to lose myself in 84 minutes of awesome horror.
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