This House Has People in It (2016 TV Short) User Reviews

a true oddity: cringe-inducing, hilarious, nightmarish

[Quinoa1984 · 9/10 · 27 October 2016]

I imagine that This House Has People In It could have been what might have occurred had David Lynch been given the keys to the Paranormal Activity franchise. What is going on here? Well, we have a suburban family, or seemingly normal, with a husband a wife a son a baby and a grandmother (and some guy fixing some pipes or something in the basement), and there's also what I think is the couple's teenage daughter laying face-down on the kitchen floor. And at first it seems like she's on the floor because... I'm not even sure, maybe passed out or drunk or on drugs or did something that is making the parents more annoyed than anything. But when the father comes over to move her, she... doesn't get it, she's just staying there. Is she dead? How? More to the point, she seems to be sinking into the floor....

The director Alan Resnick spends his 12 minutes going between about eight or nine different surveillance-style cameras laid all over this house (and one camera that gets close to the girl-on-the-floor's face, how exactly that's there I don't know, don't ask I guess), and while this manic and macabre mega-ultra-abyss-darkly comic set piece unfolds in the kitchen, the son is expecting some friends for a birthday party at this exact same time. The cutting between different perspectives makes for the real oddness of the whole piece; this aired on Adult Swim, which also put out a few years back "Too Many Cooks", and there's this aim from the studio to go for experimental cinema, things that we just don't see ANYWHERE else.

It would be one thing if the director had his characters explain things - why the girl's on the floor, why she's sinking, what the hell is the grandma doing watching strange things on TV with a guy saying how many times someone should say the word 's***' etc - but then it might ruin what is going on here actually, which is a vision of quickly deevolving hell. This is what happens when you look under the hood of a seemingly normal family and find something otherworldly, mysterious, maybe unholy(!) Or maybe it's just something weird for the sake of it and I'm being played for a fool. But I think it's daring and wonderfully bizarre, and to sustain that for 12 minutes and to make me want to watch it again to see what else I missed or didn't hear (the talking is not as clear as one might hear in a 'Paranormal Activity' movie, which makes sense), and that's something. Certainly not for ALL tastes.

Weird and a little unnerving

[I_Ailurophile · 7/10 · 18 April 2021]

This is what happens when someone observes the bizarre fad of "planking" and says to themselves, "I could make a movie out of that."

If we don't let our cynicism overwhelm our suspension of disbelief, then 'This house has people in it' is duly unsettling. Preparing for their son's birthday party, a young couple has an argument in the kitchen. It's a very curious thing, that their teenage daughter is lying on the floor in an act of apparent rebellious disobedience, and they readily ignore her casually disruptive behavior as the passing phase that it is. Until it becomes clear something else is going on.

The surreal occurrence in the kitchen gives way to other parts of the house unraveling, and we get to watch it all through the security cameras that have a (seemingly impossibly mobile) eye on each room. As the scenario unfolds, more things continue to go wrong, further building the unease of the short, culminating in a climactic unexplained event.

I appreciate the simplicity here. Each scene is depicted as an apparent recording of the events on a VHS tape, which is a little anachronistic since the short itself dates the events to 2015, when VHS was already mostly forgotten as a format. But still, the inherent nostalgia lends a small bit of credibility to the scenario, aiding our suspension of disbelief and fostering the notion that this is a thing that really happened, and could happen.

There's not a great deal of plot, and there's not a great deal to say. This is less an active narrative than the passive observation of events as they occur. It's odd, certainly, but with just the right helping of creepiness to keep us engaged.

'This house has people in it' isn't going to be for everyone or have broad appeal, but it's an intriguing watch if you're looking for something a bit different.

Yep, there's definitely people in this house

[minutolo · 9/10 · 22 June 2021]

The title speaks for itself. This house does in fact have people in it. Nothing else here.

No comment.

This show is deeper than what you think

[urikasei · 10/10 · 5 February 2022]

Im obsessed with the mysteries of this show. I have explored and investigated everything i could find. Every little detail is important and mind-blowing. Truly a masterpiece.

Wow

[DriveThreww · 21 August 2016]

One day, a family is about to celebrate their son's birthday party,when something strange begins to occur.

This short film is what all horror movies should stride to be. It didn't scare me because I though a jump scare would happen, it scared me because of the unknown.

This short film is very similar to the likes of "Too Many Cooks" and "Unedited Footage of a Bear". This film being made by the same people that made "Unedited Footage of a Bear", it's a great improvement. While "Unedited Footage of a Bear" tried to subtly teach us a lesson, "This House Has People in It" is just good old horror.

This short horror movie will definitely be up there with the likes of "The Blair Witch Project" and "Alien". Check it out as soon as you can -HashtagBrownies

weird waves of paranoia

[framptonhollis · 9/10 · 10 March 2018]

The odd Adult Swim "infomercials" series of sorts contains practically all of their best content (other than, obviously, Tim and Eric and The Eric Andre Show), and seems to be where they let their creators really have fun and go mad at play. Directed by the brilliant and twisted humorist, satirist, performance artist, and horror filmmaker Alan Resnick, the Adult Swim crew's own mini David Lynch, 'This House Has People in It' is unapologetically bizarre and occasionally confusing. It is an uncomfortable and genuinely quite creepy combo of comedy and chaos. It is surreal and scary and surprisingly hilarious, very much like practically every project worked upon by Mr. Resnick, and I love the man for it! Now, I am in all probability off to view various analysis videos of this along with a boatload of disturbed rewatchings!

I really enjoy this short!

[lost_propht · 8/10 · 28 November 2019]

It's all just a metaphor for how families give attention to certain age groups. But then there's weird stuff and it's hilarious. Then it becomes "how do 'Normal people' handle extremely unexpected stressful situations" and its absolutely hilarious to watch a grown man break down while a child whose birthday was ruined handles it better. I ain't here to say people are built differently but some people can handle stress better than others and people who break down like the husband are weak.

If you like having to find the story it could be very enjoyable

[forzabukefalas · 9/10 · 11 April 2022]

Fellini's 8 1/2 is a film about Fellini making his 8th and 1/2th film and it was made in a time when meta was a word only Greeks or academics were aware of. In order to see the real story of 8 1/2 you had to actively watch and analyze what parts were the protagonists daydreams and what was actually happening and unravel the actual story.

This little short and the corresponding 2 hours of footage that you have to uncover online to get the full story is in the same vein. You have to look for the details in order to find the extra footage online and it creates what at the time was certainly a novel experience requiring the audience to participate in unraveling what just seems like a super bizarre 14 minutes of film in the same way that to enjoy 8 1/2 it might help to know in real life Fellini was succumbing to the pressure of having to make another film, marriage, and all of life's dilemmas resulting in catastrophic writers block. "This House Has People In It" pushed the envelope for what active viewing really means by hiding the rest of the story almost cryptographically instead of in the directors personal life and having only just watched it in 2022 it became obvious it was a catalyst for the media that has come to be known as analog horror or ARGs today.

And this concept is deployed in the mainstream to great acclaim. Marvel movies famously put content post credits that drives the story forward and is the central talking point for months after the film comes out in anticipation of the next part of the anthology, and urging viewers to theorize about what happens next. And for some that can be pretty fun.

Strange and random, but not really entertaining

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 16 April 2017]

"This House Has People in It" is a 12-minute live action short film from last year (2016). It runs for 12 minutes only and was directed by Alan Resnick. He is also one of the writers here. This is an Adult Swim production and actually one of many. I think that frequently they mostly made comedy movies, but this one here is (according to IMDb) horror only. It actually looks like Big Brother footage from, start to finish and this also took away a lot of the appeal at least for me. Cast members are not well-known at all. Story is so-so and as such, it is probably still one of the better components here, but really only because most of the other stuff is entirely forgettable. I personally can only say that if Adult Swim was ever good (and I think they were), then they have really gone south in recent years and this one here is a good piece of evidence for that. I think 4 stars out of 10 (or 2 stars out of 5) is still pretty generous as I really see almost no creativity in here. Watch something else instead. And don't be fooled by the baity picture here on the title's IMDb page.

A tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

[asimov72455 · 4/10 · 24 April 2018]

I'll forgo a synopsis of 'This House Has People In It" because one can find and read it elsewhere. At first I thought the idea of using only security video footage to tell a story was a novel and interesting one but when the point of view changed such that it was impossible for the security camera to have captured it, the effect was jarring and annoying. That was my first gripe. My second was the response of the couple when they realized the unconscious girl had a problem. Who would not call 911 immediately? But they didn't and their odd behavior failed to suspend my disbelief. Then there was the peppering of viewer YouTube videos explaining THHPII. Most of the videos were longer than the original, some much longer. If a story needs to be explained then perhaps the story wasn't told well. I understand vague references are clever. I delight in esoterica but inside jokes and obscura do not a good story make. This House Has People In It spent too much time trying to show how smart it was. The final result was not as bad as, say, Plan Nine From Outer Space, but it wasn't nearly as much fun either. But it was mercifully shorter.