We Are Still Here (2015)

Movie Info

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Mourning the death of their son Bobby, Anne Sacchetti (Barbara Crampton) and her husband Paul (Andrew Sensenig) move to a home in the country to restart their lives.  Upon arrival, Anne and Paul receive a mysterious warning from their neighbor Cat McCabe (Connie Neer) when she visits with her husband Dave (Monte Markham).  When Anne begins to sense Bobby in the house, she invites May Lewis (Lisa Marie) and her husband Jacob (Larry Fessenden) up for the weekend in an attempt to contact Bobby…and unleashes a horror.

Written and directed by Ted Geoghegan, We Are Still Here is a haunted house horror story.  The film premiered at South by Southwest in 2015 with a release later in the year.  It was largely well received by critics.

See, this is what happens when you play too rough with your toy

I saw some of the imagery from We Are Still Here and wanted to see it.  I heard good things about it.  While I think there is some good about the film, the film has a large flaw that negates most of the good.

The imagery of the film is strong.  The burned corpses of the ghosts are pretty terrifying and some of the kills are pretty graphic with corpses being ripped up and burned at the same time.  The retro setting and occult story gives the movie a bit of a throwback style.  I really liked that aspect of the movie, and I think the movie could have even taken that further.

The story also is interesting though a little underdeveloped.  You don’t get much payoff in the story in the “why” behind the sacrifices or what the spirits are.  It kind of just evolves into a pretty standard ghost story with some horrific imagery.  That isn’t bad and it has a lot of potential…but it is another factor that ruins the film.

A ghost family that kill sacrifices together, stays together

The acting in the movie is pretty atrocious.  The dialogue is sometimes clunky but its delivery often feels like a student movie.  While Barbara Crampton is ok as the mother, Andrew Sensenig is bad as the father who doesn’t seem to have a lock on his character.  Lisa Marie and Larry Fessenden are too over-the-top as the mystic couple.  They also throw two “twenty-somethings” in Michael Patrick and Kelsea Dakota who just show up to be killed…it all really hurts the movie in general.

We Are Still Here really missed the mark.  It could have been really good if they had cast it better.  I realize with smaller films that it can be difficult to get good casts, but I wish they had tried a bit harder since it is largely a character driven film.  We Are Still Here has some scares and great “monsters”, but the monster challenge of acting is scarier.