Happy Goat Horror

In programming a found footage horror festival, I found myself thinking a lot about my favourites in the field. There are plenty of movies of course – the experience of seeing Blair Witch Project in the cinemas always stuck with me, especially given the coverage of the time leaving questions of whether it was real or not. And I also love digging out and discovering lesser-known gems – movies like Skew and Exhibit A are among those to leave a big impression on me.

But the one that looms largest in my mind is one relatively few people have seen, and one whose story exists in all sorts of unusual places. And that is This House Has People In It, an Adult Swim short that hides the better part of two hours of footage, documents and more inside it.

This House Has People In It was screened as part of Adult Swim’s 4am infomercials series – a range of sporadic ten minute shorts that would typically present themselves initially as infomercials before veering off in strange and unexpected directions. Some of my favourites are For-Profit Online University, Gigglefudge and of course the best known of the bunch, Too Many Cooks. But to stumble across any of these at 4am would have been a deeply unusual experience I’m sure…

This House Has People In It (which you can watch at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-pj8OtyO2I&t=4s) presents itself through a range of cameras installed around a suburban house, depicting the events leading up to the family marking their son’s birthday. As Mum and Dad work away in the kitchen, it’s notable that their teenage daughter is lying face down on the floor, while Grandma is watching the TV in the front room far more than she is watching the baby as she should be. The discussions at times are a little confusing and discombobulating, and the TV show Grandma is watching plays a larger role than you might expect. The main thread of the story is the daughter of the family not just lying on the floor, but bit by bit falling through it – Mum and Dad try to come up with all sorts of solutions, but are unable to prevent her crashing into the basement. As the guests arrive for the birthday party, soon enough they all find themselves lying face-down in the yard – much as the daughter herself.

As a short in itself, it’s intriguing, disturbing and strange – and not an easy thing to really get to the bottom of in isolation. However, as you begin to delve deeper, you unlock a labyrinth of extra material that steadily makes more sense of what you see. The easiest layer to find is on YouTube – The Scultor’s  Playground – and yes, it is really spelt like this.

This is the show that Grandma is watching, and a sculptor (played by co-creator Alan Resnick) makes a strange creation step by step. What is notable here is that he makes multiple references to something called Lynks Disease – which bears a big part in the overall, larger arc. This is a disease with a mix of strange symptoms, and apparently caused by a miscellany of different things – sometimes even contradictory things.

Those two in isolation may seem not all that strongly linked – and sadly much of what I am about to describe is no longer to be found online in its original form. But there did exist A Scultor’s Playground website, which started to tell us a little more about Lynks Disease in abstract ways. But this was still just the starters, because by visiting the website referenced fleetingly in the short – Absurveillancesolutions.com – you were able to find over an hour of phone records, additional camera footage from the house and a number of files of The Lynks Review – the magazine written and created for those suffering with or concerned about Lynks Disease. However it’s not as easy as clicking through – oh no, you have to notice and type in a password buried in the short itself. And that’s without mentioning that there’s yet another half an hour of footage to be found if you are willing to sign in with a user account (number buried in the short again) with a second password tucked away in the original. On this level, it’s just the weird sort of rabbit hole that appeals immensely to me, and really the sort of thing that only Adult Swim would do – who else would shoot two hours of footage across multiple mediums, screen ten minutes of it and then hide the rest for intrepid internet pioneers to discover?

The full chronological tale of This House Has People In It has been lovingly curated by a YouTube legend at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I31T0Yt7GxU&t=127s, and I heartily recommend it as being worth two hours of your time. The blend of clips collated together, samples of Lynks Review, phone calls and of course the video game (oh yes, let’s not forget that) tells the story of a family haunted by an ailment that may or may not exist, seemingly cut apart from reality by all the bizarre influences around them and existing in a space with a nightmarish creature we see largely in glimpses. It’s a harrowing piece of psychological horror told in snippets that bear repeat viewing to truly get to the bottom of – and even with your best efforts, there are liable to be questions left.

I’d personally love to see some sort of TV or cinema release for the full version, though I suspect that too much time has passed for that to happen. But what we have left is a cult oddity, the tale of a short buried within a short, with hours of extra footage tucked away for those willing to find it. It’s a truly unique and unsettling experience that I would suggest any found footage horror fan check out – it may not be talked about that much, but it retains a devoted following among Adult Swim afficionados. And if this one does float your boat, you’re also likely to get something out of Alan Resnick’s other meta nightmare, Unedited Footage of a Bear – quite the double bill if you fancied it… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gMjJNGg9Z8

And if found footage horror at large is you bag, then POV: The Found Footage Festival at QUAD here in Derby could be the event for you! We’ve got some exciting new movies, classics and a lively range of shorts throughout the day – it all runs on the 22^nd November, and you can check out everything on tap at https://www.derbyquad.co.uk/pov/