By David Dent
I’ve been a fan of Scottish filmmaker Graham Hughes for a while now; his features are cheaply made, inventive and often darkly funny.
To say that his latest project has taken a bit of a leftfield turn would be a considerable understatement; Family Go to the Bad House was inspired by the 2012 Hungarian flick, Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen by György Pálfi, a film entirely assembled from clips of other movies. While Pálfi’s feature was ostensibly a love story, Hughes has taken the same idea and applied it to the horror movie.
The rules are simple: only feature length films are used; no film can cut from itself to itself; there should be limited use of footage from any single film; and no image augmentation can be used.
What Hughes reveals, in using footage from nearly 400 movies, is nothing less than a visual essay on the cinematic language of the genre. Anyone who says “if you’ve seen one horror movie, you’ve seen them all” after watching this may feel that their point is well made. For a category of movie making which can often surprise, it’s amazing how much similarity there exists in the basic narrative setup of the entries.
Hughes emphasises this by broad groupings of his clips into categories like ‘The Mother’, ‘The Father’, ‘The Expert’ and of course ‘The Monster’ and organises all the footage into a strange three act structure that in its construction becomes its own movie. The succession of often short clips, expertly put together, cleverly shows how filmmakers reinterpret the same basic ideas; seen as a single film it becomes a mesmerising meditation on how we react to horror on the screen.
For this viewer, it also confirmed that I’ve seen too many horror movies; or conversely not enough, as I only recognised about 80% of the clips; there’s a full list of sources at the end.
As the ‘director’ has admitted, FGttBH is a rights nightmare, so don’t be surprised if you never get to see it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be elitist here; Hughes will make it available. The question is for how long. But see it if you can; it’s a fascinating idea.
