Burning Until the Stars Go Dark: ‘We Are Still Here’ at 10
Grief is a fire that never truly goes out.
It might smolder and dwindle down to embers, it might even go dark and leave only a few wisps of smoke, but it’s never entirely gone. You can always smell something burnt in your nostrils, however faint, and it’s up to you whether you let that fire consume every waking moment of your day.
It’s no accident that fire is a central element of We Are Still Here, writer/director Ted Geoghegan‘s masterpiece of grief horror, which turns 10 years old this month. Set in an icy, bleak New England landscape, the film’s surroundings practically beg for the nourishing warmth of a fireplace, but that’s not the only fire lurking here. As the film lays out its premise, its mythology, and its themes, the fire becomes a vivid, often brutal metaphor for the way we treat grief, the way it passes along, and the way it can either devour or transform us. That fire, and the raw emotional earnestness with which Geoghegan and his cast confront it, is what makes the film one of the best horror stories of the 21st century, and an essential piece of the modern horror canon.
Set in the 1970s, the film follows Anne (Barbara Crampton) and Paul (Andrew Sensenig), a couple who lost their son in a car crash, who’ve now moved out to their new home in a rural New England farmhouse in an effort to get a fresh start. Grief is burning bright in both of them, but in very different ways.
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Paul, clearly scarred by his inability to save his son or keep his family intact, throws himself into projects around the house, shouting at the furnace repairman on the phone and flat-out demanding that he and Anne move on. He’s burning with the need to push past their grief, while Anne’s fire is something different altogether. Desperate to hold on to her son, she believes she can feel him in the house, trying to reach out from beyond, to stay with his parents no matter what, and against Paul’s objections, she’s determined to prove it.
The 1970s setting is very important here, because it not only further isolates Paul and Anne from the world, but allows them to be immersed in the New Age culture of the era, especially when Anne recruits their witchy friends May (Lisa Marie) and Jacob (indie horror legend Larry Fessenden) to come out and help her try to reach her son.
In the days before you could get witchcraft books at every Barnes & Noble and the internet was full of well-meaning occultists trying to guide practitioners forward, this was simply how these sorts of things tended to work for normies who were curious about esoterica. Geoghegan’s grasp of the period and its details adds a layer of immersion, rooting the early acts of We Are Still Here in moments of both menace and a strange sense of hope. Maybe Anne can reach her son, or at least find peace through trying.
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But it’s not just about the screenplay’s choice of era. Geoghegan is a clear student of the grief horror films of the 1970s, especially in his own film’s cinematography. He uses long, slow zooms to watch his characters from a distance, and peppers the narrative with static shots of the wintry landscape. His camera is almost meditative, right up until the moment it needs to be more visceral, recalling films like Don’t Look Now and The Changeling. He’s also, of course, always cognizant of the contrast between fire and ice onscreen, especially when it becomes clearer what’s actually going on in this house.
And here’s where We Are Still Here expands from a compelling and atmospheric piece of grief horror to something much more chilling and malevolent. Paul and Anne are told, from the beginning, that their house used to be home to the Dagmar family: a funeral parlor owner and his wife and children who were run out of town when rumors spread that Mr. Dagmar was doing things with the bodies. Their oddly persistent neighbor Dave (Monte Markham) is quick to declare that the place is “still Dagmar’s house” even though he’s been dead for decades. As strange things begin to happen around the house, including a horrible burn sustained by a furnace repairman in the basement, both the couple and the audience start wondering about what kind of scars are still lurking in the house.
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We Are Still Here is a brisk 84 minutes, and yet it feels like it takes its time, making every second count to purposefully, patiently unfold the full breadth of its premise. The house “needs a family”, Dave tells Anne and Paul, and we’re led to believe that means the ghosts in the house are now hungry for new souls to claim as their own, and the townspeople are happy to oblige. Then, in a seance gone wrong, a possessed Jacob reveals that something else entirely is happening. The Dagmars were not the malevolent presence in the house. They were sacrifices to something far older, an old god who demanded blood, and so the town set the Dagmars ablaze, and now they’re “burning until the stars go dark.” Even in the bitter cold of a New England winter, they can’t stop.
Just like Anne can’t stop, just like Paul can’t stop while Anne continues down her course, just like the whole town can’t stop because they’ll be devoured if they don’t feed the house and whatever lurks beneath it. It’s all an endless cycle of sacrifice and violence, of dredging up the dead to consume the living like an everlasting fire.
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We Are Still Here could have taken this final plot development, which gives the whole thing an added folk-horror edge, and descended into pure cosmic weirdness for its final minutes, but Geoghegan holds back from that. He’s much more interested in the raw, emotional response to the chaos these truths spawn, the way that two grieving parents are forced to fight for their lives while also reckoning with what their lives mean at a time when they’ve been set up as a sacrifice. Even as the central conflict seems to revolve and the story ends, Geoghegan is still meditating on his reckoning, giving Anne and Paul an ending that might be hopeful or might be horrifying, depending on how you choose to look at it. The fire has not gone out; the grief is still there, but it may yet be transformed.
Ten years later, we’re still watching this film, studying its carefully constructed characters and its remarkable performances from Crampton, Sensenig, Fessenden, and Marie. Geoghegan managed to make something meditative, slow-burning (pun very much intended), and complex while also peppering in wonderful practical effects, copious amounts of blood, and a climax that gore-hounds will love. We Are Still Here is a masterclass in balancing overt horror elements with the more cerebral feeling of that unquenchable fire of grief in the bellies of its characters, a visual delight as well as a suspenseful one. After a decade, it remains one of the finest horror films produced in the last 25 years, and one of the best ghost stories ever told onscreen.
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