[Mother of Fears] This House Needs a Family in We Are Still Here

Mother Of Fears Column

Welcome to Mother of Fears – a monthly column that will explore the various roles that mothers play within the horror genre. Mothers are a staple feature in horror movies, and yet, their stories, motivations, representations, and relationships with their children are so varied and complex that we never feel like we’re watching the same story twice. Every month I will take a look at a different mother from the world of horror, explore their story, and look at how they fit into the broader representation of women in horror.

Grief is a topic that’s touched on in horror movies quite a lot, especially when mothers are involved. Breaking the bond between mother and child is something that can have devastating consequences and some of our favourite horror movies such as Friday the 13th (1980), Before I Wake (2016), Scream (1996), and Psycho (1960) look at the effect the death of a child or the death of a mother can have on those left behind. 

In We Are Still Here (2015), we are plunged right into the middle of Anne’s grief just a couple of months after losing her son, Bobby, in a car crash. Anne and her husband, Paul, have decided to move out of the city and into the countryside in the hopes of distancing themselves from the painful memories surrounding Bobby’s death. While both parents are clearly suffering, it seems as if Anne is taking the brunt of it. 

Paul has been in charge of organising the house move and making sure the movers have placed things where they need to be, while Anne sits despondent in the front seat of the car, staring off into the middle distance. Anne looks as though she’s just finished crying, her eyes red and puffy, which is a look she carries for pretty much the rest of the movie. It’s as though her grief is never too far away, always lurking on the fringes of her day, waiting to strike whenever it feels like it. 

Paul fusses with how long they have left on their journey and reassures Anne that they’re almost at their new home and able to relax. However, Anne is concerned with how the movers will have known where to put the family photos. And walking through the door of their new home, this is the first thing Anne focuses on. She promptly begins moving photos around, placing a framed photo of Bobby front and centre in the hallway. It’s clear that Bobby is always the first thing she thinks about, and by moving his photo to somewhere more prominent, she’s ensuring that he’s as important in the house as Paul and herself. While Paul may hope that moving to the countryside will help Anne forget Bobby, it seems it’s only making her keener to keep Bobby at the front of her mind at all times.

Making her way around the new house, Anne hears a noise which she first believes to be Paul. However, she soon realises the sound is coming from the basement. The room is incredibly large, empty, and unusually hot as we find out later, but Anne believes she feels a presence down there which she thinks can only be Bobby. So many haunted house stories start this way, with a creepy basement and a sense that you’re not quite alone, but Anne brushes this aside, claiming that it must be her son. 

Rather than lean into fear, or let the strangeness of the new house and the whole situation wash over her, Anne has decided to find comfort in the situation by attaching it to her son. It’s clear that this is a coping mechanism for Anne, hoping that she can hold onto a bit of Bobby even in death. There’s also the additional pressure of relocating added into the situation. Paul worries that this will set her back, saying that they left the city to get away from the pain related to Bobby. However, Anne points out that she was merely trying to escape the bad bits, as she always wants to take the good memories with her.

While moving away may have seemed like the best way to help tackle Anne’s depression, and give the couple a new start, it’s also true that it’s probably added to Anne’s stress because she has distanced herself from everything that was related to Bobby.

She tells Paul that she can feel Bobby in the house, and while this seems to concern him, it looks like it gives Anne a little peace to know that her son is close again. And when she finds the photo of Bobby fallen over and smashed, she can’t see past the fact it must be a sign from her dead son.

Determined to find out what is going on, and hopefully make more meaningful contact with Bobby, Anne invites her friends May and Jacob to stay at the house with them. May and Jacob are both spiritualists, and Anne wants them to help her figure out what is going on. May and Jacob also decide to invite their son Harry along, as he was roommates with Bobby. May thinks that the strong bond the pair shared will help them connect with Bobby if he really is a ghost. 

While Anne is excited for the family to arrive, it’s unknown what effect Harry being in the house would actually have on her. While both she and May acknowledge the connection the men shared may help May’s work, no one seems to mention how difficult this connection may make things for Anne when she’s actually face to face with Harry. Anne is so focused on what she thinks will help her, it’s unclear if she’s thought about how difficult it would be to have one of her son’s friends staying in her house. She seems to like to focus on the things right in front of her, instead of thinking about the bigger picture. And while this may usually help her block out her grief and focus on other things, in this case, it may end up having a detrimental effect on her. However, we never get to find out, as Harry and his girlfriend are brutally murdered within moments of arriving at the house. It does show just how far Anne is willing to push the situation and herself to be closer to Bobby.

We soon discover there is something far more sinister lurking in Anne and Paul’s basement in the form of the ghosts of the Dagmar family, as well as a powerful presence that needs a sacrifice every 30 years to be kept under control. Because the Dagmar’s are so keen on killing anyone who enters the house, the town has been letting the ghosts do the dirty work for them by offering sacrifices to the house. 

However, Anne and Paul have been living in the house for two weeks, and have been left untouched by the murderous ghosts. The townsfolk try to find a reason why Anne and Paul have survived for so long, worrying that the force in the house will soon take over the town if it’s not given a sacrifice. The truth is that even though the Dagmar’s are ghosts filled with rage after being the town’s first sacrifice in the 1800s, they are still a family at heart. While the ending is left a little ambiguous, it seems that the Dagmars recognise Bobby’s spirit in the house, and also the fact that Bobby, Anne, and Paul are a family. 

We constantly hear Dave, the leader of the murderous townsfolk, say “This house needs a family” when he discusses the urgency of providing a sacrifice to the presence in the house. While Dave may have got the words right, he’s got the intent all wrong. Once the Dagmar’s have killed most of the townsfolk who turn up at Anne and Paul’s house to help speed up the sacrificial process, they hold hands and seem to move on. It may be that their spirits are finally laid to rest after they get the revenge they so desperately wanted. However, it may also be that they are willing to pass their house on to another willing family, and with Bobby’s spirit having followed his parents here, this is the only place the parents will be able to reunite with their child. 

Dave asks Dagmars why they haven’t killed Anne and Paul yet, but they refuse to give him an answer. However, it seems as though the Dagmar parents recognise their own grief mirrored in Anne. They know what it’s like to have a child die, even if they died with their daughter, and they’re also aware of just how unfair life can be. 

The Dagmars get their revenge and move on, finally at peace. Leaving the house a little less murderous also finally grants Anne and Paul the peace they need by allowing them to reconnect with their son. Hopefully, the evil under the house will be at peace for another 30 years at this point, and with the Dagmars gone, Anne and Paul will be able to live as a family with their son once again. 

The Dagmar’s murdered everyone who entered the house because they were extremely territorial, and didn’t want anyone else to take the house off them. But in the end, even they recognised that the house needed a family, and it wasn’t them. With their work in this life done, they left the house to the family who needed it more. And Anne was finally able to get what she needed to deal with her grief.

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