A repossessed storage locker contains the work of child therapist Julia Luu, whose career ran for nearly two decades before her death in 2015. The owner of this forgotten collection of notes and material nearly dismissed it as somewhat interesting but mostly useless garbage. The removal of a false bottom in a desk drawer leads to the discovery of VHS tapes and Julia’s work with a little girl named Jess and her claims of “people living under the house” soon after she and her family moved to Louisiana from Texas. Refusing to sign away life rights, Dr. Luu narrates over the mute seven-year old’s crayon drawings to document and stress how this case is prime material for a book. Jess has been mute since her frustrated father dragged her under the house to show her there was nothing there. He insists that everything was perfectly normal but Jess curls into a ball and screams herself into her current voiceless state. The sessions with the child carry on and get more and more disturbing as the doctor probes deeper into her patient’s imaginary friends who live under her house and possible mental illness blooms into a brilliantly spooky paranormal spine-chiller with some very dark material brooding under the surface. Analog horror can sometimes shoot itself in the foot by losing track of the narrative and crawling up its own ass (just look at the sleep-inducing and over-appreciated Skinamarink) but here the presentation works well with the decaying VHS visuals of simple artwork from a kid. Not only is it a completely different and unsettling haunted house story, it allows the horror to come explicitly from the eye of a child. It’s fascinating and upsetting and way better than anything I would have expected crafted with a nonexistent budget and no live action or animation to progress the story. Heartbreaking, horrifying and fascinating with only a few minor issues that are easy enough to overlook thanks to the strength of its story. Crayons, notes, voice recordings, newspaper clippings and complete nightmare fuel set to the droning musical sounds of compete dread. Why does this work so fucking well?
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