The House

Stop motion · The creepiest little animated short on Netflix.

An ill-fated family.

This is a rumination: creative inspo, thoughts-out-loud, sidebars. Complementing production/animation shop talk on TLB. You can opt out here.

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I’ve always loved unsettling stories, and October is an excuse for month-long indulgence here in the U.S.

There’s an excellent animated short film anthology on Netflix called The House. It contains three films, each about 30 minutes long. They’re stylistically distinct, have different characters, are of different worlds—but each story takes place in the same house.

In the first, a mysterious benefactor offers a poor family with two young children a grandiose house to move into.

I mean. If it seems too good to be true…

All three shorts are good, but I’ll focus on this one which is by far my fav.

Incidentally, every ad or teaser I’d seen for The House only showed scenes from the first short, so I’d initially thought it was going be the full feature! I remain disappointed to this day that it made up only 1/3 of it.

Real quick:

• There’s adult language and unsettling scenes. Probably not great for kids.

• The level of nuance, emotion, and detail is impressive; I constantly marveled at delicate and minute orchestrations, like the pursing of the butler’s lips.

• The music is creeeeepy. Reminiscent of the soundtrack in The Witch; another great, spooky film.

I reluctantly include a trailer below for completeness. As with most teasers, it’s way too long and says too much. So I hope you eschew it and just dive directly into the anthology.

If you do watch the trailer, you don’t need to go beyond the 20 second mark. Really.

Enjoy. (And feel free to share your own unsettling must-watch recommendations.)