The Night House And The Horrifying Depths Of The Ocean

By Sam Moore

There’s a moment in an episode of the 2021 season of Love Island, when Liberty, an OG Islander, says that her greatest fear is the depths of the ocean, and the fact that we have no idea what might be lurking there, deeper than we’ve ever been able to explore. This idea of the depths, and the dread that they can bring out in people, is what’s most interesting about The Night House (2021), a film about grieving, ghosts, and architecture. There’s a rich tradition in visual art, from Botticelli to Daniel Craig, of figures emerging from the ocean as if they’re arriving from some lost, mythical city. But The Night House turns this idea on its head, asking instead what would happen if you went down deeper, instead of coming up for air.

The first time Beth (Rebecca Hall) sees what may or may not be the ghost of her dead husband, he’s in the sea, just outside the house he built for the two of them. He’s nude, his feet in the water. There’s no grand act of emergence here; instead he simply appears and lingers. The Night House constantly returns to the relationship that the deceased Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) had with the sea; that he took a boat out before taking his own life, the relationship it has with the labyrinthine home that he built. The water outside that house becomes like the River Styx, where their depths reveal not only monsters, but darkness within humans as well.

In The Witch Who Came From the Sea (1976) an image of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is described by a man as being “a witch who came out of the sea.” The sea is loaded in Witch, full of some of the same ideas as it is in The Night House: memory, longing, darkness.  When Molly (Millie Perkins), gets asked why her father ended up lost at sea, she says he was “too perfect to live on land.” There’s a darkly seductive perfection about these figures who find themselves at the bottom of - literal or metaphorical - oceans, as if they’ve been cleansed of the wrongs of the world by the ocean’s waves, and the deeper down they go, the more difficult it is for the real world - and all of its problems - to reach them. This kind of descent is mirrored in the mental states of both Beth and Molly in the two films; it makes perfect sense that when Beth is in one of her darkest moments, she imagines herself on a boat in a strange, red, inverted world. The small boats in The Night House are like vessels taking their inhabitants along the River Styx, and whatever might await them on the other end of that journey. That’s what makes the sea such rich, deep territory for horror; its age-old tradition, from myth to the renaissance, and then onward into film, makes it a perfect, primal site to explore horror.

The importance of geography in both Night House and Witch is rooted not only in the existential mysteries of the sea, but also the relationship that it has with ideas of mental health and restoration. The beach was historically considered a kind of cure-all, as if sun and sea could counteract all ailments. On the surface, that’s what the eponymous Night House was supposed to be; something built by Owen for his family, a sanctuary away from the rest of the world. And that’s what makes Beth’s descent into something like madness in The Night House so interesting; it subverts these ideas of sanctuary and restoration, daring her to look into the depths. One of the most striking moments in the film is when Beth sees a group of women running past her, and diving into the water. At a glance, they all look a little like her but Beth isnt able to look at them for too long. Instead, she lingers on the water they jumped into, wondering what it is that’s under the waves, drawing these women down into the depths.

Geography has always been vital to horror films, and there’s something about the sea that uniquely invites the speculation and anxiety of horror. Everything from Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) to Jaws (1975), or something more ghostly like Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) are all about the unique horror of what lurks under the surface. The Night House is at its most frightening when it embraces these abstractions and uncertainties; when it’s about what might be hiding in the house, what might be in the depths of the ocean. It goes to the heart of the movie: Beth, and her relationship with that house, with the water that surrounds it, and the figures that she sees on the shore.

Witch also has a deeply subjective relationship with the power of the ocean. For Molly, it’s always been representative of some kind of paradise - the place that took her too-perfect father - not least because it offers freedom for her from the dark thoughts and fantasies that she has, informed by TV and advertising. Just like The Night House is about hidden, buried secrets, Witch is about the burial of trauma. That’s what makes the sea such a fascinating, fitting fixture for both of these films; so much of how the sea gets thought about is the extent to which it's an unknown. The end of Witch is, like The Night House, all about these things being brought up to the surface, with the core of this being if the film’s protagonists will, like those who came before them, find themselves lost at sea.

In its climactic scene, The Night House takes all of these ideas of the relationship between the ocean and horror and brings them together; like the rhythm of waves and tides, The Night House returns to its initial ideas in a new way. When Beth first falls through the water, she seems to fall into a different, inverted world. This is taken to a new level when she sails out to the spot on the water where Owen killed himself: the world is red, she’s adrift physically and psychologically, and the idea of the River Styx, the danger of both loss and rebirth, all come together. The film flirts with these ideas of rebirth, but always while foregrounding the fact that to begin a new life, you have to leave the old one behind.

Sam Moore is a writer, artist, and editor. Their work has been published by the LA Review of Books, i-D, the BFI, and other places. They are one of the founding editors of Third Way Press. Their first book, All my teachers died of AIDS, was published by Pilot Press in 2020

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