'I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House' Director Osgood Perkins on His Haunted New Horror Movie That's Dedicated to His Famous Father
After years as apartment-dwellers, my family moved into our first house this summer. It’s a cozy ‘60s-era Cape in the suburbs, nothing like the gloomy Gothic mansions I used to spend time in as a kid courtesy of chilling childhood books and movies like The House With a Clock in Its Walls or The Watcher in the Woods. Since moving in though, I’ve felt a distinct presence in our new home. Not in the paranormal sense; I think what I’m feeling is the weight of the house’s history and the lingering traces of past residents.
I shared this thought with Osgood Perkins, director of the new horror film, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, which premieres on Netflix on Oct. 28 after its successful debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “Good timing, then, for you to watch my picture,” he says, with a laugh. He’s right, of course. Even if I wasn’t coming off a major life milestone, I would have been delighted by the entrancing style and disciplined storytelling of Perkins’s chilling ghost story about a caretaker named Lily (Ruth Wilson), who moves into an old farmhouse inhabited by the reclusive author Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss) and the centuries-dead phantom Polly (Lucy Boynton), whose short life provided the narrative for Iris’s most famous novel The Lady in the Walls.
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As unnerving as the film is — and it is deeply, beautifully unnerving — what resonates most with me after the events of this past summer is the director’s evocation of the unspoken lives our homes lead before and after we inhabit them. As Lily spends more time in the Blum homestead, she starts to notice signs of pretty Polly’s presence: the stain on the wall that grows larger and darker each day and the moldy box of documents in the closet that outline the tragic, bloody story she whispered in Iris’s ear. “The spaces we live in absorb us,” Perkins says. “Nothing ever really leaves, because where would it go?”
Perkins had a specific space in mind when he went to create the house that becomes Lily’s tomb. (That’s not a spoiler: Lily informs us of her demise in the film’s opening minutes.) The house in the movie is based on a 1790s-era home in Cape Cod that his father bought in the 1960s and that the family still owns. “I should know more about its history, but I’m an incredibly lazy person when it comes to things like that,” he says. “It may just be that I’m too overwhelmed by the enormity of my parents’ own histories and lineages.”
And Perkins, aged 42, does live in the shadow of two impressive legacies. The eldest son of actress/photographer Berinthia Berenson and horror icon Anthony Perkins, he lost his father to AIDS in 1992 and his mother in the 9/11 attacks nine years later. After starting his film career as an actor, he transitioned into directing with the horror film The Blackcoat’s Daughter, which premiered to strong reviews at Toronto in 2015. (The studio A24 picked up the distribution rights and plans to release the film sometime next year.)
Perkins says that his chosen genre isn’t the direct result of his father’s career-defining performance as Psycho’s Norman Bates, the poster child for every cinematic serial killer to emerge after Alfred Hitchcock’s towering classic. And yet, the spirit of the elder Perkins is very much present in his son’s film. It’s impossible to look at this shot of Wilson gazing into the camera lens, for example, and not see Norman staring directly at the audience in Psycho’s legendary final scene.
In another sequence, Lily vainly tries to fix the reception on Iris’s ancient television, but can only catch fragments of an old movie that happens to be Friendly Persuasion, William Wyler’s 1956 Civil War drama that earned Anthony Perkins his first and only Oscar nomination. In fact, the central arc of the movie — Lily’s quest to “see” Polly — grew out of the director’s desire to understand his distant father. “I didn’t have a relationship with him where we sat around the table talking about movies,” says Perkins, who was 18 when his father died. “It’s one of those cases where you become fascinated with someone you knew after they’re gone. This movie is about looking for someone you can’t quite see, and I made it partly to feel closer to my father, to understand him better.” (The movie is dedicated to him: An opening title card reads, “For A.P. who gave me an old house.”)
I Am the Pretty Thing demonstrates that Perkins’ stylistic influences extend well beyond Hitchcock. Throughout the film, Perkins makes excellent use of Stanley Kubrick-esque slow zooms into darkened doorways, inviting audiences to peer into the gloom. And one imagines that the director’s careful eye for shot composition can be credited to his mother’s career as a photographer. The movie is filled with individual images that could be framed and hung on a wall.
Take this shot from early on in the film, during Lily’s first night in Blum’s house. Notice how everything in the frame is perfectly balanced, save for one off element — the chair hanging upside down in the background. “My production designer had done enough research to know that old Quaker houses like this had these rows of knobs for hanging chairs,” says Perkins. “I love empty chairs anyway — both of my movies have a lot of empty chairs in them — so it was great to be able to hang one just upside down and have it be unsettling while also, in a weird way, historically accurate.”
And then there’s this shot from later in the movie, my pick for I Am the Pretty Thing’s most haunting moment and one that Perkins describes as a personal favorite as well. While a visitor knocks repeatedly on the door, Lily stands on the staircase of the eerily silent house, slightly out of focus and with only her legs are visible in the frame. In this moment, you feel like you’re the visitor at the door and, having gotten fed up with the lack of an answer, decide to peer in through one of the glass windows only to see — or think you see — a figure standing there, waiting. It’s an obliquely frightening image that would make master illustrator of the macabre, Edward Gorey, proud. “That came about because there was literally no upstairs to the set!” says Perkins. “We built the two levels on different sets, and they weren’t connected by a staircase, so Ruth couldn’t go any further up those stairs! I don’t mean to diminish the job, but there’s so much that was dumb second movie luck.”
The script’s carefully layered approach to storytelling, on the other hand, can’t be chalked up to dumb luck. Perkins reveals that I Am the Pretty Thing grew out of a different story he had outlined, a tale of a woman who wakes up from a car accident in unfamiliar surroundings and pieces her fragmented memory together through voiceover. He eventually abandoned that premise, but retained the notion of a character observing her physical body from a distance. That forms the outer layer of I Am the Pretty Thing’s narrative, with a ghostly Lily watching and commenting upon events in richly penned narration — evocatively delivered by Wilson — that has echoes of writers like Shirley Jackson and Mary Shelley. The second layer of the story is those events as Lily experiences them in the moment and with a minimum of spoken dialogue.
At a certain point, Iris’s novel, The Lady in the Walls, joins the chorus, revealing bits of Polly’s story save for the one thing Iris declined to describe on the page: the girl’s untimely demise. But Perkins does show the audience that moment in an artfully staged sequence that lies at the movie’s center. While Polly’s end is violent, we’re never told the exact reason for her death, and frankly, the explanation isn’t missed. That’s the way it so often goes with the distant past; specific details can vanish or change depending on the teller of the tale. What remains behind is the event itself, and perhaps, some of the evidence.
Perkins says he drew his inspiration for Polly’s fate from the song “Pretty Polly,” one of the many so-called “murder ballads” that traveled from Europe to become an important part of early American folk music. “That song is so uncompromising in its sparseness: Basically, a guy takes Polly out to the woods and says, ‘Hey look, there’s a grave I dug for you, and now you’re getting in it,’” Perkins says. “There’s no explanation. And that’s the scariest part of living, isn’t it? S— happens and there’s no reason for it. It’s just, ‘There’s your grave, now you’re getting in it.’”
The closing moments of I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House reveals yet another layer to Lily and Polly’s now-shared experience as ghostly ladies who walk between the walls of Iris’s house, and it’s one that speaks directly to the history you inherit when you make another person’s house your own home. I’ve seen the film twice now and the final scene never fails to stir my imagination about the house we now inhabit. In fact, I’m sitting in my home as I type these final sentences. It’s approaching midnight, my family is fast asleep, and I’m once again sensing the presence of the past and thinking about something Lily says towards the end of the film: “I have heard myself say that a house with a death in it can never again be bought or sold by the living — it can only be borrowed from its ghosts.”
