[Editorial] Horror in a ‘Not Horror’ Film: Deconstructing The Humans (2021)

As The Humans ended, I sat in stunned silence. I had expected a family drama with some light comic relief, so I was surprised by the goosebumps that still rippled down my arms and the sense of dread that crept into my skull. This was an uncanny horror.

In a rundown Manhattan apartment, a family sits down to Thanksgiving dinner hosted by the youngest daughter Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and her relatively new partner Richard (Steven Yeun). The guests are Brigid’s parents, Erik (Richard Jenkins) and Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell), Erik’s mother Momo (June Squibb) and Brigid’s sister Aimee (Amy Schumer). As the evening draws in and the light dims, family truths are revealed, the tone shifting to match the trauma.

Adapted by Stephen Karam from his 2016 Tony Award-winning play of the same name, it’s clear to see how the general ‘stage feel’ of the film translates to a peculiar tension within the audience. Although it is not primarily staged like the play, a few shots linger in ways that make you feel like you’re watching from your theatre seat, particularly towards the end. Combined with the fact that it was distributed by A24, an independent entertainment company that has worked its way up the horror ranks over the past decade, the foundations are set for this to be a cross-genre spectacle from the start. 

Although the dialogue lends itself to a standard family drama, the reason that The Humans feels so ‘horror’ is the composition of the shots combined with the mundanity of the conversation, always leaving you on edge. You find yourself watching the background in case you see a flicker of a horror trope; a shadow that shouldn’t be there, an object moving without a visible hand, anything to confirm to your brain that this is about to kick up a notch. And yet it never really happens. Sure, there are jump scares, primarily due to the sounds of people walking around this and the surrounding apartments, the lift moving up and down the building, the laundry chute, and an amalgamation of other noises easily explained away by the residents. There’s visual fake-outs too, members of the family scaring each other unintentionally by appearing on the other sides of doors, the elderly neighbour from upstairs rolling her shopping trolley down the hall, failing lights descending characters into a piercing darkness, there’s even a mysterious figure looming in the interior courtyard below. With the right music and some follow-up ‘real scares’, this film could be the most cliché horror to date.

The dishevelled home of the new lovebirds is also a horror character in itself. In one scene you watch as a running tap in the bathroom leaks down into the floor and oozes along the wall below, creating billowing damp spots in the paint and wallpaper. The focus on the grime and the grit elevates this apartment to somewhere you’d expect to find the ghost of a girl who moved to the Big Apple for her chance at fame, only to be brutally murdered by her lover. Its ominous stretching corridors, that are too thin to navigate down, open to a dim maw of a doorway to the outside world. The impending dark as each lightbulb dies foreshadows the end of life, and although it doesn’t literally happen, after the conversations that the family have had it’s certainly the end of life as they know it. 

When considering this film as a whole, the word haunted lingers. It fills the air with an unsettled presence and possessed me to start unwrapping its complex layers. True horror resides in family conflict, the unspoken problems that creep to the surface after a few too many drinks. All families have trauma, no matter how happy they seem, a person can’t live without experiencing at least one thing that brings them sadness or resentment, and the majority of the time that trauma will relate back to the people they hold dearest, which is often the family. Even though every character in this film holds their own horror at heart, from Richard’s depression, to Aimee’s health and job issues, the person who is perhaps in the most frightening situation is poor Momo. The inclusion of a grandmother with Dementia in The Humans is an example of something that people often fear the most, losing themselves. Even though she wrote an email to her granddaughters when she was lucid (which Deirdre reads out as a Thanksgiving tradition), telling them that she is perhaps not as afraid as they think, it is still terrifying to observe someone you know and love slowly fading away, until you are left with a shell. Imagine being on the other side of it and realising that your mind won’t be around forever and soon you won’t be able to communicate with your family, now that is true horror.

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