I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives, Dies, and Haunts in the House Horror Movie

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• April Movie Preview (
• Filmmaker Oz Perkins discusses the making of his eerie ghost story I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
• ‘Good Times’ Boss Defends Animated Reboot, Telling Viewers: “I Understand If This Is Jolting”
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• Nicole Kidman’s Daughters Make Their Red Carpet Debut at AFI Life Achievement Award Gala
• Real-Life ‘Baby Reindeer’ Stalker Speaks Out Following Netflix Show Success

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a 2016 horror film, directed and written by Oz Perkins. Lily Saylor (Ruth Wilson), a hospice nurse, moves in with a retired horror story author named Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss). Given the eerie and mysterious nature of both the house and Iris, Lily suspects something sinister has occurred. After being hired to care for Iris Bloom (Paula Prentiss), a reclusive author well past her prime, Lily is hung out to dry. In an effort to humanise her, Perkins (who also wrote the screenplay) has her cry on the phone while opening up to a friend about a man who left her. But as far as characterisation goes, that’s all Perkins affords his lead.

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But if you're looking for horror movies pushing the cinematic boundaries of the genre -- and a spooky experience that inspires more awe than fright -- just try giving it ten minutes of your life. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House might best be understood as The Witch meets The Hours. Writer-director Osgood Perkins, previously known for his debut film festival-darling The Blackcoat’s Daughter (AKA February), employs a tantalizing, maddening kind of minimalism while exploring a story of all-encompassing breadth. In 1812, the blindfolded Polly uses her hands to feel her surroundings, coming across a wall that has been stripped of its boards - the same section where mold is growing in present day. Polly raises her blindfold and sees the hole, locking eyes with her husband in confusion. Her husband suddenly bludgeons her to death with a hammer and hides her body behind the wall.

Filmmaker Oz Perkins discusses the making of his eerie ghost story I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

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Like the opening shot depicting a spectral woman in white gliding across the screen, elusive yet pleading, the film proves impossible to pin down. But what it holds back in terms of concrete meaning it makes up for with an effervescent sense of things. Because, sure, every plot point and character remains at arms length and out of focus, but that only makes them more piercing.

Because every woman is caught in this purgatory between life and death. In the kitchen, Lily briefly hallucinates that her arms have become bloated and covered in black mold spots. That evening, she spots the reflection of the figure dressed in white standing in the room but when she turns, no one is there. Inside are rough drafts for "The Lady in the Walls." She comes to believe that the novel may not be fictitious but rather depicts an actual murder committed in the house.

Critic Reviews

Sure, the bad ones are often about jump scares and poor CGI, but we fear haunted houses because they remind us of mortality and force us to question that which we know about it. “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House” isn’t about ghosts as much as it’s about death—the one coming soon for the homeowner, the one of the protagonist in her book, the one we’re told is coming for its protagonist. And all of these deaths swirl around to the point that they hang in the air, creating dread. From the very beginning of his sophomore film (his even-better “February” aka “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” has lingered in distribution purgatory but should be released next year), Perkins is playing with perspective and atmosphere. For example, when we meet Lily, it is on her first day in the house.

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Ms. Blum cannot see Polly’s ending because Polly cannot see it, and she sees Lily as the closest she can get. Despite Lily’s angry insistence on her identity, she becomes a conduit between the dying and the dead for Ms. Blum through this manifestation of Polly. His father was the late, great actor and sometime director Anthony Perkins, the man whose turn as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (and its three direct sequels) continues to chill the blood.

For the rest of film, she simply creeps around the house at a glacial pace, trying to find out why Iris keeps calling her Polly, the name of the doomed heroine in her novel, The Lady in the Walls. With its female-driven narrative, its irony-free faith in vintage horror tropes, and its unspecified but minutely detailed retro setting, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a stylistic sister film to February. Cinematographer Julie Kirkwood deserves special mention for her command of uncanny mood shifts, conjuring up maximum unease with glacially slow zooms into deep shadow, light-footed prowling and precisely framed interior shots. Another returnee is musician Elvis Perkins, the director’s brother, who amps up the suspense with off-key pianos, ominous drones and slithering soundscapes full of phantom menace. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a 2016 gothic supernatural horror film written and directed by Osgood Perkins.

Alternative Titles

In the second, it could be a blurred hand, but the first offers no such explanation. 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 the ghosts who have stayed behind…. They have stayed to look back for a glimpse of the very last moments of their lives but the memories of their own deaths are faces on the wrong side of wet windows, smeared by rain, impossible to properly see.

On Lily's first night in the house, the telephone is wrenched out of her hands by an unseen force. A spot of black mold appears on the wall and slowly grows as the months pass. Lily often finds a corner of the rug at the base of the stairs has been flipped up, but she is the only person in the house who walks on the first floor.

Still a striking beauty at 78, Prentiss has little to do but look scared and confused, while Bob Balaban provides reliably deadpan comic relief. Perkins also pays wry homage to his father, who makes a fleeting cameo on a flickering TV screen. The director has jokingly described I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House as a reunion for the cast of Catch-22, which co-starred Prentiss, Balaban and his father. Summary A young nurse, Lily (Ruth Wilson), moves in to a secluded old house to care for an elderly, reclusive horror novelist. Ultimately, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is not a movie for everyone.

Several days after, Mr. Waxcap discovers Lily's and Iris's bodies. Years later, a new family has moved into the house, watched over by Lily's ghost. Iris angrily explains that Polly betrayed and abandoned her, and reminds her that even the prettiest of things eventually rot.