The Siegel house, intended to evoke comfort, safety, and the capital-G Good life due to its fancy pants and ultimately pointless “passive house” environmental certification, is where you feel that malevolence the strongest. The place the Siegels themselves designed to make them feel their safest and best is where they are most keenly and cruelly observed by the camera, and where they are, in the end, most harshly punished by whatever force exists to do so in their world. The family home is central to the middle-class dream; it is just as central to the nightmare of surveillance cinema.

I wrote about the “surveillance cinema” of Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, and Alan Resnick’s This House Has People in It for the Welcome to Hell World newsletter. Scroll down to read it!

AI does not feel like the future, at least not the future I want. It feels like I’m watching a robot take a shit. It feels like I’m being forced to consume some kind of vile digital excrescence — a Silicon Valley Salò. Resnick, O’Brien, and Kelberman’s grotesque floating heads and their meaningless drivel got there ten years ago. It’s simply taken the real world this long to catch up, or more accurately, fall down.

I wrote about Live Forever as You Are Now with Alan Resnick, the old Adult Swim infomercial that predicted the vileness of AI to a tee

The makers of Unedited Footage of a Bear and This House Has People in It are back with a new project called The Mirror for IFC. I don’t want to give much away, but let’s just say that given my recent reading habits as discussed elsewhere on this blog, I was very, very excited by this. Perhaps you will be too.

Home is where the horror is. That’s the underlying logic of This House Has People In It, which debuted with little fanfare at 4am Tuesday morning as part of Adult Swim’s elusive “Infomercials” initiative. The network, a ratings powerhouse which nonetheless airs some of the most ferociously experimental stuff on TV, used this horror-comedy-parody umbrella project to launch a genuine viral hit with last year’s smash sitcom satire Too Many Cooks. But its successor, Unedited Footage of a Bear, was the best and most brutal of the bunch—a send-up of medication commercials that rapidly devolved into one of the most frightening works of doppelgänger horror this side of Mulholland Drive, as well as an emotionally upsetting vision of how severe mental illness can hold entire families at its mercy.

Now AB Video Solutions and Wham City Comedy, the overlapping Baltimore art, music, and performance collectives who unleashed Unedited Footage, have returned with This House—an even more ambitious stab at the horror genre. Constructed as an assembled collection of surveillance-camera recordings of a seemingly ordinary blended family, the 11-minute movie takes place on the day of their son’s birthday, when his older sister’s…condition, let’s say, threatens to shatter the suburban tranquility forever. But the story spills beyond the confines of the video, into a website for “AB Surveillance Solutions” that’s packed with hidden links, videos, text files, images, and audio recordings that further flesh out the family’s plight. We don’t want to spoil the sick surprises, but they involve a mysterious ailment called Lynks Disease, a kids’ cartoon character named Boomy the Cat, an amateur sculptor with a hankering for clay and a dark secret, a whole lot of screaming, and a very special houseguest who’ll keep you from feeling comfortable in basements, bedrooms, and backyards for a long, long time. Sure enough, Reddit sleuths have been working round the clock to unearth every hidden horror.

We spoke with This House co-writers and executive producers Robby Rackleff, Alan Resnick, and Dina Kelberman—all of whom played multiple roles in its creation alongside fellow ABV members Ben O’Brien and Cricket Arrison, with Resnick making a cameo and serving as director, cinematographer, co-editor, and effects supervisor, Rackleff co-editing and co-starring as the family’s father, and Kelberman providing web design—about the video(s), the site(s), the superfans, and the reason suburban families provide such fertile territory for terror.

I wrote about This House Has People In It, which you should watch immediately, and interviewed its co-creators Alan Resnick, Robby Rackleff, and Dina Kelberman, for the New York Observer.