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What Lives Here
R0 - America - MVD Visual Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (7th September 2025). |
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The Film
 When the elderly owner of the Edwards Mansion looming above the township of Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, is murdered in her sleep – not content to just turn off her oxygen, the assailant slits her throat and stabs her twenty-odd times – local realtor James Collins (Christian Keiber) knows better than to contract any local junk removal businesses given the house's reputation and instead contacts Lee Duncan (100 Acres of Hell's Jeff Swanton) who initially balks at taking a job three hours away, requiring food and accommodations for his six man crew; that is, until Collins offers to cover all of that and double his rate if they can clear out the house in a week so he can get it on the market. Lee's crew is less-than-pleased to be giving up their weekends to get to the location to beat Monday morning traffic, and upon arrival Lee discover that Collins has inadvertently reserved rooms at the local motel for them a day later than needed. Collins offers to let them stay in the house and puts their food and drink at the local bar on his tab. While Lee is going around town making arrangements for supplies, his crew – Beau (director Troy Burbank, The House at 831), Vito (ThE F3aR's Robert Ruvolo), Carson (Clerks' Ernest O'Donnell), Cole (Peter Hogan), Dillon (Cult of Blood's Dan Gregory), and Eddie (Ugochukwu Onyianta) – discover from the locals including bartender Tara (Bloodrunners' Kerry McGann) and barflys Laurie (Terrifier 2's Jackie Adragna) and Emma (The Dark Military's Katie Walsh) that the Edwards Mansion has a reputation of being a haunted house with a past including deformed daughters supposedly hidden away by the owners and the alleged murder of a neighbor's baby by one of the children. In the crew's absence, visitors to the house ahead of the crew are quickly and gruesomely murdered by an assailant that looks like an old woman and local teen Chase (The Compound Movie's Matt Riley) is prowling about ostensibly looking for work; but, as night falls, members of the crew and some comely company stagger back to the mansion and walk right into a slaughterhouse. What Lives Here looks like and actually is a run-of-the-mill haunted house slasher film of the "don't go…" variety; indeed, its sole point of interest is that it was filmed in the Strauss Mansion, a striking hilltop Victorian mansion previously seen in the early eighties horror film Don't Go in the House (which in spite of its title was a body count film but not a slasher given the killer's modus operandi). The location – restored since then and functioning as a museum with a haunted reputation and acknowledging its use in the aforementioned film – still makes for a wonderfully atmospheric backdrop with a great drone shot following Lee's truck down a straight road though the town and coming up upon the house; however, it plays host here to an ordinary horror pic of wandering punctuated by a mix of gory but unconvincing practical and CGI-enhanced kills with a reveal that calls back to some earlier, better slasher films (particularly Tower of Evil and Hell Night). What could have been a relatively ordinary but swift genre exercise is drawn out painfully by its three act structure. It is a full thirty minutes before the crew arrive at the house thanks to a long diner sequence of "quirky" local humor and character bits that do little to actually define any of the characters, a second act also stretched to almost exactly thirty minutes including visits to real local businesses – one would think the entire town was behind the film if not for its depicting its business proprietors as unfriendly and lackadaisical – with some kills of periphery characters, leading to a third act of stalking, chasing, and killing that gives us nothing we have not already seen before. Performances are serviceable – director Burbank is not bad but it was a wise decision for him not to take the lead and Swanton does well in what is ultimately a thankless role – as is the occasionally-attractive photography, and a few bits of gore including a sickle bisection are effective in spite of their artificiality, but What Lives Here feels more like an exercise that could have been developed into something that made better use of its great location. 
Video
Shot and finished in HD, What Lives Here gets a serviceable 16:9 anamorphic 1.78:1 widescreen encode. Detail holds up well upscaled and blacks remain deep in the moodier scenes of the second and third acts, suggesting that some attention was paid in the shooting and the grading with noise only evident in the darkest areas of the frame (and probably unnoticeable on smaller monitors). 
Audio
The only audio option is a Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo option with optional English SDH subtitles. Dialogue is always clear and the sound design is not particularly ambitious apart from some offscreen noises and slashing/stabbing sounds with music doing much of the heavy lifting. 
Extras
There are no extras apart from a trailer (0:40). 
Overall
What Lives Here feels more like an exercise that could have been developed into something that made better use of its great location.
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