'Thunk' in the Night
There’s an ongoing argument in my house about the validity of paranormal-investigation shows. My wife and I have both experienced unexplained phenomena that we chock up to neither heavenly nor hellish—simply weird and rather creepy. Though we’re both believers in something beyond the realm of current human understanding, I’m not inclined to take others' claims of supernatural insight seriously—especially if they make those claims on television.
Enter Zak Bagans, one of the “Ghost Adventurers” on Travel Channel’s wildly popular, 15-season docu-series. In 2015, he purchased a run-down home in Gary, Indiana, after seeing news reports that its residents had fled following a demonic possession. Bagans and crew moved in, and began interviewing locals who knew the cursed family--as well as the decades of rumors surrounding the “Demon House”.
Demon House is Bagans’ three-years-in-the-making account of his time in Gary. The director’s experience didn’t last nearly that long, but it took quite a lot of writing, casting, editing, and effects work to flesh out the movie, which, if you remove the dramatic re-creations of twelve-foot-tall goat monsters; children walking backwards up walls; and dramatic slow-mo, amounts to maybe thirty minutes of documentary footage wherein dubious interview subjects talk over several glorified open-house walk-throughs.
As propaganda for the supernaturally inclined, Demon House is likely very effective entertainment. My wife partially heeded the warning that opens the film, and left about twenty minutes in. I stuck it out and, despite Bagans’ claim that the movie itself is cursed, I came away with only a mild case of the heebie-jeebies and a profound appreciation for the filmmaker's deft sleights-of-hand.
Even being hyper aware of Bagans’ bag of tricks, I couldn’t help but wonder how he’d convinced so many ostensibly reputable Gary professionals—from police officials, to a social worker, to home inspectors—to talk about their encounters with evil on camera. Surely, there must be something to their stories—unless they were being paid so handsomely by the production as to make up for behavior that could, at best, ding their credibility and, at worst, jeopardize their careers.
Could the “Demon House” really be (as those who’d been inside have claimed) a portal to Hell?
Hold your Apocalyptic horses.
After laying out his case in haunted-hay-ride fashion, Bagans takes us on a revelatory detour, spending a good ten minutes debunking just about everyone and everything from the previous half-hour. The home’s landlord says he’s never heard of any suspicious activity in three decades of owning the property; extended family members of the people whose abrupt exit prompted Bagans to investigate refute their relatives' version of events; undercover video shows one of the first townspeople we meet (a real proponent of the house’s otherworldly qualities) attempting to extort the crew for money in exchange for more outrageous stories. The last straw is a conversation with, if I recall correctly, a structural engineer who talks about the gases, mold, and chemicals bleeding out into the residence—which could very easily cause disorientation and hallucinations with prolonged exposure.
Bagans himself seems convinced that he's in the midst of some kind of small-town shakedown—until, as he says, “Shit got real.”
Yes, after a sanity pit stop, we hop right back on the expressway to Ghostville, with even more wild stories, conjecture, and surveillance footage of visitors and crew members walking the grounds and acting weird. The climax sees Bagans boarding himself up in the house overnight to confront whatever malevolent forces have apparently caused everything from organ failure to car accidents to death in the lives of those whom he has encountered since settling in Gary. The only thing remotely interesting stretch of this alleged horrific experience involves Bagans crouched on a bed, yelling at something we cannot see—and then throwing his car keys at it.
There’s no saving Demon House, but Bagans might have fared better by hiring a narrator to play him. I realize this would make things terribly confusing for the viewer, but the current first-person voice-over conveys the same flat, Dude-Bro affect as that cop in Idiocracy who kept referring to people as “particular individuals”. Bagans looks and acts like the lead singer of a Papa Roach cover band—not good when attempting to convey high-wattage cosmic understanding (or, at the very least, sincerity).
That’s unfair. It doesn’t matter what someone looks like, as long as they’ve got the goods. Unfortunately, our intrepid host’s over-reliance on dramatizations and horror-movie techniques makes the entire operation seem fraudulent—like he’s over-compensating for a lack of evidence that might, on its face, convince audiences that there really was (is?) a sinister force lurking beneath Gary’s blighted soil. We may never know Bagans’ motives (if any, beyond money and fame) for presenting Demon House in this most problematic way. This mystery, to me, is more chilling than a hundred haunted basements.