Haunting

Made by New York artist John Menick during lockdown, Haunting is a found footage horror film: clips from fifty international horror films from the last seventy years, projected on two side-by-side screens. The stars, mostly deceased or forgotten actors, interpret different stories with a common conventional theme: a mysterious house in which eerie things happen. The trouble begins with the inevitable shot of a staircase that leads to the mysteries on the upper or lower floors, and ends with a final escape into the night. These elements, in Menick’s film, make up an unusual choreography with an abstract, ghostly rhythm. Haunting is also a response to the pandemic, in which domestic space has been transformed, for many, into a disturbing place.