 Day 16 officially passed the halfway mark, talking about The House, which is TBH, a pretty terrible name for a movie, but I'm not in marketing. What do I know? This is not, however, The Wolf House, which is a whole other stop-motion horror film that people have been suggesting lately, nor is it, this house has people in it, which is what I'm talking about tomorrow. Anyways, this suggestion came from Ryan P. Studios and was seconded by 17 people. A few months ago, The Always Interesting Hazel released a video about claymation horror. She has since said that she's not super proud of it, I liked it, and it primed me to really enjoy turkey tod, a Thanksgiving parody of Sweeney Tod that my friend Alex spent literally months working on all by himself and which features a genuinely great claymation segment wherein this turkey takes down a feasting family. It is my favorite part of an awesome video that in general I highly recommend and not just because I know the guy and the absurd amount of work he put into it, but because I think you'll have a better time with that than you will with this. Anyways, when someone suggested stop-motion horror comedy as part of this whole 30 days thing, because of all the things I was just talking about, I was pretty excited until I got to Netflix at which point I was confused because I didn't see horror listed anywhere on the film's page, just dark comedy. And after seeing it, I'm even more confused because there's definitely horror, but where the fuck was the comedy? The anthology, Three Half Hour Shorts, all written by Irish playwright Enda Walsh, follows the trials and tribulations of residents of a particular home over centuries. In the distant past, the more or less present and the far future. And I feel for the people who had to classify it because each of these is completely different in both tone and presentation. The first is just like a straight up A24 horror film, about a poor family given a deal that's too good to be true, a brand new home with servants and cooks built and maintained just for them. It is incredibly moody and unnerving. Everything is made of fabric, including the creepy ass puppet people who are basically like the little bits folks from Rick and Morty but sadder. It feels like if Ari Aster and Robert Eggers teamed up to do a stop-motion short. Things change dramatically for part two. We are in the modern day, but instead of soft, felty, fleshy things, we've got a world of rats, which I assume is why 15 seconds in my cat jumped up on the TV stand to get real close to our rodent protagonist. He bought the house, which is now in a bustling neighborhood and renovated it. It's all sleek and modern, and he hopes that the viewing day will be the first day of the rest of his life. But I got some real mother vibes from this one, so you know it's not going to go well. It is unnerving in a very different way than the first story, and while I don't think it is funny, it probably counts as satire, so maybe that's where the classification comes from. Things take an even more bizarre turn in story three because it's neither spooky nor funny. It's a sort of surreal drama, very dreamlike set in some far-flung time where the rats are all gone and have been replaced with cats. The home is under the purview of Rosa, a landlord who has been renting the place out, but most of the tenants have left, and the only two who remain have no money. One pays rent in fish, and the other in psychic crystals, or whatever. Also, and this is the important thing I should have led with, everything around the house has sunk under massive floods, and the water is still rising, so she has to deal with that. But where stories one and two end pretty bleakly, three has a much more optimistic view, and I won't lie that I was glad to leave on that note. However, if you think that there's a dramatic throughline, the change-up does confuse it a bit. On a base level, all three stories are about people who got in too deep with this house and what happens as a result. The poor family suffers at the hands of a rich man who has nothing better to do because rich people are evil. The developer brings tragedy upon himself because the foundation is infested with bugs, opening up the question of who this property or any property really actually belongs to, and that's interesting until Rosa comes along and the answer to the question is like her, I guess. About 30 seconds into that final story, I turned to my girlfriend and said, is this thing trying to make me feel sympathy for a landlord? And yeah, it is, which is wild because I don't do that much. Most of the time they're pretty terrible, and obviously it is more about being willing to adapt to changing circumstances and not be so precious and all of that. But if you really think about what's happening in that gorgeous final shot, that's not really so obvious. And it made me think that I'm not actually supposed to take anything concrete away from this anthology as a whole. That each of its three parables has a message, but they're not really trying to say anything collectively. The titular house is not its own critique, rather it is a convenient way to link three distinct stories for the purpose of selling them to Netflix. You know what, I'm totally fine with that. 8.1 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching, thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Cameron Marco, Kat Saracota, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I Am The Sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Baer, Taylor Lindyce, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, that's great, if not, oh well, if you want to decide what I'd do in three days, put that in the comments, great.