Dis­cov­er the mul­ti-lev­elled mad­ness of this Saw-esque house horror

“Our hous­es are such unwieldy prop­er­ties that we are often impris­oned rather than housed by them.” It begins with this tex­tu­al quote from Hen­ry David Thore­au. An open­ing cred­its sequence fol­lows, show­ing news­pa­per head­lines about bizarre crime scenes – and then comes a voiceover narration.

Indeed, Abat­toir is a wordy affair, as befits a film whose arch-vil­lain – and nar­ra­tor – Jebe­di­ah Crane (Day­ton Cal­lie) is, by his own account, ​“a man of words… tongue dipped in sil­ver.” Crane is a col­lec­tor of both sto­ries and storeys, which is to say that he has, over a 50-year peri­od, been remov­ing whole­sale from dif­fer­ent dwellings the rooms where acts of dead­ly vio­lence have tak­en place, and rebuild­ing from them a com­pos­ite house whose every room res­onates with its own haunt­ing, for rea­sons that will only grad­u­al­ly become clear.

In the mid-2000s, when tor­ture porn was at its peak, Dar­ren Lynn Bous­man was respon­si­ble for helm­ing Saw II, III and IV, so that he occu­pied the dead cen­tre of main­stream hor­ror. It would, how­ev­er, be a mis­take to dis­miss him as a pur­vey­or of the pure­ly con­ven­tion­al – after all, his exten­sive fil­mog­ra­phy also includes a pair of deeply man­nered, mar­gin-push­ing hor­ror musi­cals (Repo! The Genet­ic Opera and Alleluia! The Devil’s Car­ni­val). Abat­toir, his lat­est, may at heart be a haunt­ed house movie, but it also dis­as­sem­bles and recon­structs that sub-genre with reflex­ive rel­ish, and refur­nish­es those well-trod­den hall­ways and base­ments with gen­uine invention.

Julia Tal­ben (Jes­si­ca Lown­des) writes about real estate for Los Ange­les paper The Metro Dai­ly, but would rather be a crime inves­ti­ga­tor. Her two jour­nal­is­tic inter­ests com­bine after her sis­ter Aman­da (Jack­ie Tut­tle), broth­er-in-law and nephew are bru­tal­ly mur­dered in their home, and then the room in which the mas­sacre occurred is tak­en away by the mys­te­ri­ous Crane. Helped by her some­time lover, the homi­cide detec­tive Declan Grady (Joe Ander­son), Julia fol­lows an irra­tional trail that leads to New Eng­lish, an indus­tri­al ghost town in Louisiana. Tak­ing up lodg­ings there with long-time res­i­dent Allie (genre queen Lin Shaye), Julia is con­front­ed with a piece of her own miss­ing his­to­ry, and finds her­self will­ing­ly being woven into the fab­ric of some­one else’s infer­nal sto­ry of domes­tic loss.

“Guys like that don’t give expo­si­tion,” Declan warns Julia when she states her inten­tion to inter­view her sister’s incar­cer­at­ed mur­der­er. ​“You’re get­ting too close to this one, kid­do,” Julia is told by her edi­tor (Bryan Batt) – to which she responds, ​“This is where I ignore you and chase it any­way.” Julia is always rac­ing for­wards (and back­wards) to places she shouldn’t go, in accor­dance with the demands of movie con­ven­tion as much as per­son­al des­tiny – and yet so self-con­scious are these lines about their sta­tus as well-estab­lished tropes (who, besides aca­d­e­mics and crit­ics, ever uses the term ​‘expo­si­tion’?) that Christo­pher Monfette’s wit­ty dia­logue becomes dia­bol­i­cal­ly metacin­e­mat­ic. It is almost as though these char­ac­ters, fol­low­ing clues that include a VHS tape and an old pro­jec­tor reel, are no less caught in a prison-house of cin­e­ma and its clich­es than tor­ment­ed souls have become trapped in Crane’s pre­fab home.

Much as Crane has pieced togeth­er his house from many haunt­ed rooms, Bous­mann takes a sim­i­lar jig­saw-like approach to genre, stitch­ing sev­er­al mis­match­ing modes of cin­e­mat­ic sto­ry­telling togeth­er into a hybrid whole, and let­ting the cracks show. For in its open­ing LA sec­tion, Abat­toir is a neo-noir, all neon light­ing and shad­ow play, ​‘vin­tage’ clothes and cars, and smart, stylised exchanges between a hard­boiled ​‘tec and a plucky dame; in its mid­dle, Louisiana-set sec­tion, the film trans­forms itself into a South­ern goth­ic of small­town con­spir­a­cy, fam­i­ly secrets and some­thing unseen (but heard) in the woods; and the film’s cli­max is the ulti­mate haunt­ed house sequence, com­pound­ing mul­ti­ple ghost­ly sce­nar­ios in a loopy labyrinth of dis­tress­ing, CG-heavy eter­nal return. Per­haps Abat­toir is an unwieldy prop­er­ty, com­ing with all its assem­bly work exposed – but, just as Crane promis­es near the begin­ning, ​“what a mag­nif­i­cent struc­ture” it turns out to be. Pre­pare to get lost in its mul­ti-lev­elled mad­ness, and to have your famil­iar­i­ty with horror’s ever-revenant tropes thor­ough­ly deconstructed.

Abat­toir is released on DVD and Dig­i­tal Down­load 19 Sep­tem­ber 2016 cour­tesy of Uni­ver­sal Pic­tures International.