Dust on the banister, an unoccupied chair facing the door, footsteps from a room that should be empty: the old haunted house makes an accusation out of every ordinary object. Domestic space becomes a kind of unfinished business, holding on to lives its current occupants never knew. Even before anyone calls a medium, there is the uncomfortable suspicion that the people paying the mortgage have mistaken themselves for the owners.
Seattle deathrock band Ghosts In The Graveyard give that suspicion a voice on Old Dark House: Resurrected Version. Taken from Monsters For The Masses: Resurrected, released October 23rd through Re:Mission Entertainment, the song sets a deep, resonant piano melody beneath Shelly Smith’s clear, ghostly vocals. Her delivery carries the formal poise of a Victorian ghost story, as though each line has travelled some considerable distance to reach the living.
Smith’s spectral presence and the song’s macabre elegance bring Mephisto Walz’s Mephisto Waltz to mind: both make gothic theatricality feel strangely intimate, drawing the listener close enough to become uneasy. Here, the piano gives that feeling a domestic setting, its measured notes suggesting an instrument being played somewhere else in the house.
Around a minute in, percussion begins to thump like unexplained banging in the attic. Colder electronic tones introduce Byron C. Miller’s distorted murmurs, with the rhythm growing rougher around him before Smith’s voice returns. As the piano comes forward again, Miller takes up a melody akin to hers, the two voices passing through one another until Smith closes the song. By then, the music seems to have acquired a second occupant.
Directed, photographed, and edited by bandmate Paul Morgan, the video turns this domestic disturbance into an affectionate homage to classic horror, with House on Haunted Hill among its touchstones. La Petite Mort and Miller play a troubled couple who call upon a psychic, portrayed by Tiffany Astrid, to investigate their unwelcome company. Megan Bishop appears as the Ghost Psychic, adding another presence to a gathering already short on reassurance.
The dining table becomes the centre of the trouble. Hands join, faces tighten in close-up, and translucent figures intrude upon rooms whose carved chairs and heavy curtains already seem prepared for their arrival. Smith’s production design gives the house its welcoming gloom, while Morgan’s superimpositions let faces and bodies occupy the same space with the peculiar wrongness of an old spirit photograph. A veiled figure at the table makes an ordinary seat look like a very poor place to sit.
Morgan approached the film with a clear affection for the methods behind those earlier hauntings:
“I shot it black and white to invoke the look of a classic horror film from the 1960’s, even though the video is not really set any one period. The idea of a seance gone wrong was intriguing to me, so I used that as jumping off point. We assembled a brilliant cast and they performed everything beautifully. I will stress that no AI or CGI was used in the making of this video. The ghost effects are all created using techniques that the horror filmmakers have used since the dawn of cinema.”
Watch the video for Old Dark House: Resurrected Version below:
The album surrounding Old Dark House: Resurrected Version has undergone its own return from the grave. For the tenth anniversary of their 2016 album, Ghosts In The Graveyard revisited the original recordings, with Morgan rebuilding the material through new production and programming, and Chris Longo mastering the new mixes. Reconstructed versions of Better In Black and Monster Mask sit alongside the collection’s sole newly added song, a cover of The Afghan Whigs’ Debonair.
For Miller, who began the project after eight years in God Module, the material reaches back further still. “The interludes on this album are made from cassette recordings I did when I was a little kid trying to be scary. In many ways these songs are the first half of my life as song.” Those childhood recordings give the reconstruction a personal charge: the adult musician is reopening rooms his younger self furnished with imaginary monsters.
Listen to Old Dark House: Resurrected Version below. Monsters For The Masses: Resurrected is available now on CD digipak and digitally through Re:Mission Entertainment. Order the album here, or find additional listening options here.
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