Hi. The other day while rewatching The Deep House (2021) I realized I’d never talked about it here in the blog. Odd. This French movie is one I regard dearly as it combines some of my favorite things: horror, large bodies of water, and relaxation. For me, nothing compares to the wonderful feeling I get while watching a slow-paced aquatic adventure with dire consequences. The warm and soothing embrace of darkness, the quiet isolation underwater, the battle with mortality, the absolute realization that nothing matters more than fresh air, the automatic agreement you make with yourself that if you make it out alive things will change, the deep knowledge that you will be alright, the calming horror of it all.
How do you call the total opposite of thalassophobia and submechanophobia? Whatever it is called, I have it. I love looking at pictures and videos of large and deep bodies of water as well as at man-made objects submerged underwater. I love that, I really do. The first time I noticed I had it was when I visited the Queen Mary in Long Beach:
Right. That is my deep connection with this movie.
The Deep House tells the story of Ben, his girlfriend Tina, and his 4K underwater drone Tom (as in Peeping Tom). At the moment, Ben was concentrated in growing his youtube channel where the average view count for his walk-through vlogs about far and secret ruins was 50K, but once he hit 1M views he promised he would propose and get married to Tina.
Their latest adventure took place at an abandoned asylum in Ukraine where nothing much happened; it was a run-of-the-mill old building in the forest with abandoned furniture, indoor vines, graffiti, and trash – if it weren’t for Ben’s pranks on Tina (he enjoyed scaring her) his content would be even less entertaining. An asylum in a forest in Ukraine was a dud, so maybe his next location, a total and complete secret spot, a submerged small town in a lake in France would get him closer to that elusive 1M.
Ben and Tina prepared and trained in scuba diving as their new adventure would be a challenging one. Ben was dialed in and excited and ready to go go go (!!), but Tina wasn’t, she even lied about her minute and a half record (she told Ben she could hold her breath underwater for three whole minutes), and even tried to charm and convince him with simply relaxing and being tourists for the day after finding out the ‘total and complete secret spot’ at Fress Lake was anything but. Ben might have been disappointed that all his planning was for naught, but at least was pleased Tina was by his side, so tourists it was, sadly.
When Ben went to purchase cheap wine at the food truck by the lake, he met a local, Pierre, who told him about a secret spot (a real one this time) away from all those loud and annoying tourists, so Ben decided to take the stranger’s offer and exchange money for information. The place was so private that the guy would have to take them there himself. Tina was hesitant once again, nevertheless, she pushed forward and supported Ben’s youtube hobby.
The place history went a little something like this: Forest Chanteloup, now called Fress Lake, was a small town in South West France which got severely flooded around fifty years ago, so when planning and construction was finally done to control and redirect waterflow in 1984, a year after local kids went missing, the village was voluntarily vacated and the valley was purposefully flooded, with all the damaged houses getting demolished prior to the scheduled flooding, that is. This last fact was hidden from the online world, thus Ben being blindsided and taking on a whim the stranger’s offer for the promise of an intact, one hundred percent well-preserved house that no one, absolutely no one but the stranger himself, knew about. All Ben could see was that big fat 1M, so much so that it eclipsed everything else: his girlfriend’s uneasiness, the stranger’s miraculous offer, the million and one red flags.
Underwater, deep down at the bottom of the lake was the promised house. Still standing. Intact. Maybe too intact? How could a flooding of such great magnitude not jeopardize the beautiful structure? How could the passing of time not be visible? And the inside of the house… of the home… why was everything still in its place? It is almost as if the structure was floating on the lake and it simply sank. You knew where you were. Yes. You were diving inside a lake in France, but you could have easily told yourself you were somewhere else, maybe in the Atlantic Ocean exploring the Titanic mere hours after its sinking on April 15, 1912. That would have made more sense. That would explain why everything was brand new and still in its place. The impossibility of what you were experiencing was unbelievable, but you were looking at it so it had to be… true? Or, maybe you died and this was all a nightmare; that being the case, who actually cares & let’s look around while the hallucination lasts, shall we?
**SPOILERS**
It turned out the deep house was haunted by its owners, the Montégnac’s, who were— surprise! —the mother, the father, and the sister of the stranger, Pierre. As a teenager in 1984, Pierre Montégnac was able to escape an attack against his family carried out by a few locals who were taking matters into their own hands because—surprise again! –they had found out the family was involved in the disappearance of the missing children. The vengeful locals ended up imprisoning the family inside their own house before the final flooding. There were no witnesses, just a son who, decades later, would take pleasure in tricking overzealous tourists and offering them as gift to his beloved, drown family.
Let’s be honest, nobody can escape alive from a haunted house underwater, mmh-kay? Especially if you suffer from panic attacks and your brain freaks out and makes you do stupid things like wasting time and precious oxygen from your oxygen tank. Moral of the story besides not going to haunted houses underwater? Listen to your girlfriend and ask for her honest opinion (if you must, ask her a couple of times if/when she replies "mmh, it’s fine” in a weird voice), but most importantly and for the love of God, DO NOT trust strangers.
In Love and Fear,
—Marath
P.S. Videos like these are my new ASMR:
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