Foreboding dronescapes welcome in the supernatural; a skeletal finger of white bone, calling you into its sickly aura of light. As you reach The House In The Woods, cicadas chirp in the sweeping brush of the grass, and the light seems to increase in intensity, creeping under the doorway in a rectangular beam of terror. Aural terrors abound when confronted with The House In The Woods.
“Distributor Logo #1” could be the scratched, almost faded lines that assail the television screens when inserting an old, early 80’s VHS tape, a horror b-movie featuring footage that has previously been kept at bay…until now. Sadako isn’t going to come out of the well and out of your television screen, but The House In The Woods is a doorway all of itself. a portal into a living nightmare, and the copyright belongs to oh/ex/oh.
‘Oh shit, it’s a house’, aren’t exactly the words you’d want to hear when you’ve been trekking through the woods, lost for days on end, seemingly running around in circles and stalked nightly by an invisible presence. It’s almost as if the house wants to be found; it wants you to discover it. Effigies of stick-men hang suspended from tall trees, staring a subtle, all-seeing eye of your approaching doom. Snapped twigs resemble the broken hope of ever finding your way out.
Placed under a tagline of Witch Drone, the atmosphere that emanates never feels settled – they crawl under your skin, possessively, and into your susceptible subconscious. Instead of the classic cabin, it’s the house that pulls you in, staring with windows for blank, glass eyes and an open door inviting you in. Rated R, or even banned in some countries, this is the Evil Dead of drone. And haunted drones are aplenty – “The Gristlehurst Boggart” and “Stay Asleep” conjure up waves of subtle dread, coasting along through the woodlands as if it was the entity itself, echoing eerie noises into the woods as it taunts the lost teenagers.
In “Waiting Room To Hell”, a failing drone seems to be subsiding, slipping outside of any physical reality and into the supernatural dimension; the drone frequencies sit so low that they spiral inwards, dead to hope, but it’s also another monolithic, chilling construction of drone. Like the classic horror soundtracks, it stays with you long after viewing, of remembering a specific scene that continues to haunt years later. Our feature presentation leads onto “The Church Hearing 1977”, where the slowly revolving atmosphere is overwhelmed by lakes of oozing drone. As you approach the light, the baying cries of a werewolf can be heard prowling the moors, scenting out opportunity – and a couple of lost American tourists. It’s a slice of vintage horror that has been unleashed and then tamed by oh/ex/oh. As the horror is finally revealed, you realise you can’t go home again.
All rights reserved. (James Catchpole)
a closer listen 