Immigration is Horror
I wrote about my emigration to London through the best horror Netflix ever made.
When I moved to London in 2013, the first place I lived in was a two-story house that I shared with nine other Hungarians. It had five rooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, and an uncared-for backyard. The walls were so thin I could hear if someone farted upstairs.
My first night was terrifying. I spent it alone in a double room with a fake fireplace — which was a cruel joke since the heating was broken. I couldn’t sleep. I woke up every half an hour because of a vicious storm outside. The wind kept hitting something behind the walls. I was sure there were some mutant rats or bats inside, waiting for me to fall asleep so they can murder me.
As I later found out, there had been some other threats in the house too. I named them soul-suckers. They said things like, “You’ll never make it here,” “This is worse than home,” “You won’t find any jobs without speaking the language.” I was twenty-three, scared shitless, with limited knowledge of English.
The following morning I faced another creature — the toilet monster. I had to be really careful how I approached it — if I went too early, the smell nearly killed me. If I went too late, I had to get in line, risking the chance of my soul being sucked by one of the soul-suckers. I still have recurring nightmares about the horrifying small talks.
Even if I managed to slip into the bathroom and avoid any attack, I still had to look in the mirror. That’s when I saw my first ghost — pale and skinny with a receding hairline. He followed me here and stayed to remind me of where I came from and what I’ve been through. At the time, I didn’t know there will be others to come.
Remi Weekes’ feature debut, His House, captures what every immigrant feels when they first set foot in another country: we don’t belong here.
Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wonmi Mosaku), a refugee couple from war-torn South Sudan, can’t believe their luck: the government grants them probational asylum and assigns the two an entire house on the outskirts of London. Bol is determined to settle in and adjust to the new environment and its culture. He wants to prove they’re good people — that they deserve a chance and won’t disappoint.
His wife, Rial, is doubtful, though. She knows they’re not welcome here. She sees the contempt on people’s faces and hears it in the tone they speak. A group of black teenagers even tells her to “go back to fucking Africa” when she asks for guidance. These acquaintances feed her skepticism about whether they can stay here for good.
It doesn’t take long until the first ghost appears. Although it frightens Bol, he tries to ignore it. When his wife confronts him, he refuses to admit what he saw. But the two both know that more spirits are yet to come — they brought them from home just like I did eight years ago.
When you move to a different country, everything seems scary at first. Accents sound like ancient worship, job interviews are deathtraps, and the underground metro system is a giant octopus right from a Lovecraft novella. You feel small, insignificant, and worry that this new enormous world might swallow you in whole.
I come from a tiny Hungarian city where the population counts about thirty-one thousand souls. London’s is nine million. Yet, over time, I realized that most of my fears — those monsters above — were only shades and shadows based on my own insecurities.
I spent four months in a neighborhood where white people were a rarity. Mostly South Asians populated the area, and I had no idea what to make of them. Up to that point, my only experience with “brown” people (gypsies) in Hungary wasn’t a pleasant one. They usually wanted two things from me: cigarettes or money. But they were entirely different from the ones I encountered in England.
See, when you have zero experience with other nationalities, your brain stereotypes. It’s a subconscious reaction — especially if you lived your whole life in a country that barely has immigrants — and you don’t have much power over it. Soon, I realized that these people didn’t want to exploit me here — they simply had no reason to do so.
The racial undertones in His House are subtly portrayed but clear as day. Generations of racial hatred and oppression follow and haunt Bol and Rial as they try to settle in. For a while, racism seems to be disguised — but it’s actually everywhere. The white caseworker treats them with a slight arrogance, the pale-faced woman next door “suggests” them to leave, and a group of England-born black kids cruelly make fun of their origins.
The movie poignantly highlights the flaws of the UK’s immigration system and its treatment of people who seek refuge. Weekes tells a devastating human story through pain and tragedy about two people who would’ve done anything to flee a country that was no longer safe. Indirectly, their experience shines a new light on the core of immigrants and one of their most pressing causes to leave their home country.
Thus there are two kinds of immigrants. The ones who leave by choice and the others who do out of necessity. But, often, their reasons and motivations come from the same place: the conditions they live in are no longer sustainable either physically, mentally, or emotionally.
As immigrants, we all choose to leave seeking a better — safer, brighter, and more promising — future. But regardless of why we flee, we can never entirely escape our past.
After eight years in London, I rarely see my first ghost anymore. I needed to learn how to face him, so I could find peace. Yet there are dozens of others who haunt me to this day — ex-girlfriends, dead relatives, lost childhood friends, and other fellow countrymen. Some of them still terrifies me and might never leave if I don’t find a way to let them in and hear what they have to say.
The scares in His House are visceral and disturbing because they rise from deep emotional wounds. Our ghosts linger in the human psyche until we attain the courage to confront them head-on. We can try to escape, but we’ll carry our traumas throughout life no matter where we decide to run or move — only the setting changes.
We have to develop an inner acceptance and ability to acquire how to live with them. Otherwise, we’ll be trapped in a small and dark room where beasts are watching us from behind the walls — constant reminders of all the sins we ever committed. And no vaster threat can consume a human being faster than our own guilt.
As a strongly related piece, I also wrote about Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal here:
