Girl on the Third Floor is a skin-crawling horror movie about home improvement

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. This review comes from the 2019 SXSW Interactive Festival. It’s hard finding new ways to haunt a house. And Girl on the Third Floor, a horror film that premiered at 2019’s SXSW Interactive Festival, doesn’t make a point of trying. It hits the classic beats of the genre, largely established by Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House: a protagonist with a troubled past moves into a grand but dilapidated old home with a dark secret, then finds a malevolent force dredging up his personal demons. Instead of trying to push narrative limits, Girl on the Third Floor uses predictability to generate suspense. It draws the... Continue reading…