A Haunted House (2013)

A Haunted House arrives in 2013 with modest ambitions and a budget roughly equal to the price of a used sedan. Marlon Wayans and Essence Atkins play Malcolm and Kisha, a couple whose new home comes furnished with a demon, a camera crew's worth of shaky footage, and a running inventory of flatulence, uncooked food, and marital grievance. The film spoofs Paranormal Activity without much affection for its target, and the critics were unkind. It grossed sixty million dollars anyway. Such is the market.

The principal cast is Black, and Wayans built the project through his own production outfit, which lends the film a demographic center of gravity nobody involved felt the need to announce. It simply is. The psychic Chip, played by Nick Swardson, exists to lust after Malcolm, and the joke is his desire, not any dignity attached to it. That is the film's lone gesture toward queer content, and it lands as a punchline. Nothing is being advocated. Something is being mocked, and the distinction matters.

Everything else sits at zero, and the film seems content there. Kisha is possessed, ogled, and dragged around by a ghost; no feminist reading survives contact with the material. Race is never engaged as a subject. The environment goes unmentioned. The inability to sell a house is a gag about a soft market, not an indictment of capital. The bodily functions are deployed for disgust, not affirmation. Bobby's illiteracy is a cheap laugh. History is not revised because history is not consulted. Most tellingly, the film never lectures. It has no lesson to deliver, no audience to correct, no virtue to signal. In a decade when comedies increasingly felt obliged to justify their own existence, this one simply refuses. It is crude, witless, and entirely free of instruction, which is either a failing or a kind of integrity, depending on the cellar you keep.