The House Was Not Hungry Then

The House Was Not Hungry Then (2025).

Runtime: 93min. Shot in Angus, Scotland. Starring Bobby Rainsbury (The Crown, Filth), Clive Russell (Game of Thrones, Outlander), and Bill Paterson (Fleabag, House of the Dragon).

While searching for her estranged father, a young woman breaks into an empty house in the countryside where every visitor disappears. Now she must avoid the man posing as a real estate agent who lures victims inside.

Premiering March 22nd at Cinequest -- get tickets here.

This is a film about a house.

It’s a film about a girl with no home of her own finding an empty space to stay warm and dry for a night.

It’s a horror film; it’s about the fear of saying yes to love and to life, the pain of letting people in.

It’s a film about places, and leaving them – leaving your comfort zone, leaving home, leaving the womb, leaving your body – to become something new.

I love horror. The rules of everyday life are relaxed, and primal themes can be explored under totally new (and often very upsetting) circumstances.

Horror films are usually fast paced and frantic and up close. They’re filled with breathless subjectivity, following fearful victims as they move through new, dangerous spaces.

I wanted to do something different. I love the dry comedies of Ruben Ostlund and Roy Anderson, and the tongue in cheek morbidity of Edward Gorey. I started to think whether I could make a horror film following the same principles, of distance, of sparsity, of withholding, of brutal objectivity. No inserts, no reaction shots, nothing to tell the audience what to feel, just one single locked off wide for each room. What would that feel like, to be so still, so removed from the human life that wanders in, unsuspecting?

The answer came gradually, as I explored the idea of what would happen in this dispassionate space, and how the unseen presence would behave. A subtle but growing alienation, an omnipresent gaze; we are distant, objective to humans, but very close to something else.

We are the house. I (the writer, the director) am the house. You (the viewer) are the house. We are all the house, ceaselessly watching, feeling, and – sometimes – doing.

I fell in love with the house. The actors, Bobby and Clive, fell in love with it a little bit too, I think (though they called it “he” and “she” respectively). The character of the house, since there is no actor, no human performance interpreting it, has remained free, inhuman. It’s been remarkable for all of us, through writing and editing, sound design and colour, set decoration, to build that character together.

And the audience is just as big a part of that character: I hope you feel every drop of fear, and grief, and hope, and hunger, and all the alien emotions I can’t describe, that the house has.

Can you – like Caroline’s father – recognise yourself when the architecture of your body seems foreign, when you are just a gaze looking out from within? Can you open yourself up and let in someone new, a strange girl breaking through a window in the middle of the night? Can you finally come to terms with the fact that no home is forever, whether that’s a house or a body? Will you let yourself be born again, an absolved daughter, a doll's house?

Writer and director Harry Aspinwall is a queer Scottish/American filmmaker. He studied screenwriting and playwriting at Brown University, and he loves comedy, horror, historical and speculative fiction, and their intersections with queerness and privilege.

His competition wins and placements include Sundance Screenwriting Lab, ScreenCraft, WeScreenplay, and Fresh Voices, and he's a writer in residence emeritus at ArtFarm and The Studios of Key West. His first feature, Eradication, premiered as a Tubi original in 2022, and his fantasy parody series Orcs of New York was featured in Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, the Nerdist, Tor.com, Hypable, and Geek and Sundry (and got tweeted out by RL Stine once).

His directorial feature debut, The House Was Not Hungry Then, starring Bobby Rainsbury (The Crown, Filth), Clive Russell (Game of Thrones, Outlander), and Bill Paterson (Fleabag, House of the Dragon), is premiering at Cinequest on 3/22/25. A follow up dark comedy, Embodiment, starring Richard Kind (Argo, Curb Your Enthusiasm), Catherine Curtin (Stranger Things, Orange is the New Black), and Katie Leclerc (Switched at Birth, The Big Bang Theory), is in production.