‘Only English Around Here, Darlin’: His House, Anti-location and the Social (Sur)Realist Horror of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK

Contextualised against the backdrop of Brexit, populist nationalism, the Windrush scandal and, most directly, the ‘refugee crisis’, His house (Director Remi Weekes, 2020) follows Bol and Rial Majur as they flee South Sudan as asylum seekers rehoused in England. Applying and revising ‘social surrealism’ to the film’s aesthetical construction of spatial dislocation, lostness and disorientation affectively felt by refugees, this paper reads His house’s socio-political commentary through a postcolonial Gothic lens. Specifically, the film’s unnamed and unknown English town creates an ‘anti-location’ that engenders immobility and dread in the Majurs. Thus, as genre cinema His house’s horror vérité positions audiences to understand and feel the horrors of refugeedom, giving ‘voice’ to those seeking asylum in a way that mainstream British media routinely neglects and/or demonises, and that speaks to the racist xenophobic hostility those under
forced migration experience when navigating relocation in the UK.