13 Days to Halloween: 'Housebound' is the perfect horror film

Horror comedies are difficult to do. The two genres are often contradictory — how often, for instance, the ghosts haunting your house are funny or zombies devouring the brains of your neighbours are funny? It is especially tricky to strike the right balance in terms of tone. There have been many movies, however, which really have done that. 'Housebound', a little New Zealand picture from 2014 that can be called cult film only if the said cult consists of a few dozen people, does success is being a legitimate horror comedy. The film hardly got any attention despite premiering at a major film festival and frankly being that brilliant.

Perhaps the timing was off, and the film, written and directed by Gerard Johnstone, should have been released in a post-pandemic world. For its heroine, and our surrogate into its story, Kylie Bucknell (Morgana O'Reilly), is locked into her mother's (and previously hers) house after she unsuccessfully tries to break into an ATM machine. She is handed down a house arrest of eight months. Yes, she tried to commit a crime, but we can really empathise with her confining situation after what we have all gone through.

Kylie's mother Miriam (a magnificent Rima Te Wiata) unhelpfully and casually informs her that the house is haunted. Scoffing at the very notion, Kylie later learns to her detriment that it really might be true. Miriam says Kylie also saw right before her eyes the proof of the haunting, but she doesn't remember that. Meanwhile, she begins to learn the dark past of the house to find out about the entity (or entities) that may be responsible for things going bump in the night.

All that might make 'Housebound' sound like a dark, depressive horror flick, but what saves it from feeling like so many other films in the haunted house genre is the humour. There is a lot of it, and it is superb and usually lands. What's more, the humour never overshadows the creepy atmosphere and scare quotient — a downfall of many a horror comedy. (Agencies)

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