1) Housebound (2014)
Peter Jackson may be spending more time with hobbits and gorillas these days, but the Kiwi auteur originally made a name for himself in horror with low-budget classics such as Braindead and Bad Taste. It’s taken a while, but New Zealand may have finally produced a new filmmaker worthy of Jackson’s crown, and his name is Gerard Johnstone.
Horror and comedy are notoriously hard to combine without creating something that’s too cheesy, but Johnstone’s feature film debut, Housebound, juggles the two disparate genres with ease, defying simple classification as either.
The film stars Morgana O’Reilly as a young woman sentenced to house arrest with her mother. Upon returning to her childhood home, it soon becomes clear that Kylie and her hilariously irritating family aren’t alone in the house…
Shifting effortlessly between the haunted house genre to murder mystery, comedy and more, Housebound is one of those rare horror movies that engrosses you from start to finish. Johnstone makes effective use of his small budget, putting 99% of studio horrors to shame and reminding us all that we don’t have to sit through yet another Saw when gems like this are still being made.
