Editorials
‘Housebound’: Home Is Where the Haunt Is [Horrors Elsewhere]
Horrors Elsewhere is a recurring column that spotlights a variety of movies from all around the globe, particularly those not from the United States. Fears may not be universal, but one thing is for sure — a scream is understood, always and everywhere.
Standing trial for robbery is just the beginning of Kylie Bucknell’s troubles in the 2014 film, Housebound. In light of the defendant’s repeat offenses, a judge decides Kylie needs stability; something maybe her mother can provide. Others in the same boat would be relieved to serve their jail time with family and in the comfort of their childhood home. Yet judging from Kylie’s reaction as she hears the details of her sentence, going back home is nothing short of terrifying.
Gerard Johnstone’s directorial debut starts off like a lot of other horror movies; someone returns to their hometown. Of course Kylie (Morgana O’Reilly) is not visiting Bulford of her own accord. For the next eight months, Kylie is left in the care of her mother Miriam (Rima Te Wiata) and stepfather Graeme (Ross Harper). The transition is not easy given the visible friction between daughter and mother, and the presence of what may very well be a ghost in the house. Kylie’s search for clues with probation officer Amos (Glen-Paul Waru) soon reveals this is no ordinary haunting.
The horror elements come into play after Miriam plants the idea that the house has always been haunted. Kylie is skeptical, but the mother reminds the daughter she used to feel similarly growing up. This is where Miriam does Kylie a disservice; she fills her head with superstition. And with the protagonist under house arrest, she now spends her time trapped inside with a supposed ghost. Her cabin fever eventually gives rise to obsession and paranoia. Ordinary sounds — the house settling or cats crying in the middle of the night — are suddenly proof of the uncanny. Amos’ convenient hobby of ghost hunting only adds to the problem.
Housebound comes from a long line of horror movies that combine comedy with terror. This enduring trend of humorous horror is especially popular in New Zealand, and it took off after Peter Jackson’s earlier films, Bad Taste and Braindead. Although nothing in Housebound is all that spine-chilling, Johnstone still manages to create and sustain tension in spite of the wacky atmosphere. Those intervening doses of humor throughout also soften the story’s heaviness without removing any of the emotional value or effect.
Families are a timeless subject in horror. While other narratives have a tendency to be serious or abrasive with the topic, Housebound is lighthearted but also not shallow. Moments punctuated by quips, wit or slapstick still have some emotional weight to them. This includes Kylie’s simmering resentment as she hears her mother’s every word, Miriam’s passive aggressiveness after discovering her daughter has done something thoughtless again, and Kylie feeling out of sorts when on the receiving end of genuine affection. The characters’ inability to express their emotions is both amusing and relatable.
Kylie is not the easiest character to root for. She is indignant, stubborn and selfish. It is never completely laid out why Kylie begrudges her mother so much, but a good guess would be her absent father. Kylie’s court-ordered therapist Dennis (Cameron Rhodes) hits a bit of a sore spot when he brings up her estranged father, who moved away years ago and started a new life with his new family. Logic suggests Kylie would be mad at him, but as is so often the case in these divorces, the child takes their anger out on the parent who stayed. Kylie gives in to bad habits when she finds out the truth about the house’s origins and blames her mother for everything. Miriam, however, is naturally stoic. She could have been more truthful with her daughter, but whether or not it was intentional, Miriam offered herself as a target for Kylie’s spite as well as a distraction from the pain of losing a father.
Normally viewers might feel disappointed when a horror movie changes course midway through. As soon as Kylie starts chasing ghosts and digging up the past in the second act, Housebound restates its own mystery. This entails a protracted hunt for answers, which at times makes for a less spirited story until the conclusion. As an alternative, the plot shakeup adds to the themes of family and acceptance and sets the stage for a gory tour of the house.
Kylie and Miriam’s strained relationship slowly but surely improves. They are on better terms at the end, but the road getting there is fraught with bumps. At first their clashes are routine; Kylie always undermines her mother’s optimism and refuses to listen to her advice. Things then escalate as Kylie’s investigation becomes more intense and involved. Originally, Miriam protects Kylie when the police insinuate she had something to do with Dennis’ bizarre injury. No matter how unkind Kylie is toward her and everyone else, Miriam still wants to help her daughter. That maternal bond is later challenged once Kylie’s erratic behavior causes accidental harm to someone close to them. At last though, a disheartened Miriam manages to come out in full support of her child when everything becomes especially hairy in Housebound.
Baked on top of the central family drama is a ghost story that takes some considerable turns. The basic concept is familiar, but Johnstone’s approach is refreshing, genuinely funny and fairly consistent in tone. Housebound is yet another win for Kiwi horror.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
You must be logged in to post a comment.