It may sometimes seem like the golden age of horror is dead and gone. That age, of course, varies depending on who you talk to. For some it was the era of the Universal Monsters. For others it was the boundary-pushing 70s or the practical FX-heavy 80s. All important periods with many memorable genre entries. The reality is, however, that great genre films are made every decade, and even every year. Maybe nothing has come along to displace your absolute favorites, but for others, newer films are the benchmarks.

Scream came out nearly two decades ago. At the time, you probably wouldn’t have found many fans saying that they liked it better than Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, even if they loved it. These days, it’s not uncommon at all to hear someone cite Scream as their all-time favorite. Maybe Scream isn’t the best example since it came from Wes Craven, one of the all time greats, and is responsible for changing the genre, but there are a lot of great films that come along and just stand on their own without invoking any cultural shift. And that’s just it. There are plenty that just do the only thing that they need to. In some cases that’s simply to entertain. In others, it’s to push the envelope. The best ones tend to show us something we haven’t quite seen before or at least give us a different spin on something we have. There have been a lot of genre films since the turn of the century that already show longevity, and that deserve to be celebrated and talked about for years to come, turning new people (not to mention younger generations) on to films they might have missed.

My friend and colleague John Squires has written about this subject on more than one occasion. In a recent article at HalloweenLove, he put it like this:

The horror community, like most fan communities these days, is very much driven by nostalgia, to the point that many fans are simply unable to accept that the past is in the past. There’s of course nothing wrong with revisiting childhood favorites and holding on for dear life to classic movies that you deeply love, but the horror genre only moves forward when us fans allow it to. And we must allow it to.

In the same article, he made a point about how important it is to talk about new horror movies because it helps more people discover them. It’s kind of in that spirit that I wanted to start what I plan to turn into an ongoing column, showing appreciation for some of the more modern standouts. These articles will look at modern movies that I think deserve lasting attention, why I think they do, and share various odds and ends related to the films and the people who made them.

The films I feature may be as old as the early 2000s or as recent as the current year. Either way, they’ll be from a more recent time than “the glory days”. They also MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS, so beware of that.

I’m starting with last year’s Housebound simply because I just re-watched it and it’s fresh in my mind. It’s not about Housebound being the greatest film of the century or anything. In fact, it actually just barely made my top ten of 2014, but that’s only because there were a bunch of good genre movies last year. Housebound deserves all the kudos it gets.

There’s a lot to like about Housebound. It’s often described as a horror comedy, and I suppose it is to an extent, but it never feels like the comedy overshadows the horror or vice versa. I like to think of it as just a movie with some humor and some scares, not to mention some moments of genuine suspense. I hate to put it into any genre label of a box because it deserves better than that.

Gerard Johnstone shines in his feature film debut both through his writing and his direction, and the actresses and actors help tremendously to bring out the best in both. Morgana O’Reilly is basically perfect in the role of the housebound Kylie Bucknell as is Rima Te Wiata in the role of her mother Miriam.

Likewise, actors Glen-Paul Waru, Ross Hopper, and Cameron Rhodes are fantastic in their respective roles of Amos, Graeme and Dennis. The rest of the cast is quite good as well, but these five are the standouts. They all play off of one another splendidly and add the much-needed character depth lacking in so much of today’s genre fare.

Housebound is also noteworthy in that it shows us something we haven’t seen before (at least as far as I’m aware), which is very hard to do in the haunted house sub-genre. It plays with our expectations and challenges us every time we think we know what’s going on.

I’ve seen the movie twice now, and while I greatly enjoyed it the first time, it was the subsequent viewing that really told me that we might have a modern classic on our hands. It’s hard to say for sure until enough years have passed, but while knowing what’s really going on through the entire duration of the film takes away the mystique of the first viewing,  it doesn’t take away the enjoyment. That’s a key reason as to why I think Housebound has legs and that it will remain beloved in the years and decades to come. Even being aware of all the spoilers, it’s still wholly entertaining.

The most common complaint I saw about the film in reading various reviews was that it went on a bit too long, and quite frankly, I kind of felt the same way on the first viewing, but on the second, I actually appreciated that it takes its time and doesn’t feel the need to rush to come in under 90 minutes. It’s only 107 minutes, so we’re not talking The Lord of the Rings here anyway.

And by the way, a lot of people were comparing the film to early Peter Jackson films, which is a complete misrepresentation of the film in my opinion, and bound to set some viewers up for disappointment. Like Peter Jackson’s films, Housebound does hail from New Zealand and does blend horror and humor, but it’s really a completely different kind of movie in spite of that. It’s certainly not a splatter film despite an appropriate amount of gore.

I think that second viewing helps eliminate any of the baggage the viewer brings with them to the first one as well, and just lets you enjoy it for what it really is.

Housebound clearly won many of its audience members over, making most (including my own) horror top ten lists in 2014. Earlier this year, it was even announced that New Line is remaking it for America. We haven’t heard much about that since the original announcement, but Johnstone was said to be producing with someone else in the director’s seat.

Those who really enjoyed Housebound might be interested in knowing more about what else Johnstone is doing or has done. Before Housebound, he co-created and wrote for New Zealand sitcom The Jaquie Brown Diaries in which a real-life titular TV personality played a fictionalized version of herself. Here in the U.S., it ran on Logo. Johnstone has since been working on another show called Terry Teo, which is listed as in post-production. The description for that (per IMDb) is, “A savvy teenager and former gang prospect uses his street smarts to solve crime.”

Beyond Housebound, these two shows are pretty much his only known credits as writer/director.

The bulk of Housebound star Morgana O’Reilly’s work has also been in television, including Neighbours, This is Littleton, Sunny Skies, and Nothing Trivial, but you can also see her in the 2012 drama We Feel Fine, directed by Jeremy Dumble and Adam Luxton.

An Interesting Bit of Trivia…

I don’t know if you’ve ever checked out Film School Rejects’ “Commentary Commentary” features, which pull out numerous interesting tidbits from films’ DVD commentaries (if you haven’t, you should), but you can find one of those for Housebound here. Or you could just buy the disc and listen to it for yourself. Either way, from that we learn an interesting bit of trivia in that a Wet&Forget ad that is featured on the radio in the film was actually product placement. The Motorola “Hello Moto” ringtone that is featured prominently (and quite effectively I might add) was actually just a replacement for a song by Sisters of Mercy the production couldn’t afford the rights to.