You may have seen the poster plastered around town already, populated by a laundry list of accolades. From its warm reception at Austin’s South By Southwest Festival; to its Best Film win at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival; to the howling audience at its New Zealand premiere, Gerard Johnstone’s infectious horror-comedy Housebound seems to be a favourite everywhere it screens.
Gerard Johnstone between takes Photo: Supplied
A slick, savvy ghost-mystery stuffed with deadpan humour, the affable cheek of Housebound has proven particularly adept with broad crowd-pleasing. But following the film’s debut as SXSW, the delight wasn’t totally apparent to the Kiwi filmmaker. “The crowds were modest, so it wasn’t totally rapturous”, Johnstone says. “There was plenty of laughs and applause at the end, but I was surprised by the reviews that came out of that festival. I didn’t think it had gone down as well as it had”.
But while Johnstone is thrilled with the positive international response, for him, nothing will quite beat a home crowd. “The New Zealand premiere was the best audience experience,” he says. “1800 people laughing and screaming for 100 minutes was a filmmaker’s heaven…It’s great that it plays internationally, but there’s definitely a layer to it that’s only ever going to be appreciated by a Kiwi audience.” It’s fitting that the film’s general release should begin here, rolling out into theaters nationwide this week.
Johnstone’s playful genre-melt centers on Kylie (Morgana O’ Reilly), a stroppy juvenile delinquent placed on house arrest with her insufferably chatty mum Miriam (a delicious scene-stealer from Rima Te Wiata). Restricted to the confines of her mother’s creepy, creaky estate via ankle bracelet, she slowly stumbles upon a decade-spanning supernatural mystery – and a disquieting presence she literally cannot escape from.
Devised with as much gleeful genre subversion in mind as conventional thrills, Housebound is the type of exercise that revels in upended expectation. “I wanted to see what would happen if you took characters from a kitchen sink drama and put them in a ghost mystery,” Johnstone explains. “It seemed like a fun experiment.”
But with Housebound, laughs reign supreme; the film’s tension continually undercut by a characteristically Kiwi sense of casual detachment. Frights and comic relief have long made excellent bedfellows, and in New Zealand alone, the horror-comedy has an established history; most notably so in the early works of slapstick splatter from Sir Peter Jackson.
But while he was aware of this, Johnstone never thought too hard about the tradition while writing. “For me, it was just the fact that I was making comedy already, and [that] comedic idea lent itself to being a horror”. It was only once Johnstone got behind the camera that he realised the importance of convention. “I did some prep before we filmed, but it was difficult changing hats from writer to director”, he says. “I didn't put the directing hat on until it was much too late. Thankfully, we only got through half the film in our initial shoot – so while the producer figured out how he was going to pay for the rest, I watched every decent horror every made.”
I wanted to see what would happen if you took characters from a kitchen sink drama and put them in a ghost mystery. It seemed like a fun experiment.
Johnstone cites everything from Dario Argento’s Suspiria to J.A Bayona’s The Orphanage as key fixtures in his crash course. But there was one thing particularly distinct about this hurried education: he watched most of the films on mute. “That's the best way to learn about directing action or horror – concentrating on one thing at a time. So it was visuals, then music, then sound design.”
Johnstone turned to the beats of filmmakers like Mike Leigh, Alexander Payne and The Coen Brothers for comedic influence – but with the sound on, of course. While the humor most dominant in the film is distinctly of our own cultural sensibility, one can certainly see the latter siblings’ attitudes to genre all over Johnstone’s work. There’s a reverence and affection for its forebears, but also a tendency to wriggle out from beneath every trope, to pummel it into something surprising.
But as much as Johnstone will admit that Housebound is tailored specifically for a Kiwi sensibility, he was also conscious of his film offering that rare slice of national cinema that isn’t concerned with our cultural identity. Indeed, Housebound does feel bereft of that familiar impulse to explore what it means to be a New Zealander that defines so much of our output. In fact, one of the film’s only allusions to race or culture is clearly played for laughs, in a scene where Te Wiata’s character Miriam spews some brazenly ignorant racial generalisations at the dinner table.
“When Rima’s character became casually racist, I loved it more because of that fact,” Johnstone says. “We don’t do racist comedy here much. People are too scared. I grew up with an extended Maori family and a lot of Maori friends, so I’m a bit fearless in that regard. And I’m sure it’s going to get me in trouble at some point.”
But one outcome of this brazen – some might say foolhardy – disregard for political correctness is that Johnstone shrugs off most of the self-consciousness that New Zealand films so often find themselves prone to. “I love Once Were Warriors, Whale Rider and The Dark Horse,” he says. “But when people try and mimic these films, they completely miss the point of what it is that makes them so special.”
Next on the agenda for Johnstone is a re-make of cult Kiwi television show Terry Teo for TV2. Currently putting finishing touches on the script, he asserts that all of the fun-loving spirit of his latest feature will be present in this next endeavor. “I’m eschewing cultural identity again for the sake of solid entertainment,” he laughs. “It's going to be fun.”
In the meantime, the snappy, self-aware blast of Housebound can be visited, and re-visited, in New Zealand cinemas from today.
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