Every House is Haunted
2023 · 13m · USA
Directed by Bryce McGuire
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tender
A young couple moves into a haunted house on purpose, and when Maya is left alone, she bonds with the resident ghosts — finding healing and a lost part of herself through their company in this darkly humorous deconstruction of the ghost-story genre.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Couple buys a haunted house on purpose and the ghosts are nice. Inverting the haunted-house premise into wellness-coded grief therapy is exactly the kind of feel-good softball I came here to dismiss.
Inverting the haunted-house premise into grief therapy is a one-line pitch I've seen before, and McGuire's subsequent Night Swim feature suggests competence over revelation. The Short of the Week framing is broad; my expectations are modest.
Flipping haunted-house tropes into a feel-good grief comedy at 12:34 means the genre subversion has to land in the casting and tonal control, not the premise. 108K views on Short of the Week says the deconstruction is playing — Bryce McGuire pre-Night Swim.
Reviews
Darkly humorous with some incredible visuals that both scare and warm the heart, Every House is Haunted is a refreshing reimagining of what it means to tell a ghost story.
McGuire goes for something far deeper than mere shocks and starts in this thoughtful, sensitive exploration of a woman who has suffered a tragic loss.
Festivals
- SXSW 2023
- Fantasia International Film Festival 2023
- El Paso Film Festival 2023