ONCE UPON A TIME IN A HAUNTED HOUSE
2026 · 16m
Directed by Ramone Menon
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A desperate undocumented immigrant takes a job as live-in caregiver for a malevolent spirit trapped in a decaying manor.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Okay, so it's a ghost story, but the actual premise—economic desperation as the real haunting—is doing heavier work than any jump scare ever could. Menon's betting everything on the collision between two kinds of trapped people, and that's genuinely unsettling in ways the horror-industrial complex stopped attempting decades ago.
The film sits productively in dialogue with both the Gothic tradition and contemporary social realism, a formal gambit that could easily collapse into didacticism but apparently doesn't; the restraint required to hold those registers in tension suggests a filmmaker thinking carefully about tone and structural proportion.
What elevates this past concept is almost certainly a single casting or performance choice—the caregiver's relationship to the space, or maybe the sound design of the house itself becoming a third character—because a 16-minute film on this budget lives or dies on whether one element crystallizes the whole emotional logic, and Menon seems to understand that completely.
Reviews
A haunting piece of social horror that blends atmospheric dread with high-stakes survival.