Picture a quintessential housewife. In positively 50s fashion, she’s a dress and apron-wearing love bomber that just wants you to have a healthy, home-cooked lunch and will have the house spick-n-span just in time for dinner. Housewife turns that trope into a freakish nightmare in just four minutes.
When a woman accidentally cuts herself on her forgotten dollhouse, she’ll unwittingly awaken Housewife, a primordial monster with strange ideas about how to care for her children. Based on the character created by Miranda Parkin.
Housewife, IMDB
You would think that finding something odd or forgotten in your storage space would prompt you to immediately throw it out for fear of it being haunted or possessed or something. But no, the woman in this story finds a dollhouse that — when bonded with a drop of blood from a pricked finger — provides love and comfort in a really scary way. With a doubled, inhuman voice and flare with a kitchen knife, who knows how strict this monstrous housewife will be.
I am pleasantly surprised– and downright impressed — at the monster at the center of Housewife‘s story. I was not expecting the figure we see at all: the red and blue dollhouse perched atop a stereotypical homemaker’s body. With the aforementioned voice and gaping, empty void for a face (or “mouth,” perhaps), she is even more terrifying than what I could have imagined myself.
Of course, that’s not the only thing to be afraid of. Finding weird items in your attic is one thing. Then a dollhouse coming alive is another. And when that sentient dollhouse kills someone and serves them up in a brown paper bag, it can only be the first stop on the crazy train of mommy issues. Housewife makes the misogynistic, outdated version of June Cleaver into a fantastical horror ripped from the brain of an insane Tupperware seller. I can only imagine what it would be like to make this housewife mad.
And if that wasn’t enough, Housewife was filmed on grainy 35mm film, giving it an eerie, yet nostalgic look; feeling like the past and present combined together, this short is midcentury meets modern meets our childhood… something perpetually feels wrong. This must be what happens when analog horror meets Lovecraftian creatures.
Housewife is short, but it hits hard. A hallucination turned horrifying, Housewife turns a cozy home into a slaughterhouse and a usually loving figure into something abominable. Watch… and enjoy.
Watch Housewife now on Crypt TV’s YouTube channel. Follow writer/director Greta Guthrie on Instagram for more!
