Halloween has arrived, and it’s a shame that the Babadook likely won’t be haunting your dreams. Yet. Hell, maybe consider yourself lucky The Babadook won’t be released until November 28^th stateside. You might not be ready. When it does, the critical darling (a phrase rarely trotted out for horror fare) whose performance at film festivals this year was the cinematic equivalent of Madison Bumgarner in this year’s World Series, will be the next The Ring or Paranormal Activity, a freaky phenomenon. Except it’s much better than either of those movies, and it’s not even close.

The Australian horror film from writer-director Jennifer Kent presents a parent’s worst nightmare, and I don’t mean a blood-curdling monster, though there is that. I’m referring to a son who’s the ultimate pain in the ass, one so troublesome, crazy and annoying that he’s almost impossible to love. The Babadook showcases a realistic mother/son scenario where you can forgive a mother for wanting to give up…ON A SIX YEAR OLD BOY. Even before Mister Babadook starts crawling around the chimney and walls of her drab house, Amelia (Essie Davis) can’t sleep, because Samuel is the nightmare. Samuel (Noah Wiseman) is obsessed with monsters and magic, but not in a cute, healthy Monster Kid sort of way. He’s aggressive and violent with his peers, “the boy” who gets kicked out of school. He’s just as much a monster as the Babadook, one that has left Amelia an exhausted husk who can hardly stand up right at work, tending for senior citizens with dementia. Is there someone with a sadder existence than Amelia? Nope; Amelia can’t even bare to celebrate Sam’s birthday, because it falls on the anniversary of the death of her husband and Sam’s father, who died driving a pregnant Amelia to the hospital.

While the introduction of the Babadook elicits eye rolling on the surface, it sparks nothing but dread on screen: Sam finds a blood red pop-up book called “Mister Babadook” on his shelves and forces his mother to read it before bed (“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of…the Babadook”). Before long, he’s in tears, another night of sleep down the drain, and the book produces a hulking, pitch black beast with a top hat and shiny, dark claws that would make Edward Scissorhands soil his shorts.

As Samuel gets worse, Amelia’s life deteriorates even further (somehow), and the Babadook takes over. Essie Davis (The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions) delivers one of the most fearless, captivating, through-the-ringer-and-then-some performances I’ve seen in a horror movie ever, let alone this year. She’s loving, embarrassed, distraught, exhausted, malevolent, murderous and insane, many times in the same scene. Essie’s work is right there with Alexandra Essoe’s feral performance in Starry Eyes, two carnal creations that would make the immortal Isabelle Adjani proud.

Kent displays stunning and admirable restraint in the amount she shows the Babadook, making it even scarier when we actually do. Plus, I don’t know if I could’ve handled more of the monster. Not since I was a ten year old watching The Exorcist was I more tempted to just close my eyes, knowing it’d be better for my long term health. But I didn’t want to miss a frame of this thrilling freakshow.

I’m struggling to come up with a creepier creature than the Babadook, a testament to the movie’s practical FX and sound wizardry. If Essie Davis is the film’s MVP, its sound is the glue that makes everything around it better. The sound production, whether it’s the beast’s unnerving skittering movements, its unearthly booming voice, or its clinking claws (holy snikt), inspiring greater depths of fear.

While it never should be in doubt, movies like The Babadook prove horror’s legitimacy even while Ouija gives credence to the genre’s unfair scorn and derision (and becomes a box office success anyways). If there’s any justice, The Babadook will be scaring the crap out of a large mainstream audience come Thanksgiving time. Along with Starry Eyes and Housebound, The Babadook towers over the rest of the horror landscape in 2014 and beyond.

The Babadook arrives On Demand and in limited release on November 28th.

Kylie Bucknell (Morgana O’Reilly) is a perpetually pissed off juvenile delinquent, except she’s closer to 30 than high school. Treatment facilities have failed time and time again, so she’s sentenced to eight months of house arrest with her mother Miriam (Rima Te Wiata, MVP) and her “cabbage in a polo” husband Graeme (Ross Harper) in Bulford, a small town off the Twin Coast Highway in New Zealand. Worse even than the fact that the house is most definitely haunted? It’s still got dial-up internet.

It’s like a retro Disturbia (but not quite Rear Window) meets every haunted house movie ever. Or so writer-director Gerard Johnstone would have you believe. We’re immediately put on notice that we’re getting something entirely more clever, funny and original than that constrictive description by how Kylie gets into this mess. The movie opens with Kylie and her partner in crime robbing an ATM. The man attacks it with a sledgehammer relentlessly, until it bounces back and absolutely decks him across the temple. As Kylie tries to make her getaway in the parking lot, her car immediately stalls out on the first curb she attempts to drive over. That’s exactly what you’ve always wanted to see: getaways never happen as smoothly as they appear in the movies, and Housebound is as keenly aware of movie stereotypes as the viewer is.

Most of the time. Kylie is antagonistic, angry and we know she’s troubled because she’s a chain-smoker. Just once, I’d like a criminal/malcontent to NOT smoke. That’d be practically revolutionary. Anyways, Kylie is kind of the worst: she eats all of her Mom’s meatloaf, which was supposed to be dinner for everyone. And she doesn’t even let Miriam watch her stories! Miriam is a folksy, incessant and mindless gossiper, the would-be lead in Fargo: New Zealand. In other words: she’s an unbearable delight.

But Kylie and Miriam have more pressing matters than meatloaf, as sacrilegious as that sounds. Weird and spooky things begin to happen, and quickly escalate, as one would expect when the cameras start rolling. It’s got all the elements we’ve become indoctrinated to and then some: Kylie’s parole officer Amos (Gabriel IglesiasGlen-Paul Waru) is the enthuastic and bumbling believer in the paranormal. Kylie has to endure painful therapy sessions with Dennis (Cameron Rhodes, Farmer Maggot in Fellowship of the Ring). But throughout are gleefully hilarious and terrifying moments, as when Kylie takes the world’s longest pee, and each time she stops, creepy laughter haunts her overhead. And don’t get me started on the possessed teddy bear, who makes Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear look like…a normal teddy bear.

For the first half of the movie, Housebound doesn’t seem to know if it’s a parody or a well-crafted (but cliché) horror movie, but it keeps piling on. The house wasn’t formerly a bed and breakfast as assumed, it was a halfway house, and obviously there was a gruesome unsolved murder involved. The opossum-skinning neighbor is terrifying (and smokes). Kylie and Amos are on the case, but no one else believes the sinister plot they (and the audience) become convinced of. There’s a very Hot Fuzz-like atmosphere with the police and townsfolk, frustratingly refusing to believe anything’s the matter despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Thankfully there are enough intriguing nuggets to tide you over until the shift when Housebound takes a turn, and it all was misdirection, with the story expanding, contracting, twisting and turning into a hilarious, bloody romp. The last half hour of the movie is pure horror movie bliss, giving the cheese grater and laundry hamper their chance to shine in the annals of the home invasion subgenre.

Housebound starts as an increasingly knowing horror movie, the creaks and crashes in the house practically accompanied with a wink and jolts of humor and terror for good measure. And just when you’re settling into the pattern, Johnstone’s film becomes one of the most entertaining, surprising and delightfully insane movies of the year, proof that there will always be more haunted house stories to tell.

HOUSEBOUND arrives in theaters, VOD and OnDemand on October 17^th.