10 More Horror Movie Characters You Trusted (But Shouldn't Have)

Terrific New Zealand horror-comedy Housebound revolves around a troubled woman, Kylie Bucknell (Morgana O'Reilly), who is held under house arrest for attempted robbery just as said house appears to become a hub for paranormal activity.

As part of her sentence, Kylie has to meet with a counselor, Dennis (Cameron Rhodes), who is initially presented as an extremely foppish and harmless sort - somebody you'd expect to be a victim rather than a perpetrator.

He doesn't take Kylie's claims about a supernatural presence seriously and is basically just a wet blanket of a human being, albeit hardly the sort of character anyone would finger to be the real villain. But the third act reveals that Dennis has been full-on gaslighting Kylie all along, and that as a younger man he brutally murdered a woman, Elizabeth, in the very house where Kylie is trapped.

As soon as Kylie figures this out, Dennis drops any and all pretense, letting his psychopathic freak flag fly as he tries to kill Kylie and her mother Miriam (Rima Te Wiata).

Satisfyingly, though, Dennis ends up having an electric carving fork stabbed into his jaw, which when powered by a car battery causes his head to explode in a fountain of gore. Lovely.