At first blush, The Awakening (2011), a gorgeous period horror movie set in 1921 England, and Housebound (2014), a quirky horror-comedy set in modern New Zealand, have nothing in common, except that they are both ostensibly ghost stories. But both films feature compelling, women leads whose futures depend on them unlocking the pasts they’ve stubbornly tried to put behind them, and—refreshingly—great female supporting characters with their own stories who aren’t just victims or window dressing.

The Awakening is sumptuously shot and builds a sense of deep sadness and hope that’s reminiscent of Guillermo del Toro’s Devil’s Backbone. Loss, grief, and guilt hang heavily on nearly every character. The opening credits state, “Observation: Between 1914 and 1919, war and influenza claimed more than a million lives in Britain alone. Conclusion: This is a time for ghosts.”

This is a quote from the book written by the main character, Florence Carthcart (Rebecca Hall), an unconventional Cambridge-educated young woman who smokes like a chimney, occasionally wears men’s clothes, and has made a career out of debunking spiritualists in 1921 England. In the opening scenes, Florence infiltrates a fake séance, pretending to be a woman who has lost someone in the war that she wants to contact again. As each participant sets a photo on the table at the ceremony’s opening, we begin to understand what it must have been like to live in that place and that time; the war and epidemic left nobody untouched. As a ghostly face appears in the séance, Florence and some helpers deftly expose a boy behind the mirror pretending to be a ghost. Florence smiles triumphantly at having unmasked yet another fake, but she invokes not only the wrath of the charlatans, but also the participants, whose desperate hopes she’s dashed. One woman slaps Florence as she leaves.

Although she’s exhausted, she agrees to see Robert Mallory (Dominic West), a teacher from a boys’ school in Northern England. Mallory explains the school is in a large mansion that had once been a private residence, and a boy died there before the building became a school. He is contacting Florence now because there are whispers among the boys about ghosts, and one of the boys has died mysteriously. Initially Florence refuses to go with him to investigate, but something changes her mind.

Once she’s there, she uses bells, strings, photography, and instruments she appears to have created herself to solve the mystery of the boy’s death fairly quickly. But her investigation has turned up evidence she can’t explain, so when the students leave for their spring break, she stays at the school to investigate further. Once she, Mallory, the school matron Maud (Imelda Staunton), the caretaker (Joseph Mawle), and one boy, Tom (Isaac Hempstead Wright) are alone in the school, the unexplainable incidents escalate, and the more Florence tries to solve the mystery, the less it becomes about ghosts of the dead-person variety and the more it becomes about the ghosts of her past.

Florence is that rare thing in a horror film—a complicated character whose facets unfold as the plot progresses—and Rebecca Hall plays the role with a great deal of nuance and sensitivity. Florence is unapologetically smart, doesn’t suffer fools, and shows an arrogance born not out of inflated self-esteem, but rather cultivated to combat a world that desperately wants to believe in ghosts and in which the few women academics who exist are treated as pariahs. She doesn’t bother to try to make people like her, and she’s frequently dismissed as having pretentious gall for being a university-educated single woman with a career.

But something beyond academic interest and professional pride is driving her to continue her investigation at the school. After the opening séance, the triumph disappears from her face and we realize there’s more in ghost-debunking for her than just science and being proved right. It’s as if under all her professional bluster she, too, is disappointed ghosts aren’t real, and obviously she is being driven to do this work by something that even she may not understand. At the school she shows warmth and compassion for Tom and the other boys and falls in love with Robert, so we see her more vulnerable side. And as she gets deeply into the mystery and her intellect and logic clash with the progressively more surreal and terrifying experiences she’s having, we watch her face everything that’s brought her to where she is now and the fantasy she’s constructed for herself about her past. Hall manages to show us all these layers in such a way that we feel pride, exasperation, hope, desperation, and incredible sadness for the character as she grapples with who she really is at the core.

Florence’s most ardent supporter at the school and a truly fascinating supporting character is the matron, Maud, who has read Florence’s book several times and treats her with a subtly creepy kind of over-familiar reverence. When you see Imelda Staunton’s name in the opening credits of a film, it’s almost a spoiler because whatever character she’s playing—no matter how minor she may seem—is going to have an impact. Maud is reliable, supportive, and kind, but ever-watchful. Although her outward behavior is a little off, but not exceptionally so—she seems much more stable than nearly everyone around her, and the boys go to her for comfort—she has a subtly unhinged gleam in her eyes that makes Staunton’s most famous character, the self-righteous Delores Umbridge, seem like an amateur in the deranged school administrative staff department. Unlike Umbridge, however, Maud is subtle, patient, and willing to wait for her agenda to unfold. And when it does, it’s easy to see why they cast Imelda Staunton.

Housebound and its characters have little of the subtlety of The Awakening, so it’s a delightful surprise when the characters unfold and become more fleshed out as the story progresses—pretty rare for a horror film, much less a horror comedy. Morgana O’Reilly is obviously having a blast playing the rebellious, surly lead character Kylie Bucknell, a twenty-something wild child with a long history with the law and some serious demons to battle. When Kylie is busted for a failed ATM robbery, she’s fit with an ankle bracelet, sentenced to house arrest at her parents’ rambling, creaky home way out in the suburbs, and monitored to prevent her leaving by the slightly doofy Amos (Glen-Paul Waru), who also happens to be a neighbor.

New Zealanders seem to have a knack for finding both the humor and the surreal in the mundane, and this is particularly evident as Kylie starts her house arrest and is forced into close quarters with her family. Naturally, nobody is happy with this arrangement. Kylie’s mom Miriam (Rima Te Wiata) is frustrated and at the end of her rope about her daughter’s behavior, and Kylie can’t stand anything about her mother, especially her habit of prattling on nonstop about inane things. (Te Wiata does an excellent job of making us exasperated with Miriam too—at first.) Meanwhile Kylie’s stepfather Graeme (Ross Harper) says almost nothing at all.

As boredom sets in, Kylie sets about alienating everyone she comes in contact with, refusing to do anything she’s asked or let Miriam and Graeme watch their favorite TV show, picking mercilessly on her mother, and being belligerent to Amos and her social worker Dennis (Cameron Rhodes), who have the unfortunate task of checking in on her. When she overhears her mother on a call-in radio show telling the host she knows for certain ghosts are real because their house is haunted, Kylie hits the roof and taunts her mercilessly. But then Kylie starts having weird experiences of her own that scare her enough to confide in Amos, who just happens to be an amateur ghostbuster.

As things escalate, Kylie discovers the house used to be a mental institution and a girl was murdered in what is now Kylie’s bedroom. With Amos’s help, Kylie tries to solve the mystery of the girl’s murder, believing the girl is the ghost haunting the house. But things go sideways as the surprisingly layered plot progresses, until Kylie has to face up to her past and she and her mother have to stop bickering and rely on each other to survive.

The film has some genuine suspense and scares and more than one hairpin twist, but the best moments come from the friction of the dysfunctional family trying to cope with the ghost, close quarters, and each other. The whole cast is good, but Reilly and Te Wiata are particularly effective—and ultimately endearing—as mother and daughter at odds. The conversation where Kylie confronts her mother about knowing the house was an asylum and her mother mumbles back something about not being able to pass up a sale is hilarious and one of several great character development moments between the two actresses. The best part is that although most of us have never lived in a haunted former mental home, the interaction is something anyone with a family can relate to.