House of Ka
A Victorian gothic thriller about a woman unraveling an ancient curse to save her father — and wrestling with who gets to own a woman's body, even in death.
The Setup: What Happens When Your Father's Illness Has No Name
Your father falls gravely ill. Doctors can't explain it. No one knows how to treat it. That's where House of Ka begins — with Margaret Trelawny, a young aristocrat played by Allison Megroet, watching her father slip away while conventional medicine fails completely. She enlists a skeptical lawyer (Jeffrey Shawn Miller) to help her dig into the one thread that makes sense: an ancient Egyptian mummy her father had recently acquired. Together they uncover something far older and far darker than either expected — and something that refuses to stay dead.
The film doesn't rush. It builds dread through candlelit rooms and half-spoken warnings, trusting you'll lean in rather than demanding it announce every scare. At 87 minutes, it's lean without feeling truncated. No bloat.
Where to watch: House of Ka is available to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube Movies, and Fandango at Home. It landed digitally on January 27, 2026, through Freestyle Digital Media — a relatively quiet release for a film that deserves more eyes than it's gotten so far.
Why This Adaptation Matters: Bram Stoker's Feminist Reframing
Writer-director Josie Eli Herman adapted this from Bram Stoker's 1903 novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars, a book that's always lived in Dracula's shadow despite containing some of Stoker's most genuinely unsettling ideas about death, resurrection, and the Western obsession with ancient Egypt. Herman's version does something smarter. She reframes the source material through a pointed feminist lens, using the mummy narrative to interrogate who gets to own a woman's body — even in death.
That's not subtle. But it gives the film a thematic spine that the original novel, written in a very different era, largely lacks. What's striking is how deliberately Herman anchors the horror in bodily autonomy rather than simple monster-movie dread. The mummified queen isn't just a supernatural threat — she's a figure who's been studied, catalogued, transported across continents, and displayed, with no one ever asking if that was right. Margaret's investigation forces her to confront the same logic applied to living women in Victorian society. The parallel feels earned.
The production was crowdfunded, which explains both its modest scale and the creative autonomy that shaped it. Low budgets in horror aren't a liability — they force filmmakers to rely on atmosphere, performance, and writing rather than spectacle.
The Craft: What Makes It Work Despite Everything
Megroet carries a lot of weight in the lead role. She holds it together even when the film's TV-movie production values threaten to flatten the tension. The supporting cast — Yesmeen Mikhail and Brittany Batell — add texture, while Miller's lawyer provides the skeptical counterweight to Margaret's increasingly desperate certainty.
Here's what gets me: there's a scene involving the examination of the mummy's chamber that manages genuine unease without a single jump scare. Just framing. Silence. The particular horror of something ancient being where it shouldn't be. Not flashy. It works.
Early viewers on Letterboxd tend to land somewhere around "entirely okay Victorian gothic," which sounds like faint praise but is actually a reasonable description of a film that does what it sets out to do without overreaching. Nobody's calling this a masterpiece — the 0/10 on IMDb (from just 15 votes) and the complete absence of critic scores on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic tell you the film hasn't broken through mainstream awareness yet. Genre outlets like Rue Morgue have covered it, but mainstream critical coverage hasn't arrived, and honestly, hard to say if it will.
Where to Find It + How to Track Availability
If you're hunting for a film like this — something that doesn't trend but quietly delivers — Movie OTT aggregates real-time streaming availability across Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and other platforms, so you can check current pricing in one place instead of hopping between services. That matters for an indie release; the price varies week to week, and knowing where it's cheapest saves frustration.
House of Ka is currently rentable or purchasable on all major digital platforms through Freestyle Digital Media. Cable on-demand services carry it too, though availability varies by region.
Should You Actually Watch This?
If you're drawn to period horror that takes its ideas seriously — and don't need a massive budget to buy into a story — this earns a recommendation. It won't satisfy viewers looking for relentless scares or prestige-television production values, but as a lean, thematically focused indie that treats its source material as a starting point rather than a ceiling, it's worth 87 minutes of your evening.
Fans of Victorian gothic fiction — or anyone interested in how contemporary filmmakers are reworking classic texts through modern lenses — will find it rewarding. If you liked The Woman in Black or The Little Stranger, this occupies similar territory: atmospheric, character-driven, less concerned with jump scares than with the slow creep of wrongness.
One practical note: watch it in a single sitting. It's short enough that breaking it up loses momentum, and the dread accumulates better when you don't step away.
