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Posted on May 23, 2026

“And the Wisdom to Know the Difference”: Intimacies in Obsession (2026)

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Jered Mabaquiao

Obsession (2026) directed by Curry Barker breaks new ground for horror cinema. In its own ways, it fondly reminds me of It’s What’s Inside (2024), Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), or even Y2K (2024) with its strong attention to dialogue, soundtracks, and an atmosphere that speaks directly to older Gen Z sensibilities. I think it’s clear that a new generation of directors and writers are here to reshape fear in refreshing ways. Barker is amongst a new line of YouTuber-to-filmmaker directors, along with Danny and Michael Philippiou (Talk to Me and Bring Her Back), Mark Fischbach, aka, Markiplier (Iron Lung), Chris Stuckmann (Shelby Oaks), and Kane Parsons (Backrooms). With an approximate budget of around $750k to $1 million, Obsession’s domestic opening weekend brought in $17.2 million with a total global opening of $27 million. (Obsession is, apparently, the cheapest film to top the box office in 17 years – a record held till now by Paranormal Activity.)

Posted on May 16, 2026

Reliquary (2026) by Hannah Whitten – a Review

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Jered Mabaquiao

I grew up in a fairly conservative evangelical denomination. It was common to hear things like, “your body is a temple” or “the Holy Spirit lives in you.” This language shaped a lot of my thinking—ideas about what sort of vessel I was (or becoming) sometimes flooded my mind. Surrounded by congregants, even family members, that deliberately or implicitly, reminded me of my shortcomings, I wondered how would my soul ever be saved? While a lot of time and space has appropriately put distance between myself and these thoughts, Hannah Whitten’s Reliquary (2026) resurrects an important question for me: “What would you do to save your soul?”

A reliquary is a special container meant to hold and display holy or divine relics, often from saints or other significant religious historical figures. Whitten’s Reliquary reframes this object by asking what it means for a body to be a vessel for something divine and what happens to our “original soul” when it is replaced by something else. Whitten transforms the idea of the reliquary into something intimate and unsettling: an exploration of a body asked to house a divine terror; a relinquishing of one’s agency to a higher power. The novel’s exploration reanimates my own long-standing question of how a person learns to distinguish salvation from surrender.

Posted on May 7, 2026

Reproductive Rights in Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s Swallow

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Brandon West

Reproductive rights are human rights, says Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s 2019 thriller film Swallow. This easily-overlooked English language film uses body horror to explore the myriad fetters with which modern American society aims to constrain the female body. The film follows a young woman, protagonist Hunter (Haley Bennett), who finds herself encircled on all sides. Since Hunter is the product of rape, her “right-wing, religious right” mother views her as a burden. Meanwhile, her wealthy husband views her as a baby incubator, a means to carry on his family name. Thus isolated, Hunter seeks bodily autonomy in one of the few avenues open to her: consumption. And so, she develops an acute case of pica, consuming such materials as a marble, a thumb tack, and a battery. Yet, even in this arena, Hunter’s control proves inadequate, subject to male supervision. When Hunter’s pica causes complications with her pregnancy, her husband scolds her and hires another man to supervise her at home.

Posted on February 23, 2026

Death and “A Livin’ Man”: Ambrose Bierce, The Twilight Zone, and Jazz Icon Kenny Clarke

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Linda Ganus

A little over 60 years ago, an episode produced for the legendary science fiction TV show, The Twilight Zone, aired on February 28, 1964. It’s surprisingly apt that this anniversary falls during Black History Month; here’s why.

The episode, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, was a short French film adaption (La rivière du hibou) of Ambrose Bierce’s widely anthologized short story of the same name about a Confederate soldier facing death during the Civil War. The director, Robert Enrico, while faithfully hewing to the text of the original story published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1890, boldly added filmic elements that gave the naturalist narrative a modern 20^th-century perspective. The film eventually won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and was one of the first television episodes to win an Oscar for Best Short Subject in 1964. An uncredited performance on the film by African-American musician and jazz master, Kenny Clarke, fiercely transformed the meaning of the story by immersing the viewer in an auditory sound world imagined from enslaved Black Americans’ viewpoints. Clarke amplified their voices, left unheard in Bierce’s original.

Posted on February 5, 2026

On Transformation and Addiction in My Novel-in-Progress, Chicana Werewolf

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Daniel A. Olivas

I was no older than five or six when my parents first allowed me to watch the 1941 classic Universal Pictures horror movie, The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr., as the titular shapeshifting monster as designed by makeup artist Jack Pierce of Frankenstein fame. This was a different time—the mid-1960s—before Blockbuster Video, cable television, and streaming. So for families that lived on a tight budget, Los Angeles’s local television stations offered unending reruns of old movies from horror to noir, science fiction to westerns, and comedies to musicals. Horror, not surprisingly, sat the top of my favorites.

Unlike Universal’s Frankenstein of ten years earlier, The Wolf Man (1941)—directed by George Waggner—was not inspired by a literary classic but sprung from the creative mind of science fiction writer, Curt Siodmak, who decided to leave Germany for England in 1933 after hearing an anti-Semitic tirade by Joseph Goebbels. He established himself as a screenwriter in his adopted country and eventually made his way to the United States in 1937. Siodmak’s big break in Hollywood came in the form of his screenplay for the 1940 Universal’s film, Invisible Man Returns. His horror chops thus established, Universal tapped him to pen The Wolf Man.