Horror Homeroom

a creepy doll stands adjacent to a dollhouse in the movie poster for Doll House (2020)

Posted on January 4, 2026

CFP: Dolls and Their Houses

Steeped in the primal discomfort of the uncanny, dolls and the houses they inhabit are an especially fluid and perennially creepy motif within popular culture. Revealing historical and on-going tensions between what it means to be human and what it means to only perform those attributes, these remnants of childhood carry with them specific cultural messaging that has been particularly fertile ground for the horror genre.

For special issue #10 (spring 2026) of Horror Homeroom, we’re diving into the world of creepy dollhouses and their inhabitants. We’re interested in abstracts about the dolls and dollhouses of horror – or of horror adjacent narratives (thrillers, mysteries, science fiction etc.).

You can focus on literal dollhouses, from the sublime (Hereditary) to the wonderfully ridiculous (Amityville Dollhouse, Doll House) – and everything in between (e.g., The Twilight Zone, Betty Ren Wright’s The Dollhouse Murders, Creepshow’s “The House of the Head,” Tales from the Hood’s “KKK Comeuppance,” Doctor Who’s “Night Terrors,” The Lovely Bones, Sharp Objects). Think also miniatures and dioramas. And you can be creative: dolls and mannequins inevitably turn the places they live into de facto dollhouses – so what are the implications of this uncanny move? Read more

Posted on December 13, 2025

Snakes and Strap-Ons: Queer Subtext in Ken Russell’s Lair of the White Worm

Guest Post

Ava DeVries

There is a surprising lack of academic criticism surrounding the absolute fever dream of a film that is The Lair of the White Worm (1988). Ken Russell’s folk horror-comedy is often overlooked within discussions of the genre, as academics turn instead to more widely recognized folk horror classics like The Wicker Man (1973) or newer films like Midsommar (2019). The Lair of the White Worm is a ridiculous, campy, psychosexual masterpiece – but, most of all, it’s absolutely saturated in queer themes.

Loosely inspired by Bram Stoker’s final novel of the same name (published in 1911), The Lair of the White Worm stars a pre-Doctor Who Peter Capaldi as archeologist Angus Flint, Hugh Grant as the dashing Lord James D’Ampton, Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis as sisters Eve and Mary Trent, and Amanda Donohoe as the iconic femme fatale Lady Sylvia Marsh.

Posted on December 3, 2025

A Must-Watch for the Holiday Season: Kier-La Janisse’s The Occupant of the Room

Dawn Keetley

It’s the holiday season – and Severin Films has released a new episode of The Haunted Season entitled The Occupant of the Room (an adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s 1909 story of the same name), now streaming on Shudder.[1] It’s a wonderful film, a perfect eerie ghost story – better, to be honest, than most of the recent fare in BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series. My review, below, includes a brief interview with director and writer, Kier-La Janisse.

Algernon Blackwood’s “The Occupant of the Room” is about a school teacher who arrives late at night at an inn in the Alps, the “Dent de Midi,” only to find there are no rooms available.[2] He is eventually offered a room that is not quite unoccupied – that is to say, it is possibly occupied. The porter tells the teacher that “the real occupant of the room” is an English woman who had insisted on venturing out alone into the Alps two days ago. She hadn’t returned (yet), but may do so at any moment. She may be the “real” occupant of the room, but she’s not the actual occupant of the room – hence its uncertain status as part occupied, part unoccupied. That the room is a liminal space defines the story, which takes place only within its confines, as one occupant, the school teacher, deals with the lingering presence of the other, his possible predecessor but also possibly successor. As Blackwood writes, in a crucial sentence, “One moment the atmosphere seemed subtly charged with a ‘just left’ feeling – the next it was a queer awareness of ‘still here’ that made him turn cold and look hurriedly behind him.”

Posted on November 29, 2025

M3GAN 2.0: One of the Most Interesting Horror Films of 2025

Dawn Keetley

Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 (2025) has mostly not been identified as a horror film. On IMDb, it’s labeled “thriller,” “action” and “sci-fi.” On Wikipedia, it’s “science fiction action.” This is after the first film in the franchise, Johnstone’s M3GAN (2022), was widely dubbed a “science fiction horror” film. Stephen Parthimos’s review on Everything Movie Reviews seems representative of the reaction to M3GAN 2.0 when he writes that there is “not a single second of horror in sight” and that watching the film, and “gradually realising they’ve abandoned any and all sense of horror is utterly baffling.” Ahead of the film’s release, Johnstone promised fans that his sequel would include horror: “Even though we are in action-comedy territory, the horror DNA is absolutely still there.” Upon release, however, it became clear that most viewers didn’t see it, though debate ensued on Reddit.

Posted on November 25, 2025

Listening to Sensitive Characters in Horror Movies

Guest Post

Kati Aakkonen

Alice: Why don’t we just hike out of here? Get out. Right Now!

Bill: It’s 10 miles to the nearest crossroads. Steve will be back soon. We can use his jeep if we need to get help. Don’t worry. There’s probably some stupid explanation for this.

Alice: Like what?!

Bill: We’ll be laughing about this tomorrow, I promise.

Friday the 13th, (1:01:35)

This exchange from Friday the 13th (1980) follows a typical pattern of conversation in horror movies: one character is worried and suspicious that something strange is going on and another character dismisses this worry and refuses to notice the signs of trouble. This is an acknowledged trope in horror, and often seems to primarily irritate writers (Cheung 2022; Jacobs 2020). But one of my favorite things about horror fiction is that part of its DNA seems to be the realization that we should listen to the sensitive, intuitive and usually marginalized characters, even though this is rarely made explicit. Depicting incredulity can be frustrating but I think it taps into real fears many of us have to live with.