Horror Homeroom

Posted on November 4, 2025

To Sleep with Demons: A Review of A Muse by Kieran Saint Leonard

Guest Post

by Patrick Zaia

In 1844, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer penned a curious and somewhat controversial essay titled ‘The Metaphysics of Sexual Love’. With devilish and gloomily elegant prose, Schopenhauer’s essay articulates a theory of sexual love and desire that is negative, irrational, and perilously self-destructive to all those who experience it. In one of the essay’s more bombastic sections, Schopenhauer’ describes the sexual instinct thusly:

“Every day it brews and hatches the worst and most perplexing quarrels and disputes, destroys the most valuable relationships, and breaks the strongest bonds. It demands the sacrifice sometimes of life or health, sometimes of wealth, position, and happiness. Indeed, it robs of all conscience those who were previously loyal and faithful. Accordingly, it appears on the whole as a malevolent demon, striving to pervert, to confuse, and to overthrow everything.”

Posted on October 26, 2025

What Is It Like to Be a Good Boy? Trying to Imagine the Phenomenology of a Dog

Guest Post

Robert S. Cairns

The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” In his essay, Nagel argues that if we agree that bats, like many other animals, are creatures with experiences, then there is a type of ‘batness’ to the bat that makes it distinctly itself. I could not help thinking about this while watching Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy (2025), which invites the viewer to imagine what it is like to be a dog. I also wondered to what extent a film was able to show me, even modestly, what this might be like.

Posted on September 29, 2025

What If Witches Are Actually Real? Zach Cregger’s Weapons and Witches

Guest Post

Robert S. Cairns

In high school we had to read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), an allegory about the McCarthy-era, Communist ‘Red Scare’ in America that used the Salem Witch Trials as its point of comparison. Years later, I discovered there was actually Communist infiltration during this time and that the fear was credible. If the supposed hysteria surrounding the ‘Red Scare’ had some basis in truth, could the same be said of the witches Arthur Miller used as a historical reference?

Years later still, I watched Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943). Another allegory for mass hysteria, I remember wondering why witches couldn’t just be real in this moment of occult-haunted history, and why it seemed as if the intelligent person had to represent them by way of allegory. Dreyer depicted the existence of miracles in his other, most famous film, Ordet (1955). But apparently witches were a step too far for him.

Posted on September 23, 2025

Why the Producer’s Cut & Curse of Thorn Captures the True Spirit of Halloween and Michael Myers

Guest Post

Alfonso Zavala, Jr.

Within the past few decades, Hollywood has released legacy sequels and reboots of many well-known film franchises. These include popular titles such as Star Wars and even Jurassic Park (now rebranded as Jurassic World). Many of these recent sequels have been met with extreme controversy due to characters, plot and storytelling decisions which changed canon for better or worse. (All you need to do is go online and watch videos and read comments to see this is true.) If Star Wars is a controversial fandom because of the direction the canon has gone, so is Halloween.

Since 1978, Michael Myers has been an icon in the horror genre and remains as relevant as ever. He is as synonymous as the jack-o’-lantern with the holiday of Halloween itself.[i] Indeed, Halloween’s legacy and impact upon horror cannot be understated, and numerous homages—even rip offs—have followed in its wake. While director John Carpenter originally intended Michael Myers to be in only a single standalone film, the character and his story have taken on a life of their own, with different iterations all attempting to expand upon the original film in the form of reboots and remakes.

Posted on September 15, 2025

Society Must be Upended: 28 Years Later and the Shattered Dream of Zombie Apocalypse Post-COVID-19

Guest Post

Andrés Emil González

When Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a coma near the beginning of Danny Boyle’s classic zombie film, 28 Days Later (2002), he does so wholly alone. This is not so surprising in a film and, indeed, a whole subgenre of horror fixated on the idea of societal breakdown and the survival of the individual in its aftermath, but it is a choice worth reexamining in light of Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland’s return to the franchise with 2025’s 28 Years Later. For starters, the social world that was toppled by a handful of animal rights activists at the start of the first film is firmly back at the outset of this third and most recent entry, albeit in a particularly monstrous form. This time, when 28 Years protagonist Spike sets off on his perilous journey, his social world is not nearly as empty as the streets of London that Jim walked upon his return to life. As the film does, we might ask: what happened in between? If the story of the 28 Days Later series turns on this question with respect to quarantined Britain and Ireland, it also poses a broader question about zombie narratives in the twenty-first century, and particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. What does actually happen to society when it faces a global viral threat?