Horror Homeroom

Posted on October 21, 2026

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival – Culture Shock: Black Horror Shorts

Dawn Keetley

Culture Shock: Black Horror Shorts was a program of excellent horror shorts by Black filmmakers that screened on October 20, 2026, at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. It was followed by a fabulous Q&A with creatives involved in all but one of the six films.

Here are some highlights!

Grampa (2026)

The six films were all very different, but I have to say my favorite was the horror comedy, Grampa, directed by Justice Smith and starring Nicholas L. Ashe as the main character, James. James is visiting his white boyfriend’s family home for Thanksgiving dinner, and things take a turn for the grotesque, the terrifying, and the hilarious when Grampa lumbers to the table. You may think you’ve seen this story somewhere before, but Grampa is perennially surprising and downright hilarious (I can’t stress that enough). A huge portion of the humor is due to Ashe’s performance as James: he plays the role with a wide-eyed incredulity that had the whole theatre laughing – absolute disbelief that he’s seeing what he’s seeing and that no one else thinks that what he’s seeing is absolutely batshit crazy. There’s an absolutely brilliant scene filmed mostly from above in a tiny bathroom in which James’s boyfriend persistently tries to bring what’s going on outside into the realm of totally normal relationship conflict. In the Q&A at the end, Ashe talked about why horror’s so great – and one of the things he said was about the way the genre can spectacularize the everyday. Grampa totally does this. Interestingly, he also said that Train to Busan (Yeon Sang-ho, 2016), with its fast zombies, was one of the inspirations for the film. Watch this if and when you can!

You can check out a trailer for Grampa on YouTube:

Posted on October 21, 2026

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival: Alison-Eve Hammersley’s Erie

Dawn Keetley

I watched Erie as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its East Coast premiere on October 20, 2026.

Directed by Alison-Eve Hammersley and co-written by Hammersley and J. Batzli, Erie is a found-footage horror film that does something new with a genre that’s been going strong for over twenty-five years. We’re reminded of this because the film is set in 1999 – a date that obviously has significance for any fan of found-footage: it’s the year that the ground-breaking The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez) was released. With that choice, we’re back in the era when cameras, not phones, are used to record everything, archival materials consist of newspapers not websites, and anything resembling social media was in its infancy (the film’s protagonist does do some research via a very clunky online chat room).

Hammersley says that they set the film in the 90s so they could

“manifest that feeling of isolation for these characters. We’ve taken away the thing that connects all of us currently — the internet, our smart phones, and placed them in a situation where they truly to have to rely on each other and face their darkest selves.”*

Erie starts by telling us we’re in Erie, Pennsylvania, where an unusually high number of deaths have occurred. The first scene is one of those deaths – the apparent suicide of a young woman who, moments before, had been enjoying talking about blue flag irises. Her face goes blank, she disappears, and, moments later, her body thuds to the ground. The mystery of this young woman’s death – her name is Iris Scott (Aimee Paxton) – provides the impetus for the narrative, as we then meet Iris’s sister, Stella (Carly Stewart), an aspiring investigative journalist who is on a mission to find out what happened to her sister. And it’s not just her sister. As she tells her brother, Oscar (Grant Crater), a more reluctant co-investigator, there have been an unusual string of suicides in a bank of woods on the north-east edge of town. She wants to find out what’s behind them.

Through the afore-mentioned clunky chat room, Stella and Oscar hook up with a man named Red (Ryan W. Garcia), whose girlfriend was one of the suicide victims. He too is intent on figuring out why there are so many deaths in the area. Red is undoubtedly one of the stars of the film, bringing an intensity that stays (mostly) just on this size of crazy as he alternately helps and (supposedly jokingly) threatens Stella and Oscar when they meet him at his remote, rural home. Others will make this comparison, I’m sure, but Stella and Oscar’s encounter with Red is very much in the spirit of the fabulous Creep (Patrick Brice, 2014) with its unhinged encounters between Brice and Mark Duplass. (Indeed, Hammersley says that the two biggest influences on this film are The Blair Witch Project and Creep.)

Stella and Oscar

Red’s a big proponent of the idea that Ion Labs, which made lithium batteries and closed down in the 1950s, polluted the ground with heavy metals and toxins – causing mutations as well as strange behavior and suicide. Apparently, it’s “local legend.” Stella seems more convinced than Oscar is by this explanation, and so she steals Red’s map for their trek into the woods.

Of course, Stella and Oscar get lost – the second act of the film – and are stranded in the darkness, hearing things possibly pursuing them, sobbing and screams. While Stella continues to film, Oscar starts behaving erratically, blaming himself for allowing their sister to kill herself and seemingly harming himself.

The third act changes everything: the handheld camera Stella’s been using drops, and we start to see through an objective camera lens instead, as the rest of the film pretty much abandons found footage. This move undercuts the ‘authenticity’ of everything we’ve seen till now, and that’s a jolt because Erie has worked hard to make Stella and Oscar believable characters with understandable motivations. We’ve believed what we’ve seen and heard. As Hammersley says about this move:

“Up until this point in the film we’re quite firmly (and literally) planted in [Stella’s] POV. We understand her. We’re rooting for her. We see the world through her eyes. But this is the moment where we learn the real reason she’s out here.”

Identification is suddenly more difficult, character more slippery.

In fact, it seems even more than that: everything seems untethered. For me, in this last act, Erie is tapping into a recent trend of existentialism (Alexander Ullom’s It Ends and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms), where reality itself comes unmoored and meaning is up for grabs.

Erie is an well-constructed film that does something new with found footage, that draws you in and keeps you there, prompting you to think about it long after it’s over. The actors are great – convincingly pulling off the range of emotions demanded of them. Carly Stewart and Ryan W. Garcia deserve especial mention – and I’m ending with two shots of Stella (Stewart) from a scene I watched over and over again as it was just so compellingly weird. Hammersley says of it: “It’s an uncanny moment that begins to tip that there’s something amiss here before we fully reveal what’s happening to [Stella].”

Stella (Carly Stewart) in an incredibly compelling scene

*Comments by Alison-Eve Hammersley are from email correspondence on 20 October 2026.

Posted on October 20, 2026

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival Review: Russell Goldman’s Sender

Dawn Keetley

I watched Sender as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its New York City premiere on October 19, 2026. Director Russell Goldman was present for a Q&A after the film.

Sender is a film that’s all about the actors, although that doesn’t seem entirely fair to all those who worked on the cinematography, the costumes, the sounds and, of course the writing and directing. All those are indeed excellent, but Sender showcases a tour de force performance by Britt Lower as the lead character.

From the moment we first see her, Britt Lower’s Julia seems to be on a knife-edge – hunched over, too thin, intense, wired, restless. She’s moving into a new apartment, has just lost her job, and is sort of looking for what’s next – a job, an MFA? She’s also in recovery, and her alcoholism was clearly the reason she lost said job (although it doesn’t seem like it was much of a loss). Indeed, the seeming deadness of Julia’s job may go some way to explain her excessive drinking. She always, as one co-worker put it, threw the best parties. What else was there to do?

Posted on October 18, 2026

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival Review: Jordan Downey’s The Cycle

Dawn Keetley

I watched The Cycle as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its east coast premiere on October 16, 2026.

Directed by Jordan Downey, and written by Downey and Kevin Stewart, The Cycle (2026) is a distinctive blend of forensic crime / police procedural and supernatural horror. (The Autopsy of Jane Doe, released in 2016 and directed by André Øvredal comes to mind as a similar kind of endeavor.) It’s filmed in Astoria, Oregon, and it has the grey landscapes, the rain and the mist, that evoke Nordic Noir, heightening its links to crime narrative.

The Cycle centers on Meg Garland (Deborah Ann Woll), a forensic anthropologist who studies bodies in all stages of decomposition: she listens to the dead, reconstructing their lives from their dead bodies. In a sense, The Cycle is all about understanding dead bodies, although, for Meg, while the bodies she studies may be dead, they are fully animate – teeming with life – in the way they speak to her.

Posted on October 17, 2026

Chronovisor (2026): On the Affects of Academic Anxiety and Techno-Animism

Guest Post

Jered Mabaquiao

Anyone who has been swept away in a current of intellectual pursuit can identify with Chronovisor’s appeal. At least for me, I intimately recognize the kind of frightening intellectual work and mindful interiority that Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor illustrates. Chronovisor begins with the professional, and oftentimes rare, virtue of attention—with the conviction that one more source, one more language, one more archival detour, or at least one more listening ear at a dinner table might finally cohere an argument.

Between our own passions and our own attention spans, Chronovisor’s horror infuses a hubris of intellect with an occult machine that can replay and access the past. In this way, I read the film’s most unsettling discovery that “scholarship” can become a feverish, even deeply spiritually possessive narrative arc. Chronovisor frames this fever in the research professor whose funding will have been cut off if they cannot miraculously conjure a mythological machine whose sole function is to capture and bridge anyone’s consciousness and to project it as an image onto its screen.