Posted on August 5, 2026

The Unknown’s (2026) Horror of Depersonalization and the Metamorphosis of Schizophrenia

Guest Post

Kit Neikirk

The anticipated next film from Anatomy of a Fall (2023) co-writer Arthur Harari, The Unknown (French: L’Inconnue, 2026), bills itself as a body-swap horror. In it, after a brief sexual encounter beneath a subdued club light, a lonely and slightly off-putting Parisian street photographer, David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider), swaps bodies with an unknown woman (Léa Seydoux) he sleeps with. This concept has been thoroughly explored – from the body horror characteristic of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor (2020) to the racial allegory of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). In this genre, the concept of body swapping is generally contextualized as desirable and steeped in class politics; in Possessor, the bodies of the poor are colonized by the wealthy, used as corporate property that undergoes swapping. Get Out, meanwhile, uses body swapping to embody the simultaneous White fetishization and otherization of the Black body. This is not to mention the long-standing comedic potential of this genre, spanning from 2003’s family comedy Freaky Friday to the explicitly Scream-inspired comedy-horror Freaky (2020). Meanwhile, contemporary reimagining of the body-swap genre is ripe with trans-gender interpretations, best exemplified by Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024), wherein the body swap is intertwined with the transposing of oneself onto fandoms and alternative realities as an escape from gender dysphoria.

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Posted on July 30, 2026

“It’s Not Me”: Inde Navarrette’s brilliant non-naturalistic performance in Obsession

Guest Post

Johanna Isaacson

Obsession tells the story of Bear (Michael Johnston), a lost young man who is in love with his friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette), an independent young woman. Rather than render himself vulnerable he uses a novelty item to wish for her intense, unconditional love, and gets more than he bargained for. Before Bear’s curse, Nikki was salty, forthright, and ambitious. As Bear’s “dream girl” she takes on the persona of the well-worn trope, the “manic pixie,” giving up her own ambitions to quirkily help Bear fulfill his own. Or rather, she tries and fails to take on this persona, exposing its fundamental horrors.

In Obsession, the seemingly spontaneous emotions of a woman following romantic codes are revealed as labor, and this revelation is largely dependent on Inde Navarrette’s brilliant, non-naturalistic approach to the role. Her talent has been widely noted in reviews, but I predict that as this film becomes the subject of academic criticism, less attention will be paid to her performance than to director Curry Barker’s (admittedly fascinating) direction and screenplay, as well as to audience reception and to the larger ascension of YouTube creators. The lack of focus on acting in scholarly work stems from laudable impulses to concentrate on the medium’s particular formal properties. However, it is important that we consider how performance styles and choices complement or contradict the film language of shots, sound, and editing.

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Posted on July 26, 2026

Hearing is Believing: Undertone’s Aural Horror

Guest Post

Jered Mabaquiao

I initially experienced writer-director Ian Tuason’s Undertone (2026) in its opening weekend in a Dallas Cinemark XD and IMAX theater. Undertone follows Evangeline (Evy) Babic, played by Nina Kiri, who is co-host of a paranormal podcast and token skeptic. Additionally, we understand Evy also takes care of her dying mother who is a devout Catholic. Evy’s house is decorated with various religious iconography. Her friend, Justin, voiced by Adam DiMarco, is the other host of the podcast and a firm believer in the possibility of another realm. Justin anonymously receives ten audio files, each sequencing disturbing activity experienced by a couple named Mike and Jessa who seem to unleash a demonic entity, named Abyzou. Abyzou possesses mothers and causes miscarriages or outright kills infants out of jealousy due to its own infertility. Throughout Undertone, Evy is wrestling with having just learned that she’s pregnant, out of wedlock, thus adding critical mental and physical stress involving whether or not she should keep the child.

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Posted on July 23, 2026

Ballads (1993) and the Shape of Queer Anger

Guest Post

Logan Moreno

Naoyuki Tomomatsu’s Ballads (1993) lingers in obscurity, as if its very circulation were shaped by the same quiet damage that defines the film itself. What is almost immediately striking about Ballads is how it folds J-horror’s fascination with bodies under pressure and the pinku subgenre’s obsession with desire-turned-dangerous into something emotionally fragile. The erotic scenes are soaked in grief and humiliation, so sex never settles into anything like pleasure. Tomomatsu treats discomfort as his expressive language, and that discomfort lets him get close to the feelings of marginalisation at the film’s center. Grief and anger saturate the sound and image, giving the grain, noise, and erratic pacing a force that makes feelings tangible and hard to shake.

Underneath the apparent chaos of Ballads, Tomomatsu builds a careful emotional and formal logic. Fragmented concert footage, recurring snuff tapes, and flashes of nearly illegible body horror mirror the protagonist’s interior state, showing what it feels like to live as a gay man in a world that refuses to acknowledge your pain and relishes your humiliation. Akihiko Yamamoto, still mourning Hiroshi, the lover he lost in a motorcycle accident, works in a video store that quietly pushes uncensored hardcore pornography under the counter. His grief is written into his body. He walks with a cane, carries visible scars, and those scars are pointed out and handled by his boss during sex, with his injuries turned into convenient proof of weakness and sexual availability. In the early stretches of Ballads, Yamamoto moves like someone whose whole body has learned to expect injury, with grief and subordination folded into his posture and the way he occupies space. Read more

Posted on July 22, 2026

Review: Marcus Kliewer’s The Caretaker

Dawn Keetley

Marcus Kliewer’s 2026 novel, The Caretaker, in true horror fashion, begins with a prologue. A man (David) is trying desperately to follow “the Rites” in order to ward off a “Visitor” who looks just like his dead son but isn’t. He fails. Then we cut to Macy Mullins, our twenty-something protagonist – and the story becomes hers. Indeed, one of the very many good things about The Caretaker is Macy Mullins, a character expertly drawn whom we can’t help but care about, despite her own conviction that nobody will.

Macy is looking after not only herself but her teenage sister, Gemma, in the wake of their father’s death in a car accident. Three years later, his daughters are struggling to come to terms with their grief – and, indeed, to get by at all. Without a job, with no money, and accumulating eviction notices, Macy answers a strange ad for a caretaker for an elderly man – only three days of work. She takes the job even after a still stranger interview where she discovers the elderly man in question is apparently dead and what she is really being asked to do is stay by herself in the house and follow a bizarre sequence of “routines.” Desperate, she agrees. (And who wouldn’t take $9000 for three days’ work?) The novel follows Macy over those three days.

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