Horror Homeroom

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.

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.

image of a man set against a red background

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.

Posted on July 20, 2026

Obsession and the Patriarchy

Guest Post

James Staynings

When my partner joked on our car ride home from the cinema about how Curry Barker’s Obsession (2026) is a metaphor for the patriarchy, the statement became a… fascination.

We stumbled and analysed our way through the woods on a Bear hunt. We read, listened and discussed others’ observations. I noticed something in much of the discussion around the ironically named protagonist who evokes the 2024 TikTok Phenomenon. Being so focused on the bear, what about the man-made willow forest that’s made the predator deadly?

There’s plenty of valid discussion of Obsession as a new entry in the category of “incel horror.” There are valid points of comparison with Bear and the insecure male protagonists of films like Passengers, Ex Machina, Don’t Worry, Darling and Bugonia. A lonely, flawed, insecure male protagonist takes a female character/s autonomy.