Horror Homeroom

Posted on July 13, 2026

Backrooms, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Dinner Scenes, and Discarded Workers

Dawn Keetley

The new power duo of Gen Z directors, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, both seem to be influenced by an iconic horror film: Tobe Hooper’s 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Director of the record-shattering Obsession (2026), Barker is directing a reboot of the film for A24, which he plans to make “grounded, brutal, raw.” Kane Parsons, director of the similarly record-shattering Backrooms (2026), does not appear to name Texas Chain Saw Massacre as an influence (see this article in GQ for the most extensive list of the influences he’s recognized), yet he incorporated an extended homage to Hooper’s film into his own, in one of the most interesting scenes of the film.

Posted on July 11, 2026

Widow’s Bay and the Cassandra Problem in Horror

Guest Post

Valentina Ciarrocca

Gifted by Apollo and cursed when she refused him, to never be believed, Cassandra spent the fall of Troy delivering true warnings to people who looked at her the way Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) looks at Wyck Crawford (Stephen Root) in Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay (Katie Dippold, 2026): as a lunatic. The town crank is horror’s Cassandra by another name—the grizzled fisherman or grumpy elder who warns everyone that something evil is coming and people are going to die. This archetype is usually there to be ignored, to be proven right too late, and to die mid-sentence, delivering the exposition that could have saved everyone. We already know this, and after many cliché films, the horror genre has trained us to expect it. Widow’s Bay lets you settle into that expectation, and then does something the genre seldom does. It believes him.

Posted on July 4, 2026

The Horrors of Wellness Culture in Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty

Guest Post

Henriikka Koivisto

Ling Ling Huang’s satirical horror novel Natural Beauty (2023) tells the story of a young, unnamed narrator who gives up a promising career as a classical pianist after her parents are injured in a car accident. One day, an extraordinarily beautiful woman shows up at the restaurant where the narrator works and offers her a job at a high-end wellness and beauty company called Holistik. What at first seems like a dream job for many young women—with better pay, an endless supply of free skincare products and treatments, and a boost of social status—soon turns dangerous. Huang leads her readers into the deeply disturbing world of invasive and risky beauty procedures, unapologetic cultural appropriation, abuses of power culminating in sexual violence, all behind a façade of wellness and self-care.

Posted on June 28, 2026

“Trust His Instincts”: Disease & Death in Good Boy (2025)

Guest Post

Grace Fuller

Good Boy, directed by Ben Leonberg in 2025, initially appears to be a supernatural horror film from a dog’s perspective. However, upon closer examination, it reveals a deeper, unsettling meaning. Not only does it function as a haunted-house narrative, but it also serves as a metaphor for how dogs perceive human illness, both physical and mental. Dogs have an innate ability to sense changes in their owners’ physical and behavioural states before fully understanding them. They remain loyal even in the face of fear as they witness their beloved owners’ decline.

Good Boy is an independent horror film directed by Ben Leonberg and co-written by Alex Cannon. The film stars a dog named Indy and his owner, Todd, played by Shane Jensen. Todd moves into a rural family house that is supposedly cursed. This is the same house where his grandfather and his faithful dog, Bandit, both lived and died. While they are there, Indy begins to sense a supernatural presence in the house, as does Todd, who is battling a chronic lung disease.

Posted on June 16, 2026

Secrets and Mean Girls: What Happened to Those Girls Review

Elizabeth Erwin

Early on in the forthcoming novel What Happened to Those Girls, a character remarks, “There’s a point in horror movies when characters realize they’ve left their reality where nothing bad ever happens, when suddenly they’re no longer a complex human being but a delicate sack of meat.” This succinct summation of horror’s essential terror drives Carlyn Greenwald’s latest propulsive thriller while also hinting at an emotional toll similarly themed stories frequently fail to acknowledge. With its surprisingly brutal moments of body horror and its refusal to paint character motivations as binary, the story resists sanitizing death or the complicated emotions that can follow and is a very welcome addition to the YA thriller catalog. Read more