Horror Homeroom

Posted on March 24, 2026

Cultivate your own garden: Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice

Dawn Keetley

In Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759), Voltaire concluded with one of the most important ideas in modern philosophy: “Il faut cultiver notre Jardin”: We must cultivate our garden. No Other Choice, the 2025 darkly comedic film co-written, produced, and directed by Park Chan-wook takes this adage quite literally, as protagonist Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) attempts to ‘cultivate’ his ‘garden’ after being let go from his managerial job at a paper company. Thirteen months later, Man-su is still without a position and is confronted with rapidly diminishing funds along with the prospective loss of his gorgeous house, embedded in lush countryside. So, he sets out on a campaign to win a position at a successful paper company, Moon Paper, by killing its current manager and two other likely contenders for the job.

Posted on March 5, 2026

Dead of Winter, the horrors of aging, and the winter of life

Dawn Keetley

Directed by Brian Kirk and starring Emma Thompson, Dead of Winter is an action/survival thriller released in 2025 to quite positive reviews. It’s set in northern Minnesota, although filmed in Finland and Germany, and the landscape is beautiful: Kirk and cinematographer Christopher Ross really capture the frozen and vast desolateness of the upper Midwest of the US.

The plot of Dead of Winter begins with Barb (Emma Thompson), who is driving up to Lake Hilda in northern Minnesota (in off-and-on blizzard conditions) to scatter the ashes of her dead husband, Karl. Barb runs into a couple (who remain unnamed), who have kidnapped a young woman, Leah (Laurel Marsden) and are holding her captive in the basement of their cabin. Once Barb discovers Leah, she promises to save her – and most of the film concerns her indefatigable efforts, even as she becomes more and more injured, to rescue Leah from the couple. As the plot unfolds, it turns out that the couple aren’t evil . . . exactly. The woman (Judy Greer) is terminally ill with some unspecified liver condition; she works as an emergency nurse and encountered Leah when the latter was admitted after a suicide attempt. Knowing she needs a liver transplant to survive, and having the skills and connections to arrange one off the grid, the woman kidnaps Leah to be her unwilling liver donor, convinced she’s doing no harm as Leah wants to die anyway. (Of course, not surprisingly, when faced with her own prospective murder, Leah decides she wants to live after all.) The woman’s husband (Marc Menchaca) seems deeply opposed to what they’re doing, but feels obliged to help his wife.

Posted on February 23, 2026

Death and “A Livin’ Man”: Ambrose Bierce, The Twilight Zone, and Jazz Icon Kenny Clarke

Guest Post

Linda Ganus

A little over 60 years ago, an episode produced for the legendary science fiction TV show, The Twilight Zone, aired on February 28, 1964. It’s surprisingly apt that this anniversary falls during Black History Month; here’s why.

The episode, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, was a short French film adaption (La rivière du hibou) of Ambrose Bierce’s widely anthologized short story of the same name about a Confederate soldier facing death during the Civil War. The director, Robert Enrico, while faithfully hewing to the text of the original story published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1890, boldly added filmic elements that gave the naturalist narrative a modern 20^th-century perspective. The film eventually won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and was one of the first television episodes to win an Oscar for Best Short Subject in 1964. An uncredited performance on the film by African-American musician and jazz master, Kenny Clarke, fiercely transformed the meaning of the story by immersing the viewer in an auditory sound world imagined from enslaved Black Americans’ viewpoints. Clarke amplified their voices, left unheard in Bierce’s original.

Posted on February 18, 2026

The House Was Not Hungry Then – But It Is Now

Dawn Keetley

The House Was Not Hungry Then (2025) is the directorial debut of filmmaker Harry Aspinwall. It is filmed almost entirely within and from the perspective of a single house (located in Angus, Scotland); only the last scenes take us out of the house, although our perspective remains with it. The film is shot by means of static cameras located in several rooms in the house: the cameras don’t move and we get no alternating shots that give us any additional information than what we get in those fixed shots. Aspinwall describes the philosophy and composition of the film on his website:

“I wanted to do something different. I love the dry comedies of Ruben Ostlund and Roy Anderson, and the tongue in cheek morbidity of Edward Gorey. I started to think whether I could make a horror film following the same principles, of distance, of sparsity, of withholding, of brutal objectivity. No inserts, no reaction shots, nothing to tell the audience what to feel, just one single locked off wide for each room. What would that feel like, to be so still, so removed from the human life that wanders in, unsuspecting?”

Posted on February 5, 2026

On Transformation and Addiction in My Novel-in-Progress, Chicana Werewolf

Guest Post

Daniel A. Olivas

I was no older than five or six when my parents first allowed me to watch the 1941 classic Universal Pictures horror movie, The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr., as the titular shapeshifting monster as designed by makeup artist Jack Pierce of Frankenstein fame. This was a different time—the mid-1960s—before Blockbuster Video, cable television, and streaming. So for families that lived on a tight budget, Los Angeles’s local television stations offered unending reruns of old movies from horror to noir, science fiction to westerns, and comedies to musicals. Horror, not surprisingly, sat the top of my favorites.

Unlike Universal’s Frankenstein of ten years earlier, The Wolf Man (1941)—directed by George Waggner—was not inspired by a literary classic but sprung from the creative mind of science fiction writer, Curt Siodmak, who decided to leave Germany for England in 1933 after hearing an anti-Semitic tirade by Joseph Goebbels. He established himself as a screenwriter in his adopted country and eventually made his way to the United States in 1937. Siodmak’s big break in Hollywood came in the form of his screenplay for the 1940 Universal’s film, Invisible Man Returns. His horror chops thus established, Universal tapped him to pen The Wolf Man.