Horror Homeroom

Posted on October 24, 2026

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival: Ryan Glover’s Split Rock

Dawn Keetley

I watched Split Rock as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its North American premiere on October 21, 2026.

Written and directed by Ryan Glover, Split Rock is his second feature after The Strings, which was released in 2020 (and is available on Shudder). Split Rock is about a group of geologists – Lauren (Clark Backo), Ben (Drew Ray Tanner), Sam (Olivia Luccardi), and Trevor (Graham Verchere) – who are surveying an area of the Badlands in southern Saskatchewan. They’re exploring rock formations and measuring seismic activity in the region and, relatively early on, they find an anomalous rock – one they struggle to identify, one that shouldn’t be there. They theorize that it was dragged down into the region by a glacier. Even as the team talks about the rock in scientific terms, however, attempting to explain it rationally, bizarre things are happening at the camp. Lauren, especially, seems deeply affected by the presence of the rock, even as she too tries to explain what’s happening to them, to her, in scientific language.

black and red decorative image for the Agatha Christie Reconsidered podcast

Posted on October 22, 2026

Agatha Christie Reconsidered Podcast: The Moving Finger & A Murder is Announced

Dawn Keetley/ Elizabeth Erwin/ Podcast

Though her placid demeanor when compared against the worldly and theatrical Hercule Poirot often results in Miss Marple’s contributions within detective fiction being overlooked, we think that Agatha Christie’s observant spinster is an absolute force when it comes to interrogating the dangers that lurk in domestic spaces. In part three of our seven-episode exploration of Agatha Christie’s enduring Gothic legacy, we focus on The Moving Finger (1942) and A Murder Is Announced (1950). In the former, “poison pen” letters disrupt a seemingly tranquil community ending in murder and recriminations. In the latter, a small town is disrupted by the newspaper announcement of an impending murder that while at first dismissed as a party game, soon becomes a lightening rod for accusations and death.

Grounding our discussion in Christopher Yiannitsaros’s work on surveillance and incarceration in Christie’s villages, we look at how the shadows haunting the home in both novels are shaped by post-war trauma and local community norms. As always, please note that this episode will include spoilers.

Works Cited: Read more

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).

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?