Horror Homeroom, Author at Horror Homeroom

Posted on November 29, 2025

M3GAN 2.0: One of the Most Interesting Horror Films of 2025

Dawn Keetley

Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 (2025) has mostly not been identified as a horror film. On IMDb, it’s labeled “thriller,” “action” and “sci-fi.” On Wikipedia, it’s “science fiction action.” This is after the first film in the franchise, Johnstone’s M3GAN (2022), was widely dubbed a “science fiction horror” film. Stephen Parthimos’s review on Everything Movie Reviews seems representative of the reaction to M3GAN 2.0 when he writes that there is “not a single second of horror in sight” and that watching the film, and “gradually realising they’ve abandoned any and all sense of horror is utterly baffling.” Ahead of the film’s release, Johnstone promised fans that his sequel would include horror: “Even though we are in action-comedy territory, the horror DNA is absolutely still there.” Upon release, however, it became clear that most viewers didn’t see it, though debate ensued on Reddit.

Posted on November 25, 2025

Listening to Sensitive Characters in Horror Movies

Guest Post

Kati Aakkonen

Alice: Why don’t we just hike out of here? Get out. Right Now!

Bill: It’s 10 miles to the nearest crossroads. Steve will be back soon. We can use his jeep if we need to get help. Don’t worry. There’s probably some stupid explanation for this.

Alice: Like what?!

Bill: We’ll be laughing about this tomorrow, I promise.

Friday the 13th, (1:01:35)

This exchange from Friday the 13th (1980) follows a typical pattern of conversation in horror movies: one character is worried and suspicious that something strange is going on and another character dismisses this worry and refuses to notice the signs of trouble. This is an acknowledged trope in horror, and often seems to primarily irritate writers (Cheung 2022; Jacobs 2020). But one of my favorite things about horror fiction is that part of its DNA seems to be the realization that we should listen to the sensitive, intuitive and usually marginalized characters, even though this is rarely made explicit. Depicting incredulity can be frustrating but I think it taps into real fears many of us have to live with.

Posted on November 20, 2025

Dying of Laughter: Exploring Horror Parody and the Scary Movie Films

Guest Post

Nehir Orhon

A haunted house, an innocent girl possessed by the devil, or a group of teenagers that make foolish decisions to try and survive a masked killer… These cliché horror tropes can be found in famous horror films, such as The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Such storylines, figures and settings are elements that are commonly associated with the genre’s identity.

However, as Chris Yogerst argues, “repetition of genre tropes breeds familiarity, robbing once-shocking images and plot twists of the impact they originally had” (Yogerst 207). When these key tropes and patterns get overused in horror films, they become repetitive and lead to criticism, self-reflection, and parody. In the book Film Parody, Dan Harries defines parody as “the process of recontextualizing a target or source text through the transformation of its textual (and contextual) elements, thus creating a new text” (Harries 6). In this instance, through twisting the lexicon, style or syntax, parody spoofs the familiar patterns, stereotypical and normative representation of marginalised groups, and cultural taboos displayed in horror films.

Scary Movie (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2000), the first film of the contemporary horror parody franchise, takes Scream (1996) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) as reference. Whilst spoofing these movies, Scary Movie not only makes fun of the familiar horror tropes but also exposes how the “film technology and genre fictions” (Bailey 1229) are shaped by the hegemony of the white male gaze and “white ideological frames” (Yancy and Ryser 732). This essay explores the relation between horror, humour and social critique, and how parody functions within the Scary Movie films through analysing the used “methods of parodic coding” (Harries 39).

Posted on November 16, 2025

Sympathy for the Devil: The Carpenter’s Son, Religion, and Horror

Guest Post

Steve A. Wiggins

Religion and horror have been close companions ever since Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) showed that their relationship could be brought out into the open. Horror movies that feature Jesus directly are somewhat rare. The 2001 parody Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter (Lee Demarbre) really doesn’t count. A low-budget comedy-horror, Demarbre’s film attempts no theological statements, just laughs. It has been suggested a time or two that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) could be considered a horror film. It certainly goes for the torture porn aesthetic, and it does have some passing similarities with The Carpenter’s Son (Lotfy Nathan, 2025). The two movies take different texts, however.

Posted on November 4, 2025

To Sleep with Demons: A Review of A Muse by Kieran Saint Leonard

Guest Post

by Patrick Zaia

In 1844, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer penned a curious and somewhat controversial essay titled ‘The Metaphysics of Sexual Love’. With devilish and gloomily elegant prose, Schopenhauer’s essay articulates a theory of sexual love and desire that is negative, irrational, and perilously self-destructive to all those who experience it. In one of the essay’s more bombastic sections, Schopenhauer’ describes the sexual instinct thusly:

“Every day it brews and hatches the worst and most perplexing quarrels and disputes, destroys the most valuable relationships, and breaks the strongest bonds. It demands the sacrifice sometimes of life or health, sometimes of wealth, position, and happiness. Indeed, it robs of all conscience those who were previously loyal and faithful. Accordingly, it appears on the whole as a malevolent demon, striving to pervert, to confuse, and to overthrow everything.”