- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

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 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 1, 2026

Dooba Dooba – creepy found footage horror

Dawn Keetley

Dooba Dooba is written and directed by Ehrland Hollingsworth and is shot almost entirely on surveillance cameras with intercut analog scenes. It follows a babysitter, Amna (Amna Vegha), who is plunged into the strange and awkward from the moment she arrives at the home of Wilson (Winston Haynes), Taylor (Erin O’Meara) and their sixteen-year old daughter, Monroe (Betsy Sligh) – and things only get more weird from there, eventually becoming downright offensive and violent. Wilson, for instance, seems incapable of managing Amna’s name; “It’s these ethnic names . . . .” he offers in explanation, following that up with an attempt to give Amna money for what he calls “retributions” (presumably reparations). It very soon becomes clear that Amna is way too nice for her own good, constantly reassuring everyone else (and, we suspect, herself), that “It’s okay.” She should instead be asserting that, actually, it isn’t okay and she’s leaving. She doesn’t.

Posted on December 3, 2025

A Must-Watch for the Holiday Season: Kier-La Janisse’s The Occupant of the Room

Dawn Keetley

It’s the holiday season – and Severin Films has released a new episode of The Haunted Season entitled The Occupant of the Room (an adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s 1909 story of the same name), now streaming on Shudder.[1] It’s a wonderful film, a perfect eerie ghost story – better, to be honest, than most of the recent fare in BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series. My review, below, includes a brief interview with director and writer, Kier-La Janisse.

Algernon Blackwood’s “The Occupant of the Room” is about a school teacher who arrives late at night at an inn in the Alps, the “Dent de Midi,” only to find there are no rooms available.[2] He is eventually offered a room that is not quite unoccupied – that is to say, it is possibly occupied. The porter tells the teacher that “the real occupant of the room” is an English woman who had insisted on venturing out alone into the Alps two days ago. She hadn’t returned (yet), but may do so at any moment. She may be the “real” occupant of the room, but she’s not the actual occupant of the room – hence its uncertain status as part occupied, part unoccupied. That the room is a liminal space defines the story, which takes place only within its confines, as one occupant, the school teacher, deals with the lingering presence of the other, his possible predecessor but also possibly successor. As Blackwood writes, in a crucial sentence, “One moment the atmosphere seemed subtly charged with a ‘just left’ feeling – the next it was a queer awareness of ‘still here’ that made him turn cold and look hurriedly behind him.”

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.