Posted on October 31, 2026

Scream 3: A Retrospective

Guest Post

Jaymen Neff-Strickland and Shane H Weathers

Without taking the mixed reception of the recent Scream 7 (Kevin Williamson, 2026) into consideration (a film about which the authors of this retrospective disagree), Scream is considered one of the most consistent slasher series. There are few film series in American cinema history that can boast the consensus that they contain no truly “bad” entry, whether judged by critical or fan reception. Toy Story, The Lord of the Rings, John Wick, Mission: Impossible, and Back to the Future are just a few of these examples. Prior to 2026, almost every Scream film was well-received by fans and critics, with each receiving above a 60% on Rotten Tomatoes, except one: Scream 3 (Wes Craven, 2000), a film that maintains (as of October 2026) a 45% Tomatometer and a 38% Popcornmeter score. The RT consensus is as follows: “Despite some surprising twists, Scream 3 sees the franchise falling back on the same old horror formulas and cliches it once hacked and slashed with postmodern abandon” (Rotten Tomatoes). The film often ranks at the bottom in series rankings (see Franich; Nemiroff; Simpson and Lawrence; Vorel). However, with the passing of the 25^th anniversary of Scream 3 in 2025, and the 30^th anniversary of the original film taking place this year, a retrospective analysis confirms what many Scream fans have come to accept: while this is by no means the best Scream film, even the “worst” Scream film is still a cut above the rest.

Posted on October 17, 2026

Chronovisor (2026): On the Affects of Academic Anxiety and Techno-Animism

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Jered Mabaquiao

Anyone who has been swept away in a current of intellectual pursuit can identify with Chronovisor’s appeal. At least for me, I intimately recognize the kind of frightening intellectual work and mindful interiority that Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor illustrates. Chronovisor begins with the professional, and oftentimes rare, virtue of attention—with the conviction that one more source, one more language, one more archival detour, or at least one more listening ear at a dinner table might finally cohere an argument.

Between our own passions and our own attention spans, Chronovisor’s horror infuses a hubris of intellect with an occult machine that can replay and access the past. In this way, I read the film’s most unsettling discovery that “scholarship” can become a feverish, even deeply spiritually possessive narrative arc. Chronovisor frames this fever in the research professor whose funding will have been cut off if they cannot miraculously conjure a mythological machine whose sole function is to capture and bridge anyone’s consciousness and to project it as an image onto its screen.

Posted on October 15, 2026

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s What Feeds Below – Gory, Uncomfortable and Enthralling Body Horror

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Jenna LaBollita

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s What Feeds Below is thrilling, imaginative, and absolutely disgusting. I mean that last part as a compliment. Its horror is gory, detailed, and deeply uncomfortable, yet despite the strangeness of its premise and the extremity of some of its imagery, the novel never feels inaccessible. Schlote-Bonne gives readers a narrator whose voice feels familiar enough to ground an extraordinary world, making its horrors feel uncomfortably close.

Petra is an orphan approaching the age when she will have to leave the orphanage that has been her home. Her plan for what comes next is ambitious: she wants to open a clinic using medicinal plants, and doing so requires money. Petra earns that money by diving into the Void, a dangerous environment composed of different levels, each inhabited by its own species of plants and creatures. Some plants are medicinal, while others are carnivorous, venomous, or poisonous. The deeper Petra goes, the greater the danger – and the greater the potential reward.

Posted on October 12, 2026

Who Keeps the Miracle Running? ‘Twas the Night and the Machinery of Christmas

Guest Post

Luna Gray

Kevin Johnson’s debut imagines a world where Santa is real, almost everyone agrees he’s good, and the cost of all that joy gets paid by somebody else.

Most Christmas horror starts by taking something comforting and corrupting it. Kevin Johnson’s ‘Twas the Night, out October 13 from William Morrow, does something stranger. He builds a world where Santa Claus is real, almost everybody knows it, and Christmas works exactly as advertised.

Then he asks who has to suffer to keep the miracle running.

A World That Already Agrees

The prologue doesn’t treat Santa as folklore up for debate. He’s a fact. He delivers presents to children all over the world, and only children. His existence is tied to peace, kindness, low crime and an end to war between nations.

That’s a lot of power to hand one being. The prologue also makes room for a fringe of skeptics who call Santa a conspiracy, propaganda, a form of population control. Nobody has definitive physical proof of him. The presents keep showing up anyway. The narrator closes by warning that doubting Santa is dangerous.

Johnson doesn’t have to invent a surveillance state. He just reads the song literally. Santa sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows if you’ve been bad or good. In this world that isn’t a nursery rhyme. It’s policy.

Posted on October 7, 2026

Trapped in the Replica: Industrial Exploitation, Spatial Memory, and Media Panopticism in Scream 3

Guest Post

Gary Miceli

Sidney Prescott’s entry onto the Stab 3 soundstage begins with a deceptive, everyday errand: finding a hairbrush dropped by an actress and stepping into the production space to return it. What begins as a mundane act immediately collapses into spatial and emotional disorientation as she crosses the threshold onto the set. She is instantly overwhelmed by a wave of lingering trauma, confronted by the harsh reality that Hollywood has commodified her horrifying personal history into a profitable entertainment spectacle. The set does not merely resemble her past; it functions as an uncanny, hyper-detailed architectural replica of her childhood home. Surrounding this replica are the body doubles and actors cast to play her, reinforcing a quiet, tragic alienation: the “Sidney Prescott” the world now consumes is no longer a real person, but a fictionalized caricature constructed by media executives. As she confronts this physical manifestation of corporate exploitation, her initial shock shifts into hesitant curiosity, drawing her deeper into the structure to inspect its disturbing accuracy.