Diana Cedeño, PhD I’ve always thought that what makes a good horror movie is the feeling it leaves you with after it ends. That feeling doesn’t have to be fear; what matters is that something stays with you. But that response also depends on your connection to the film and the expectations you bring to […]
Written by Charlie Robb and co-directed by Robb and Douglas Tawn, the 2025 Loner is a found-footage folk horror film about a man called Angus (played by Robb) who heads out into the Northumbrian woods to vlog about “living off the land” – totally cut off from the modern world (no wi-fi, for instance). It […]
D.S. Burton We Turn Gruesome at Night is the second installment of Eric LaRocca’s Burnt Sparrow Trilogy following 2025’s transgressive small-town horror We Are Always Tender with Our Dead. Here the horror returns to the body; not the dead, but the living body’s place in the world and with others, and what we do to […]
David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street (2026) is a glorious throwback. While it may seem a bit of a swerve from Mitchell’s previous films, both The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010) and It Follows (2014) are actually also suffused with nostalgia: indeed, a key scene early in It Follows involves Jay (Maika […]
Kit Neikirk The anticipated next film from Anatomy of a Fall (2023) co-writer Arthur Harari, The Unknown (French: L’Inconnue, 2026), bills itself as a body-swap horror. In it, after a brief sexual encounter beneath a subdued club light, a lonely and slightly off-putting Parisian street photographer, David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider), swaps bodies with an unknown woman […]
Marcus Kliewer’s 2026 novel, The Caretaker, in true horror fashion, begins with a prologue. A man (David) is trying desperately to follow “the Rites” in order to ward off a “Visitor” who looks just like his dead son but isn’t. He fails. Then we cut to Macy Mullins, our twenty-something protagonist – and the story […]
Henriikka Koivisto Ling Ling Huang’s satirical horror novel Natural Beauty (2023) tells the story of a young, unnamed narrator who gives up a promising career as a classical pianist after her parents are injured in a car accident. One day, an extraordinarily beautiful woman shows up at the restaurant where the narrator works and offers […]
Early on in the novel What Happened to Those Girls, a character remarks, “There’s a point in horror movies when characters realize they’ve left their reality where nothing bad ever happens, when suddenly they’re no longer a complex human being but a delicate sack of meat.” This succinct summation of horror’s essential terror drives Carlyn […]
Jered Mabaquiao Obsession (2026) directed by Curry Barker breaks new ground for horror cinema. In its own ways, it fondly reminds me of It’s What’s Inside (2024), Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), or even Y2K (2024) with its strong attention to dialogue, soundtracks, and an atmosphere that speaks directly to older Gen Z sensibilities. I think […]