Jered Mabaquiao I grew up in a fairly conservative evangelical denomination. It was common to hear things like, “your body is a temple” or “the Holy Spirit lives in you.” This language shaped a lot of my thinking—ideas about what sort of vessel I was (or becoming) sometimes flooded my mind. Surrounded by congregants, even […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
By 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 […]
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 […]
Kyle Brett Despite its cultural ties and flashy prose, Alma Katsu’s forthcoming Fiend falls short. When I finished Fiend, I felt like I read a story filled with tissue paper dolls instead of characters. And like tissue paper, this cast of characters was only worth a single use. For a while, I thought maybe that […]
The Severed Sun (2024) is the first feature film of writer and director Dean Puckett, who has previously directed several documentaries and short films – notably, The Sermon (2017) and Satan’s Bite (2017), both of which explore themes similar to The Severed Sun. Filmed on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, The Severed Sun follows an isolated […]