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Posted on July 4, 2026

The Horrors of Wellness Culture in Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty

Guest Post

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 her a job at a high-end wellness and beauty company called Holistik. What at first seems like a dream job for many young women—with better pay, an endless supply of free skincare products and treatments, and a boost of social status—soon turns dangerous. Huang leads her readers into the deeply disturbing world of invasive and risky beauty procedures, unapologetic cultural appropriation, abuses of power culminating in sexual violence, all behind a façade of wellness and self-care.

Posted on June 12, 2026

AI horror in The Backrooms

Guest Post

Ian Haig

Kane Parsons’ The Backrooms emerged on the internet. The creepy pasta backstory of the film is well known: like a piece of haunted media within the network, it began as a mysterious still image posted on 4chan, and later a short film on YouTube with over 60 million views, and now a Hollywood movie. What’s striking about the recent film, The Backrooms, is the way viral marketing has spread across the internet, the algorithm suggesting more and yet more stories, interviews with cast and characters and various analyses of the film, amplifying the idea of the film being a product born out of the internet and the algorithmic culture of social media from where it originally emerged.

Posted on September 10, 2024

Liquid Visions: Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat by Philip Brophy

Guest Post

by Patrick Zaia

Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat was the debut featurette of Australian polymath Philip Brophy. Released in 1988, the film is an experimental and essayistic exploration of the body, specifically the physiological reality of the body as a messy soup of urges, sensations and emissions – “a soft machine” as William Burroughs famously described. When the film premiered at the Sydney Film Festival it proved to be incredibly divisive, with some critics dismissing it as boring and juvenile while others praised Brophy’s project as audacious and fascinating. One of the film’s most notable defenders was the revered critic David Stratton, who vividly described it in the press as “ a film with balls!” Because of its provocative content and polarising character, combined with the film’s relative obscurity, Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat has garnered a thrilling aura of mystique and intrigue in certain circles of underground film and art culture. This alluring spell of anonymity, however, was ruptured roughly a year ago when a copy of the film suddenly surfaced from the tumultuous depths of the internet, appearing (of all places) on the popular video-sharing site YouTube. Finally, Brophy’s fluidic vision of the body is available for public consumption.

Posted on June 17, 2024

Call for Papers — Horror Homeroom Special Issue #9: Body Horror (November/December 2024)

Call for Papers

Though the term was coined in 1986, ‘body horror’ dates back to the beginnings of Gothic literature—Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)—and extends into contemporary fiction, film, and new media. From seminal works including David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) to contemporary zombie films and portrayals of the digital-corporeal connection, as in the Unfriended franchise and Jane Schoenbrun’s recent I Saw the TV Glow, embodiment remains central to the horror genre. Mirroring the porousness of the body itself, the category evades compartmentalization and definition.

This special issue will contend with horror’s bodies in all their transgressive fluidity. We are open to essays exploring any texts that could broadly be considered ‘body horror,’ including fiction, film, and new media. We also welcome a variety of theoretical approaches and disciplinary methods. Lastly, since body horror is a global phenomenon, we hope to put together an issue that makes international connections.

Posted on May 30, 2024

Silver and Gold: The Quiet and the Storm Disturbing Hybridity in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure

Guest Post

James Rose

Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure (2015) is, like its mermaid protagonists, Golden (Michalina Olszańska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), a peculiar hybrid: part Horror, part Musical, it is an adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid that has been fused with biographical experiences from the director’s teenage years, all integrated into the landscape of 1980’s Poland. Combined, The Lure emerges as a coming-of-age narrative that charts Golden and Silver’s transition from teenage girls to young women through increasingly mature first experiences – the “first shot of vodka, first cigarette, first sexual disappointment and first important feeling for a boy.” It is these first attractions and sexual awakenings that form the film’s dramatic core; while Golden, the more aggressive of the two, engages in active seduction, lesbian sex, and savage assaults on men, Silver falls in love with Mietek (Jakub Gierszał), the drummer at the strip club where the mermaids have found themselves living and working. While this affection is reciprocated, the couple cannot physically consummate their love – not necessarily because of the complexities of interspecies sex but more because Silver is not fully a woman, for her body is a hybrid of a female torso and a fish’s tail. There is a further peculiarity about Silver’s body – when out of water she has human legs but between them is only a smooth curve of flesh that is, crudely, described as being “smooth as Barbie dolls.” It is only when she is in water that her human legs transform into the distinctive tail and her reproductive organs are revealed.