- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on August 15, 2026

The Digital Etchings of the Scaffold: The Executioner’s Anonymity and Audience Participation

Guest Post

Declan Ackroyd

In his seminal study of the English people and their attitudes toward execution V. A. C. Gatrell notes that, even before the abolition of public executions in 1868, ‘the polite’ of Victorian society had begun to distance themselves from the spectacle, resulting ‘in a deepening embarrassment about any unseemly display’ that these acts entailed.^[1] Having shifted the violence of the state away from public view it took until 1968, another hundred and one years, for execution to become completely banned in the UK. (1969 in Northern Ireland). In our modern era the consumption of public violence is now widely considered taboo, but it still appears in parts of our society in differing forms, from the sport that we watch to the cinema that we consume. This essay will explore the latter.

Posted on August 8, 2026

Suburban Blandness and Visual Violence The Mise-en-Scène of the Opening of Scream

Guest Post

Gary Miceli

Scream (1996) centers on Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), a high school student in California who becomes the target of a costumed serial killer named Ghostface on the anniversary of her mother’s murder. Directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, the movie also stars Skeet Ulrich, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Matthew Lillard, and Drew Barrymore. The opening scene of the movie is widely considered one of the greatest and most horrifying openings in the history of the horror genre. It completely subverted expectations by brutally killing off Drew Barrymore, an actress the audience expects to be the star of the movie, within the first ten minutes. This shocking narrative subversion mirrors a technique previously executed by horror legend Alfred Hitchcock in his classic 1960 movie Psycho. Ultimately, Wes Craven manipulates the stereotypical slasher rules that we all know, making his own rules – all of which we see in the powerful mise-en-scène of the opening scene.

Posted on July 30, 2026

“It’s Not Me”: Inde Navarrette’s brilliant non-naturalistic performance in Obsession

Guest Post

Johanna Isaacson

Obsession tells the story of Bear (Michael Johnston), a lost young man who is in love with his friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette), an independent young woman. Rather than render himself vulnerable he uses a novelty item to wish for her intense, unconditional love, and gets more than he bargained for. Before Bear’s curse, Nikki was salty, forthright, and ambitious. As Bear’s “dream girl” she takes on the persona of the well-worn trope, the “manic pixie,” giving up her own ambitions to quirkily help Bear fulfill his own. Or rather, she tries and fails to take on this persona, exposing its fundamental horrors.

In Obsession, the seemingly spontaneous emotions of a woman following romantic codes are revealed as labor, and this revelation is largely dependent on Inde Navarrette’s brilliant, non-naturalistic approach to the role. Her talent has been widely noted in reviews, but I predict that as this film becomes the subject of academic criticism, less attention will be paid to her performance than to director Curry Barker’s (admittedly fascinating) direction and screenplay, as well as to audience reception and to the larger ascension of YouTube creators. The lack of focus on acting in scholarly work stems from laudable impulses to concentrate on the medium’s particular formal properties. However, it is important that we consider how performance styles and choices complement or contradict the film language of shots, sound, and editing.

Posted on July 26, 2026

Hearing is Believing: Undertone’s Aural Horror

Guest Post

Jered Mabaquiao

I initially experienced writer-director Ian Tuason’s Undertone (2026) in its opening weekend in a Dallas Cinemark XD and IMAX theater. Undertone follows Evangeline (Evy) Babic, played by Nina Kiri, who is co-host of a paranormal podcast and token skeptic. Additionally, we understand Evy also takes care of her dying mother who is a devout Catholic. Evy’s house is decorated with various religious iconography. Her friend, Justin, voiced by Adam DiMarco, is the other host of the podcast and a firm believer in the possibility of another realm. Justin anonymously receives ten audio files, each sequencing disturbing activity experienced by a couple named Mike and Jessa who seem to unleash a demonic entity, named Abyzou. Abyzou possesses mothers and causes miscarriages or outright kills infants out of jealousy due to its own infertility. Throughout Undertone, Evy is wrestling with having just learned that she’s pregnant, out of wedlock, thus adding critical mental and physical stress involving whether or not she should keep the child.

image of a man set against a red background

Posted on July 23, 2026

Ballads (1993) and the Shape of Queer Anger

Guest Post

Logan Moreno

Naoyuki Tomomatsu’s Ballads (1993) lingers in obscurity, as if its very circulation were shaped by the same quiet damage that defines the film itself. What is almost immediately striking about Ballads is how it folds J-horror’s fascination with bodies under pressure and the pinku subgenre’s obsession with desire-turned-dangerous into something emotionally fragile. The erotic scenes are soaked in grief and humiliation, so sex never settles into anything like pleasure. Tomomatsu treats discomfort as his expressive language, and that discomfort lets him get close to the feelings of marginalisation at the film’s center. Grief and anger saturate the sound and image, giving the grain, noise, and erratic pacing a force that makes feelings tangible and hard to shake.

Underneath the apparent chaos of Ballads, Tomomatsu builds a careful emotional and formal logic. Fragmented concert footage, recurring snuff tapes, and flashes of nearly illegible body horror mirror the protagonist’s interior state, showing what it feels like to live as a gay man in a world that refuses to acknowledge your pain and relishes your humiliation. Akihiko Yamamoto, still mourning Hiroshi, the lover he lost in a motorcycle accident, works in a video store that quietly pushes uncensored hardcore pornography under the counter. His grief is written into his body. He walks with a cane, carries visible scars, and those scars are pointed out and handled by his boss during sex, with his injuries turned into convenient proof of weakness and sexual availability. In the early stretches of Ballads, Yamamoto moves like someone whose whole body has learned to expect injury, with grief and subordination folded into his posture and the way he occupies space. Read more