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Posted on November 29, 2025

M3GAN 2.0: One of the Most Interesting Horror Films of 2025

Dawn Keetley

Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 (2025) has mostly not been identified as a horror film. On IMDb, it’s labeled “thriller,” “action” and “sci-fi.” On Wikipedia, it’s “science fiction action.” This is after the first film in the franchise, Johnstone’s M3GAN (2022), was widely dubbed a “science fiction horror” film. Stephen Parthimos’s review on Everything Movie Reviews seems representative of the reaction to M3GAN 2.0 when he writes that there is “not a single second of horror in sight” and that watching the film, and “gradually realising they’ve abandoned any and all sense of horror is utterly baffling.” Ahead of the film’s release, Johnstone promised fans that his sequel would include horror: “Even though we are in action-comedy territory, the horror DNA is absolutely still there.” Upon release, however, it became clear that most viewers didn’t see it, though debate ensued on Reddit.

Posted on November 25, 2025

Listening to Sensitive Characters in Horror Movies

Guest Post

Kati Aakkonen

Alice: Why don’t we just hike out of here? Get out. Right Now!

Bill: It’s 10 miles to the nearest crossroads. Steve will be back soon. We can use his jeep if we need to get help. Don’t worry. There’s probably some stupid explanation for this.

Alice: Like what?!

Bill: We’ll be laughing about this tomorrow, I promise.

Friday the 13th, (1:01:35)

This exchange from Friday the 13th (1980) follows a typical pattern of conversation in horror movies: one character is worried and suspicious that something strange is going on and another character dismisses this worry and refuses to notice the signs of trouble. This is an acknowledged trope in horror, and often seems to primarily irritate writers (Cheung 2022; Jacobs 2020). But one of my favorite things about horror fiction is that part of its DNA seems to be the realization that we should listen to the sensitive, intuitive and usually marginalized characters, even though this is rarely made explicit. Depicting incredulity can be frustrating but I think it taps into real fears many of us have to live with.

Posted on November 20, 2025

Dying of Laughter: Exploring Horror Parody and the Scary Movie Films

Guest Post

Nehir Orhon

A haunted house, an innocent girl possessed by the devil, or a group of teenagers that make foolish decisions to try and survive a masked killer… These cliché horror tropes can be found in famous horror films, such as The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Such storylines, figures and settings are elements that are commonly associated with the genre’s identity.

However, as Chris Yogerst argues, “repetition of genre tropes breeds familiarity, robbing once-shocking images and plot twists of the impact they originally had” (Yogerst 207). When these key tropes and patterns get overused in horror films, they become repetitive and lead to criticism, self-reflection, and parody. In the book Film Parody, Dan Harries defines parody as “the process of recontextualizing a target or source text through the transformation of its textual (and contextual) elements, thus creating a new text” (Harries 6). In this instance, through twisting the lexicon, style or syntax, parody spoofs the familiar patterns, stereotypical and normative representation of marginalised groups, and cultural taboos displayed in horror films.

Scary Movie (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2000), the first film of the contemporary horror parody franchise, takes Scream (1996) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) as reference. Whilst spoofing these movies, Scary Movie not only makes fun of the familiar horror tropes but also exposes how the “film technology and genre fictions” (Bailey 1229) are shaped by the hegemony of the white male gaze and “white ideological frames” (Yancy and Ryser 732). This essay explores the relation between horror, humour and social critique, and how parody functions within the Scary Movie films through analysing the used “methods of parodic coding” (Harries 39).

Posted on October 26, 2025

What Is It Like to Be a Good Boy? Trying to Imagine the Phenomenology of a Dog

Guest Post

Robert S. Cairns

The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” In his essay, Nagel argues that if we agree that bats, like many other animals, are creatures with experiences, then there is a type of ‘batness’ to the bat that makes it distinctly itself. I could not help thinking about this while watching Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy (2025), which invites the viewer to imagine what it is like to be a dog. I also wondered to what extent a film was able to show me, even modestly, what this might be like.

Posted on September 29, 2025

What If Witches Are Actually Real? Zach Cregger’s Weapons and Witches

Guest Post

Robert S. Cairns

In high school we had to read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), an allegory about the McCarthy-era, Communist ‘Red Scare’ in America that used the Salem Witch Trials as its point of comparison. Years later, I discovered there was actually Communist infiltration during this time and that the fear was credible. If the supposed hysteria surrounding the ‘Red Scare’ had some basis in truth, could the same be said of the witches Arthur Miller used as a historical reference?

Years later still, I watched Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943). Another allegory for mass hysteria, I remember wondering why witches couldn’t just be real in this moment of occult-haunted history, and why it seemed as if the intelligent person had to represent them by way of allegory. Dreyer depicted the existence of miracles in his other, most famous film, Ordet (1955). But apparently witches were a step too far for him.